The Butcher of Park Ex: and Other Semi-Truthful Tales [Paperback]

For Montrealers, the liberal use of local landmarks and street names helps contribute to the impression that weve been here before; over the course of the collection, he attends parties on Clark Street, peruses record stores on Ste. Catherines, and recalls childhood trips to the Fairview centre in Pointe-Claire and Les Galeries dAnjou. But the sense of paramnesia goes beyond place names that exist on a map. Kessaris manages to convey a sense of shared history through the prose itself, bringing the Montreal immigrant experience to life with wry humour and painstaking attention to detail.

Andreas Kessaris?grew up in Montreal's Park Extension district, the son of Greek immigrants. He graduated from Dawson College and Concordia University, earning a BA in Communications & English. His column,?Read On! with Andreas Kessaris, was a popular feature in the West-End community paper?The Local Herald. His writing has also appeared on Suite101.com, in the literary journal?The Write Place, and on the Montreal entertainment website Curtainsup.tv,?The Miramichi Reader,?and?The Montreal Review of Books.?His first book,?The Butcher of Park Ex & Other Semi-Truthful Tales, was released in 2020 to great acclaim. He currently resides in Montreal with his partner. Follow him on?X (@Akessaris) or Instagram (andreas_kessaris).

It was 1975 and the English/French dispute in Quebec was reaching a boiling point. The PSBGM English schools taught French in Kindergarten once a week for half an hour. The French teacher, Madame Sigeault, whom I referred to as Madame Seagull (not as a sign of disrespect; I actually thought that was her name & I said it to her face and she never corrected me), a no-nonsense, middle-aged blonde with thick glasses who always wore navy blue or black polyester pantsuits, showed up once a week. She never spoke so much as a word to the English teachers, who always seemed to greet her arrival with a low-level degló: