Cormorant Books: Acting the Giddy Goat

Reviews:

"In the back room of Pilchak's U-Brew Palace, Brewmaster Bill keeps an eye out for customers while pursuing his true vocation: filling notebooks with meditations on the "wretched trivialities" he sees all around him.

"Toronto writer and musician Mike Tanner offers a first novel about one man's struggle to create a first novel that will give his life meaning. Bill's backroom journals become our first-person guide to a fragmented narrative of omnisciently observed hes and shes. Bill's novel never does coalesce. Tanner's comes closer. But the line between real and fictional author barely exists here; both present life as random, and art as a suspect conceit."
— Jim Bartley, The Globe & Mail, March 8, 2003

"Writing with cinematic intensity and a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Mike Tanner has invented a cast of characters so real they could walk off the page. I know these people. By turns funny, philosophical, and edgy, he's slipped into their skins to render their individual dramas with a skillful combination of compassion and objectivity..."
— Eliza Clark