About Emily Schultz
Emily Schultz was born in 1974 in southwestern Ontario. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, where she completed her BA. Her first collection of short stories, Black Coffee Night, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for Best First Fiction in Canada. A story from that collection was adapted for television, airing across Canada and the United States. At the time, the Globe and Mail included her in a “Tomorrow's Ondaatjes and Munros” round-up, calling her one of the country's most prominent writers under 30. Schultz followed up with a novel, Joyland, and a collection of poetry, Songs for the Dancing Chicken, which was named a finalist for the 2008 Trillium Prize for Poetry. Her newest novel, Heaven Is Small, released from House of Anansi Press in May 2009 in Canada, and will be available in the U.S. in September 2010. Heaven Is Small was named a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Book Award.
Her criticism, fiction, and poetry have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Eye Weekly, the Walrus, the Black Warrior Review, Prism, Geist, Event, Descant, the Fanzine, and several anthologies. A former resident of the Midwest and Virginia, Schultz currently lives in Toronto.
Click here to reach Schultz's agent: the Transatlantic Literary Agency
Contact: emilyschultz[AT]rogers.com
Praise for Heaven Is Small
A young writer dubbed promising for her first three books, Schultz now keeps that promise: Heaven is Small is confident, disturbing and clever reeling us along, prodding us to notice the lame trappings of what we call living…. Schultz's voice is stronger than ever, her storytelling tighter and her writing still replete with those trademark ziplines, surprising little protons of description that vault the reader into Schultz's unique narrative universe.
Schultz has created a delightful cast of lost souls . . . Heaven is Small is a keen examination of life and the afterlife, brimming with intelligence and wit.
—Quill & Quire
Heaven Is Small [is] a stunning, often surprising read with moments of such audacity that the reader is likely to gasp out loud. . . . Schultz is an impressive talent . . . creating something new, something unique. The result is bold and winning, the sort of novel that satisfies on every level while managing to leave the reader with an afterglow of questions and observations.
—Vancouver Sun
Emily Schultz is one of those forces of nature that propels a literary scene.
—Toronto Star
Emily Schultz’s sly novel Heaven Is Small takes a shot at the publishing industry and the pathetic failed writers victimized by it, and it definitely hits the mark.... Hilarious... sensational... poignant... Fun and smart all around.
—Now Magazine
. . . captivating . . . hilarious . . . seems tailor-made for a Hollywood adaptation.
—Flare
—Chatelaine Book Club selection
The world Schultz has created is a disturbing reflection of our own society. In many respects, Heaven is Small is about worlds people create for themselves — the world of the 9-to-5, the world of romantic fiction...
—The Catholic Register
Bizarre...funny...
—Edmonton Journal
Heaven Is Small is both a love story and a biting book-world comedy, in which Schultz skewers with equal fondness genre publishers, literary magazines and slickly marketed fiction stars… Gordon’s workaday afterlife — with its bagged lunches, gossip and ghostly commuter culture — is drawn in hilarious and poignant detail.
—North Shore News (Vancouver)
Gordon Small, the hero of this smart, deadpan novel by Toronto’s Emily Schultz, makes the same mistake Bruce Willis did in The Sixth Sense: he fails to notice that he’s dead.
—Georgia Straight
Toronto author and poet Emily Schultz excels at creating intricate, beautifully drawn worlds, encapsulated like snow globes.... Heaven is Small is a funny but heartbreaking story about the publishing industry, the disconnect between authors and their readers...
—The Coast (Halifax)
Praise for Joyland (the novel!)
Schultz’s prose is mesmerizing.
—Globe and Mail
A stellar novel… In Joyland, Schultz uses games as a foil for the terrifying morass of teenage-hood: the wary battles between friends, the vulnerability of your vessel, the muddled sensuality—the way you still feel the warmth of the last player's hand on the arcade joystick.
—Wired
I loved Joyland. Tammy Lane is the most convincing child protagonist I’ve encountered in years, a cross between Lynda Barry’s innocent smart-ass Marlys, and Judy Blume’s truth-seeking missile, Margaret…. Achingly accurate in its depiction of adolescence.
—National Post
While Moody's [The Ice Storm] was a competent meditation on changing mores and the meltdown of the nuclear family, Joyland is a far better examination of what it means to come of age in the post-post-modern technopoly of contemporary North America.
—Eye Weekly
Perfect framework...deft...convincing...dead-on.
—January Magazine
The dialogue is fierce [and] in the end, Joyland simply works.... Admirable.
—Quill & Quire
Quiet perceptions build to a powerful evocation of a time of chilling insecurity: adolescence reshuffling the kids’ cliques with Darwinian ferocity, Ronald Reagan ruling the larger world…. Truly, deeply real.
—The Georgia Straight
Honest and unrelenting… Schultz's first novel proves she has the kind of honesty and talent to earn the high score in the CanLit arcade.
—Vancouver Sun
Small-town children of the 80s will relish the uniquely resonant moments of the time, which Schultz paints perfectly in this captivating first novel.
—Now Magazine, NNNN
Joyland captures the confusion of adolescent sexuality in a tangle of pixelated icons via the video-game generation.
—Flare
Praise for Black Coffee Night
A compressed burst of sadness and wonder…. This is fiction that seduces.
—Toronto Star
Breathtaking spikes and heart-rending complexities…
—Now Magazine
Blunt and darkly hilarious...
—National Post
Praise for Songs for the Dancing Chicken
Schultz's work tends to be dark and unsettling, with a sardonic outlook on human folly.... striking. Schultz's best poems have claws, and they dig in.
—Toronto Star
[Songs for the Dancing Chicken] resonates with the subtle poignancy of skillful absurdism and humor.
—Pop Matters
Ecstatic hyper-lyrical language that knows beauty can be built but also abandoned.
—Georgia Straight
A propensity for beautiful image work... a delicious richness... One might add Schultz to the group of neo-surrealists in the tradition of Dean Young for the way her poems make surprising leaps and turns.
—Canadian Literature
Striking... Schultz has a knack for the right words, regardless of genre.
—Winnipeg Free Press, What's on Winnipeg
A delight...
—Taddle Creek
A highly intelligent and informed document that also succeeds in being thoroughly enjoyable.
—Until Monday
