A collection of mini-narratives that have been posted on Facebook every day since 2009. This book will collect posts from the entire collection in one cohesive volume of work. Award-winning artist Cliff Eyland and famed writer George Toles combine their unique talents in a book like no other, tackling apropos issues related to climate change, politics, relationships, death, and sex with wry humour and deft tone.
Selected as one of the 21 books to read in 2021.
– CBC Books
Nominated.
– Manitoba Book Awards - Manuella Dias Award for Book Design
Nominated.
– Manitoba Book Awards - Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
“Each page brings to life an invented character summarized in a brilliantly written witty single paragraph, with a different style for each. They are sometimes bleak, with a sense of humor, and always surprising.”
– KCRW Bookworm
“The often figurative mixed-media work was sometimes monochromatic, sometimes brightly coloured, and always surprising.”
– Quill and Quire
“The words and images for Status Update were smartly chosen. What Toles and Eyland share is a biting sense of humour.”
– Border Crossings
This magnificent collaboration offers us exactly what we need, a daily Guide for the Perplexed, a status update. Who are we now and can we know? Sometimes the art provides the flare-up of light needed to illuminate the prose…but sometimes vice versa. George Toles and Cliff Eyland give us a perfectly made infinity machine – explanation precedes mystery giving way to explanation again. Toles displays mastery of a hundred different enigmatic styles and Hyland, bless him, gives form to the unfathomable. Hilarious, mysterious; metaphysical, down to earth, these gorgeous pages will provide me with joy and perplexity for many of the wildly difficult days to come.
– Michael Silverblatt, KCRW Bookworm
Featured in Winnipeg Free Press Reads.
I was so hungry for something different. Now I am nourished.
– Robert Pasternak. Award winning artist of Place Into Being
A brilliantly bent book! Leave it to these two supreme artists, who made social media submit to their sumptuously screwy will, to compel one sublimely twisted tome! Hilarious, delirious, and deeply empathetic… It delights, astonishes, disquiets, and evinces the ineffable in the bewildered human heart.
– Bunny Brown songwriter / musician / recording artist
Full of satisfying detonations, upended clichés, and poignant mysteries, George Toles’s daily fictions are like micro-twisters touching down in Facebook’s flat terrain. Cliff Eyland’s illustrations are equally rich and ambiguous, making Status Update a journey to far-flung places in the imagination.
– Kristin Jones, film and art critic
This book was made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
