Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair

November 1, 2019 from Exile Editions

Available now from Exile Editions, Amazon, Indigo, or your local independent bookstore.

“Paterson’s writing shines throughout Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair. His language is concrete, poetic, and radiant.” — Literary Review of Canada

“Throughout this collection, the sweet and bitter, the ordinary and odd commingle. Paterson provides us with a lovingly resolute reminder that even in the suburbs, anything – like requited love, courtesy of a gorilla suit – is possible.”  — Montreal Review of Books

Tim walks down the main street of town dressed in a gorilla costume. Merry finds diversion in Adam and the Ants lyrics, television show novelizations, and an obsession with her blind neighbour. Alex and John, teenage brothers living under the control of overprotective parents, discover a window to the outside world in a radio show hosted by a psychic.

Welcome to Montclair, a fictional yet familiar suburb of Montreal. At the heart of this short story collection is the struggle for individuality by characters who – out of restlessness, out of nothing – make life on the outskirts of the big city a little bit remarkable for themselves. With a warm, funny, and nuanced voice, and flitting in time between the 1980s, 1990s, and today, Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair explores the little wild spaces of the suburbs, hidden away in overgrown fields behind strip malls, in dark crawlspaces beneath concrete schoolyard staircases, and in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.

Read “What Have You Done?” from Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair in The Puritan.

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A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine (Exile Editions, 2007)

“Compellingly narrated with a slacker’s eye for the bizarre.” – The Globe & Mail

“With this book, Paterson secures his place in the ranks of fellow Montrealers Neil Smith and Barry Webster, of Mark Anthony Jarman and the Americans Denis Johnson and George Saunders: all writers who trade in the zany, the pell-mell, the lunatic and absurd.” – The Malahat Review

“Mark can turn a dark and twisted and hysterical phrase with the best of them and his second collection, like his first, Other People’s Showers, strikes many nerves on the agony and ecstasy of dysfunctionality.” – The Montreal Gazette

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Other People’s Showers (Exile Editions, 2003)

“Fiction from just the other side of normal.” – Hour 

“Paterson’s unique blend of tenderness, humour and horror is engaging.” – The Montreal Gazette