Bix's Trumpet: and other stories

ISBN 13

Winner of the 2007 Book of the Year and the City of Regina Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards!

Shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards for Best Short Fiction 

978-1-897126-18-9 ISBN 13

Fall 2007

Paperback 256 pages

Fiction

Listen to Bix's online! Click here for an excerpt, read by Dave Margoshes, or click here to find out why Margoshes switched the title for the book before it was published.

Dave Margoshes explores uncharted territory of the human heart in this thoroughly engaging new collection of short stories. Like a small boy fascinated with bugs and frogs, Margoshes, a journeyman story-writer, holds his characters up to the light and lets them squirm. By and large, these people are content with their ordinary, somewhat humdrum lives, until they are shaken by unexpected stress:

A woman learns her likeable step-father was a secret pornographer; an overheard boast of infidelity sends a marriage and a life into freefall; a middle-aged musician, satisfied with his place in the orchestra’s second violin section, begins to re-examine his life when he discovers a long-buried family secret; winning a contest tests a friendship in an unexpected way; a surprise visit tilts a budding love affair over the edge; a teenaged girl finally comes to terms with grief when she swims in a lake named for her father.

Bix’s Trumpet and other stories offers surprising glimpses into people’s lives, challenging us to observe the world, and life around us, a little closer.

The verdict is in: what the Saskatchewan Book Award jury had to say about Bix's:

Margoshes is a guardian of the heart and a connoisseur of longing. His keen eye and ear bring these evocative stories to life. -Rita Donovan and William Deverell

This is the best of good, old-fashioned storytelling. Engaging yet comfortable, these are stories of us – the sorts of people who are trying. They are as surprised by life as we are. -Jack Batten, Jeanette Lynes, and Susan Kerslake