These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown
A diary of a woman longing for community in a crowded downtown in pandemic times, when casual intimacies are forbidden.
The novelist Rebecca Rosenblum lives in St. James Town, Toronto — the most densely populated square kilometre in all of Canada. When the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns arrive, she’s cut off from colleagues, friends, family, and not allowed to go near neighbours. As the world constricts, Rebecca keeps a weird and worried diary online — a love letter both to the outside world that she misses so desperately, and the little world inside St. James Town that she can see from home.
As Rebecca watches and wonders from inside her box in the sky, her diary entries mix an account of a tough time in a tough place with joyful goofiness and moments of unexpected compassion.
The blurbs say:
“It’s shocking how much the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic feel like ancient history. In these near-daily dispatches from the lockdown era, Rosenblum attempts to pin herself to the earth during a moment of global unmooring. In doing so, she provides an honest and very human accounting of a time that is already being erased from our collective memories.”
—Nathan Whitlock, author of Lump
“In early March 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic closed in and big city life shifted in estranging ways, Rebecca Rosenblum began to chronicle the changes in herself and others in journal entries on social media. As we acquired new vocabulary, adjusted to new routines, and learned to cope with losses of all kinds, she probed personal and collective anxieties and conundrums. During walks through a deserted city, she conceived of herself as an eye, but she was also the beating heart of a community trying to finds its way during a collective trauma. In compilation, this diary is a record of where we’ve been and who we’ve been under unknowable and stressful circumstances. To read These Days Are Numbered is to witness a deeply curious, compassionate, and humane mind at work.”
—Christine Fischer Guy, author The Umbrella Mender
“These Days Are Numbered is a frank, moving, and often hilarious daily chronicle of a writer trying to cope with the sudden social isolation imposed by the global emergency. Rosenblum’s astonishing powers of observation and compassion are on display as she turns her lens on herself, her spouse, and the much-longed-for outside world. An intimate portrait of a writer’s life in which moments of pandemic grief and anxiety are always matched by humour, tenderness and curiosity.”
—Saleema Nawaz, author of Songs for the End of the World
If you’d like to buy These Days Are Numbered, there’s a list of buying sites on my Linktree.
So Much Love
Olive Kitteridge meets Room and The Lovely Bones in this stunning first novel about the unexpected reverberations the abduction of a young woman has on a small community. When Catherine Reindeer vanishes from the parking lot outside the restaurant where she works, an entire community is shattered. Moving back and forth from her outer circle of acquaintances to her closest intimates, So Much Love reveals how an unexpected disappearance can overturn the lives of those left behind: Catherine’s fellow waitress now sees danger all around her. Her mother seeks comfort in saying her name over and over again. Her professor finds himself thinking of her constantly. Her husband refuses to give up hope that she will one day return. But at the heart of the novel is Catherine’s own surprising story of resilience and recovery. When, after months of captivity, a final devastating loss forces her to make a bold decision, she is unprepared for everything that follows. A riveting novel that deftly examines the complexity of love and the power of stories to shape our lives, So Much Love confirms Rebecca Rosenblum’s reputation as one of the most gifted and distinctive writers of her generation.
*
Trillium Book Award Shortlist
Amazon First Novel Award Shortlist
National Post Best 99 Books of the Year
Globe and Mail Top 100 Books List for 2017
Quill and Quire Books of the Year List
The blurbs say:
“A marvellously assured, multi-layered page turner. Chilling. Brilliant.”
—Barbara Gowdy, author of Helpless
“Elegant in form, So Much Love does what only fiction can–it gives a wide view of a horrific crime and shows how it fractures a small community. In a world of slippery truths and narrow perception, this beautiful, taut, and chilling story feels necessary and true.”
—Claire Cameron, author of The Bear
“Compelling and superbly crafted from start to finish, So Much Love is a thoughtful and disturbing look into the deep layers of a crime and its aftermath.”
—Diane Schoemperlen, author of This Is Not My Life
The reviews say
“So Much Love…approaches its subject and tells its characters’ stories with so much heart and sharp efficiency that you can sit down with it for a day and feel a shift in the way you look at life.”
