[ Large Image ] | In the Suicide’s Library: A Book Lover’s Journey Tim Bowling 2010 / Fiction / $27.95 9781554470891 / Trade paper / 320 pp Edition is out of print When the hustle and bustle of modern life, the responsibilities of marriage and parenting, and the weight of middle-age get Tim Bowling down, he heads for a bookshelf in search of the solace books and reading can provide. But can the cure become the poison? One day, alone in the Modern Literature stacks of a university library, Bowling opens a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Ideas of Order and, on the front flyleaf, finds the elegant ownership signature of Weldon Kees—an obscure American poet, painter, photographer, filmmaker and musician who vanished mysteriously in 1955, an apparent suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. So begins Bowling’s strange eight-month quest into American literature of the 1940s and ’50s and the world of book collecting, a journey branching into a wealth of subjects ranging from the relationship between fathers and daughters, suicide, masculinity, the Internet, the history of printing, bibliomania and the strange effects of midlife and obsession on an otherwise rational mind. Through it all, Bowling faces two central questions: the one that Weldon Kees put to his friend, Pauline Kael, on the day before he vanished—“What keeps you going?”—and, perhaps even more important, is it ever acceptable to steal a book for your own collection? | Other Books by this Author | Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief Tim Bowling 2014 / Poetry / $19.95 CAN 9781554471348 / Trade paper / 80 pp | The Annotated Bee and Me Tim Bowling 2010 / Poetry / $18.95 CAN 9781554470860 / Trade paper / 64 pp | Refrain for Rental Boat #4 Tim Bowling 2008 / Poetry / $100.00 CAN 9781554470679 / Fine / 12 pp | The Bone Sharps Tim Bowling 2007 / Fiction / $27.95 CAN 9781554470358 / Trade paper / 312 pp | Fathom Tim Bowling 2006 / Poetry / $49.95 CAN 9781554470174 / Fine / 112 pp | Fathom Tim Bowling 2006 / Poetry / $18.95 CAN 9781554470167 / Trade paper / 112 pp |