An engrossing post-punk novel about teenage daydreams and sibling dynamics
Teenage brothers Hombre and Transformer spend their days locked up in their suburban Montreal bedroom, writing songs and dreaming of stardom. Hombre, the younger one, is quiet, contemplative, and talented, a poet in the making. His older brother Transformer is stubborn, domineering, and secretly struggling with mental health issues. Their sequestered world is broken open one summer when their mother hires Spit, a girl from the local guitar shop, to help the boys improve their modest skills. But these good intentions set off a chain reaction with tragic consequences.
Set in the early 80s, in a local music scene brimming with post-punk ethos and a disdain for classic rock, Because is a wry and charming depiction of a sibling relationship founded on feverish angst, unspoken admiration, jealousy, and the pursuit of the greatest song they can write from their own room.
PRAISE FOR Because
“The two brothers in this story, tucked into the magic envelope of their room, listening to records and making noise, figuring out which parts of adulthood they can inhabit or destroy, are as real to me as any kid I grew up with. The world of Because could only be Montreal, it could only be the 80s, it could only be these two kids in this particular family. It is real and moving and tenderly drawn.” - Missy Marston, author of The Love Monster and Bad Ideas
“…a work of imagination, observation and sparkling dialogue that continually surprises with infectious humour and heart…a subtle, memorable story about relationships, youth and loss.” - David O’Meara, author of Masses on Radar.
“…a powerful exploration of family and mental health and nostalgia and that whole notion of looking back on your life and saying, ‘did I do the right thing?’” – Sean Wilson, artistic director of the Ottawa International Writers Festival.
“Because is a reflective, memorial novel; it wonders about the playfulness and hazards of building a musical persona, laments the fleeting moment between childhood and adulthood, and questions the twin-like terror and beauty of knowing someone as intimately as you know a sibling…an engrossing, formally inventive novel that is well worth any historical and musical detours it might invite.” - Emily Mernin, Montreal Review of Books.
“Rising out of the ashes of the ’70s, with calloused fingers and heads full of new-wave and punk hair flare, two brothers, Hombre and Transformer, form a band, and that band is called “Because”. Andrew Steinmetz’s highly anticipated novel – Because, is not your typical coming-of-age story; it captures the inspiration, irreverence, and innocence of adolescents in the eighties trying to form a rock and roll band.” - Sam Wise, Montreal Guardian
“If you’ve ever been in a garage band, or indeed any form of nascent collective artistic endeavour, you’ve probably experienced the magic of the breakthrough moment. It can come when you least expect it, and it can prove maddeningly hard to resummon, but the feeling it instills can keep you chasing it against all sensible odds…. Steinmetz places the reader in this moment with an immediacy that can catch you short.” - Ian McGillis, Canadian Notes & Queries, Fall/Winter 2023
Finalist for the 2013 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
"What the hell kind of great escape is this? No one escapes!" - L.B. Mayer, on the 1963 film
He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died.
In This Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz tenderly reconstructs the life of a man seen by millions yet recognized by no one, whose history - from childhood flight from Nazism to suspicious death twenty years later - intersects bitterly, ironically, and often movingly with the plot of Sturges's great war fi m. Splicing together documentary materials with correspondence, diary entries, and Steinmetz's own travel journal, This Great Escape does more than reconstruct the making of a cinema classic (now celebrating its 50th anniversary): it is a poignant and moving testament to the complexity of human experience, a portrait of a family for whom acting was a matter of survival, and proof that our most anonymous, uncredited, and undocumented moments can brush against the zeitgeist of world history.
This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla published by Biblioasis 2013
PRAISE FOR This Great Escape
“[An] idiosyncratic mix of travelogue, family memoir, and elliptical musing … pithy … The loving tribute that Steinmetz offers [Paryla] is that he now lives on, not merely in his fleeting scene in a Hollywood movie, but in his cousin’s nimble, evocative prose.”—The Brooklyn Rail
“[A] touching biography … Paryla was never a household name and may not seem worthy of attention, but the founding editor of Esplanade Books succeeds in making the case that anyone’s biography can provide insight into the context in which he or she existed. Paryla’s too-short life was defined by Europe during World War II and after, and through his life, those periods are themselves defined.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fascinating reading … elliptical and often intense … This book will appeal to readers who have seen The Great Escape, are interested in film history and/or acting, or have an interest in World War II and its effects on survivors.”—Library Journal
“With extraordinary emotional intensity, Steinmetz’s close-up of an almost-famous man challenges easy assumptions about who deserves a biography … beguiling.”—Toronto Star
“[Steinmetz] combines genres of travelogue, film history and family memoir into a work of gothic non-fiction … relentlessly compelling.”—National Post
“Seeing connections between Paryla’s life and art at every turn, Steinmetz pursues his ill-fated cousin’s faint and rapidly vanishing trail. The result is a kind of detective story, but one where the sleuthing being done is as psychological as literal … it succeeds completely.”—The Montreal Gazette
Eva’s Threepenny Theatre - Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and Winner of the City of Ottawa Book Award
In an unusual fiction about memoir, Andrew Steinmetz tells the story of his great-aunt Eva who performed in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera, in 1928. Steinmetz takes the story back to Eva’s childhood in Germany, with her invalid mother and domineering siblings. Her training as an actress began just after her graduation from high school, and her introduction to the philosophies of Brecht and his contemporaries soon followed. With the pronouncement of the family’s Jewish origins, both Eva and her brother left Germany to escape Nazi rule, Eva eventually settling in Canada.
In their sessions with the tape recorder running, we see Steinmetz’s own life as it intersects with Eva’s, and his changing perspective on her life and work. Tied together with threads of Brecht’s play, Steinmetz presents a life lived as though the world were a stage. A fictional tribute, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is as much concerned with what happened as what might have or was imagined to have been.
Eva’s Threepenny Theatre published by Gaspereau Press, 2007.
PRAISE FOR Eva’s Threepenny Theatre
“Patrick Dennis had his Auntie Mame, Graham Greene travelled with his Aunt Augusta, and now Andrew Steinmetz joins the ranks of eloquent nephews with his brilliant portrayal of his memorable Aunt Eva …. Steinmetz calls this work about his Aunt Eva a fiction about memoir, meaning that key aspects of the book are not invented, least of all the character of Eva Steinmetz, but a significant portion is. Although it is disconcerting that they are blended together without distinction, the result is a compelling, evocative work .... Eva is so fascinating a character that it is hard to know why her nephew felt the need to add fancy to fact.” - Robin Roger, Literary Review of Canada
“… a highly original reflection on memoir, one that views not only an individual life but an entire family history as a coherent – because shared and mutually meaningful – stream of spots of time ‘pulled through the theatrics of time and place.’ “ - Alex Good, goodreports.net
“This blend if memoir, fiction, monologue, and poetic musing deliberately blurs genre in order to acknowledge both the slipperiness and the tremendous power of ‘truth’.” - Quill & Quire
“…And yet, the “singular”… achievement of Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is that Steinmetz makes no apology for the seamlessly elegant ways in which he plays the “playwright.” Guided by Brecht’s notion that “[a]rt is not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” Steinmetz makes his hammer apparent without bludgeoning readers with it. We don’t need to be told that he can never know the full truth—and yet, we somehow sense that he has come stunningly close.” - Lisa Grekul, Canadian Literature
Wardlife - Short-listed for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the Quebec Writer’s Federation (QWF) First Book Award and Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction.
For nine years Andrew Steinmetz worked as a ward clerk in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of a major hospital. Wardlife is a series of riveting prose vignettes—intensely observed moments drawn from diaries kept during the nine years the author spent as a ward clerk. With character sketches, dialogues, and brief meditations on subjects ranging from the language of poetry to the language of medicine, Wardlife records the hospital experience—the pathos and pain, the humour and horror—of life on the wards.
Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk, Véhicule Press, 1998
PRAISE FOR Wardlife
"A remarkable first book... The writing is cool and clear. The picture of hospital life for doctors, nurses and patients is absolutely compelling." -Ian Brown, CBC This Morning - Sunday Edition"
[Steinmetz's] observations are sharp, sympathetic and oddly comforting, and he knows his way around a metaphor [...] This is prose poetry from a correspondent on the hospital front." -Wayne Janes, Toronto Sun
"He's an astute observer who doesn't miss much: the feel of instruments, the tone of a "locating girl's" voice calling a code blue, the oddly triumphant grieving of a family watching and singing at a dying father's bedside, the complicated roilings of various hospital subcultures. He knows how medicine can drain our humanity... He's eloquently subtle too, in seeking a balance between medicalizing the personal and personalizing the medical... Steinmetz has the writer's pitiless eye and worrying heart. Expect more good things from him." -Martin Levin, The Globe & Mail
"Reading Wardlife allows a glimpse of how the hospital might appear to a mind prepared for the experience by Wallace Stevens and Michael Ondaatje, instead of Harrison's textbook. Scenes cleave along undetected fault lines; implausible categories emerge from the spaces between objects; accents fall on unlikely syllables. [.] Steinmetz's sketches tacitly point out that there are things about the hospital that the doctors can't see, things that training renders invisible." -David Kent, MD, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 286 No. 1
"This book makes me, as a physician, both proud and ashamed of what I do. Buy it and read it. Give copies to your physician friends. You will laugh, cry and sometimes curse, but you'll be all the better for it." -John Stewart, M.D., Canadian Medical Association Journal