The Wigmaker

Available June 2007

The man trap. Bringing out the good china. Growing a salsa garden.

by C. E. Coughlan with illustrations by Sonja Ahlers. It's 7½ x 7½, 36 pages, hand bound in gray Canapetta bookcloth (Italian cotton/linen mix) and printed on beautiful linen paper. Ordering information is here.

C. E. Coughlan's short prose is precise and sublime. Each of the fourteen stories uncovers something essential about humanity, from the most wonderful moments of our lives to the most tragic.

Everybody was crying. The whole congregation was crying at Harry Webb’s funeral in Grace Church on the Hill. Harry Webb used to say he didn’t trust a woman who couldn’t hold her tequila. He lost fifty pounds before he died and the skin hung off his cheeks and elbows and knees, and his wife Susan didn’t seem to mind and said she had always loved his bones. His daughter Tiffany went from pew to pew handing out Kleenexes. My mother caught Tiffany by the hand and said, “He loved Dermot’s jazz collection, your Dad. He would sing along to the records at our dinner parties and he’d even cut people off mid-sentence. He was always invited, you know.”
-from Jazz Collection

Clare E. Coughlan lives in Vancouver, B.C. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in Geist, Grain and in the anthology Emerge.

Sonja Ahlers is an artist. Find out more about her at www.makeitawesome.com.