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    At Your Service
    At Your Service
    At Your Service
    Ebook34 pages25 minutes

    At Your Service

    By Priscila Uppal

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This short story is taken from the collection Cover Before Striking. The most common phrase in print is “cover before striking,” a warning to those about to innocently strike a match to be careful not to burn their fingers. Uppal’s characters in Cover Before Striking are all people pushing their lives to new levels of intensity, danger, or passion as they test their limits and those of the world. Implacable and just a little unhinged, the stories of Cover Before Striking each move toward that moment of contact when the sparks begin to fly, when destruction and beauty seem to blur together. With this collection, Priscila Uppal offers the literary equivalent of playing with fire.

    “At Your Service” was originally published in Existere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJul 4, 2015
    ISBN9781459732766
    At Your Service
    Author

    Priscila Uppal

    Priscila Uppal was an internationally acclaimed poet, prose writer, and playwright. A York University professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she was the author of Ontological Necessities and Cover Before Striking. Her memoir, Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and a Governor General’s Award.

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      Book preview

      At Your Service - Priscila Uppal

      Selected Praise for Priscila Uppal’s Works

      Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother

      "Projection proves to be remarkably free of self-pity … [A] raw, passionate memoir, a fierce exercise in family exorcism."

      — Montreal Gazette

      Uppal is brave … made of sterner stuff than most; an inspiration to messed-up adult children everywhere.

      — Globe and Mail

      "[S]uperbly conveyed without any excessive literary artifice … Projection is a book that’s simultaneously cerebral and visceral, and its ardent refusal of any sort of mind-body split — to sacrifice sophistication for sentiment or vice versa — is the sign of an author who has thrown herself wholly into her book."

      — National Post

      Incorporating movie and pop-culture references as storytelling devices is what makes this book truly shine … Above all, Uppal is an impeccable writer, deftly infusing complex scenes and emotions with power and weight … a worthy read.

      — Quill & Quire

      [A] heartbreaking memoir.

      —Toronto Life

      Intimate, sad, probing and self-aware, often very funny logbook of a harrowing encounter.

      — Literary Review of Canada

      To Whom It May Concern

      It is to be hoped that Uppal will continue to rival Atwood in productivity and wit. As Shakespeare might have said: Fortune, smile again on lovers of CanLit; grace us with more irresistible stories from Uppal’s unique perspective.

      — Montreal Gazette

      Uppal is a deep thinker, capable of carefully peeling back layer upon layer of the human psyche … makes us laugh and cry long after the last page of the novel has been read.

      — Ottawa Citizen

      Uppal’s writing bursts with humour, plot turns and insights … Uppal should be congratulated for writing one of the most powerful and riskiest scenes in a Canadian novel … [she] reveals herself as a compassionate and perspicacious novelist whose humanity and intelligence cannot be overlooked.

      — Globe and Mail

      The Divine Economy of Salvation

      "In its confident voice and its unsparing, concisely powerful narrative — like Margaret Laurence at her best — Divine Economy is an

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