—The Globe and Mail
“So Much Love, a masterfully complex and beautiful novel, is about so many things…
—The Winnipeg Review
“Beautiful, affecting, and striking, this powerfully assured debut novel is literary fiction from an author who also shows herself to be the capable architect of a complex and rousing story.”
–Starred Review, Quill and Quire
Other reviews
The Library of Pacific Tranquility
If you’d like to buy So Much Love
So Much Love in Polish/Tyle milosci
So Much Love in French/Coeurs Battants
The Big Dream
The Big Dream is a collection of interweaving short stories about life at the offices of Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. In these stories, the Dream staff struggle to do—and keep—their jobs in a tough market, but they’re also trying to have friends, to be good parents and good children, to answer the phone and fix the photocopier and be happy. The Big Dream is a book about how life doesn’t stop on company time. Sometimes the “dream job” and dream life that’s supposed to come with it don’t pan out, but in The Big Dream the joys and sorrows and sandwiches of waking life are more than enough to sustain us. This is a book not about jobs, but about the people who do them.
The reviewers say:
“In her spry, satirical new collection, Rosenblum (Once) presents 13 dialogue-rich and highly readable vignettes featuring a colorful cast of characters who work for Dream Inc.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Rosenblum hits her stride, rendering with humour and pathos those moments we take for granted as a part of life…Rosenblum’s clever, penetrating collection asks us to slow down and look around.”
–The National Post
“The Big Dream is real life. For readers who want fiction to engage with the world we live in, Rosenblum’s work matters.”
–Prairie Fire Magazine Vol 12, No. 1
Other reviews
The Toronto Review of Books blog
If you’d like to buy The Big Dream
Road Trips
From Frog Hollow Press in May 2010, Road Trips is an elegant chapbook containing two stories about friends, family, fast food, and FM radio–as seen through the windshield of a rental car.
The reviewers say:
“Within the scope of Rosenblum’s project though, all details can lead to characters, and that makes every detail vital.”–Broken Pencil Blog
If you’d like to read Road trips
Road Trips came out in a limited, very beautiful edition with Frog Hollow Press in 2010 and is now out of print, but is still available at some libraries.
Once
Once is Rebecca Rosenblum’s first book, a collection of 16 short stories. Mainly urban and always contemporary, these stories record incidents in the lives of students, techies in an office building, a girl toiling in the warehouse of a wholesale fruit and vegetable distrubutor, a boy who hustles for drug money, waitresses. Here you will find no epiphanies, no moral simplifications, nary a single wispy apercu. These stories with their brilliant and innovative handling of dialogue break the Canadian mould. With her first book Rebecca Rosenblum has achieved what writers long for, a voice and style uniquely hers and experiences that engage and grip readers.
The reviewers say:
“Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight.” —Quill and Quire [paywall] Once was also one of Q&Q’s15 Books that Mattered in 2008
“The twentysomethings that populate Rebecca Rosenblum’s dazzling debut collection of stories are lost, searching for a niche and an identity, and marked by a scrappy yet poignant vulnerability.” —The Walrus
“Rebecca Rosenblum’s head-turningly good debut, Once, is a story collection about people who tend not to see the narrative of their own lives.” —The Toronto Star
Other reviews
CanLit Rookie of the Year on Maclean’s Blog
If you’d like to buy Once:
Journey Prize 21
For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been Canada’s most celebrated annual fiction anthology, presenting the best stories published each year by some of our most exciting emerging writers. The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.
In a vividly evoked story set in the offices of a Jewish newspaper in 1920s Cleveland, the unassuming writer behind a successful advice column discovers just how difficult it can be to navigate matters of the heart. A dwindling group of Chinese-Canadian lepers spend their final days fighting for survival and dreaming of escape after they are exiled to a remote island at the turn of the twentieth century. In what might prove to be the most important race of their careers, two competitive runners put everything on the line in the hopes of achieving the “miracle mile.” After the strange facts surrounding a girl’s disappearance from a small Japanese town decades earlier come to light, one of her former classmates recalls their charged but confusing last encounter. When an aging painter visits his estranged son, a gifted artist now gravely ill, old rivalries are reignited in a seductive story of art, love, desire, and betrayal.
What the reviewers say:
If you would like to buy the Journey Prize Anthology 21:
