Dan Vyleta
Born to Czech emigre parents, Dan Vyleta is an inveterate migrant who has lived in Germany, Canada, the USA and the UK. Dan’s debut novel Pavel & I gathered immediate international acclaim and was translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; his third, The Crooked Maid, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the J.I. Segal Award. His writing has been compared to works by Greene, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Hitchcock, Nabokov, Murnau and Grass, giving him some modicum of hope that he has found a voice all his own. When not reading or writing novels, Dan Vyleta watches cop shows, or listens to CDs from his embarrassingly large collection of Jazz albums.
“It takes me a while to drag him out, he's got himself stuck to the axle, and by the time I am done and stand over the body something strange has started to happen. The alley's filled with a half-dozen cats, runty little things with their ribs showing and their tails worn high like they're pointing to the moon. I stand there, breathing froth into the snowflakes and watch them gather round me, soft kitty paws, and now and then a patrol car rolls past in the distance. The cats are circling us, tails cocked at the moon, their muzzles bloodied by the tail lights' glow. They are vicious bastards, let me tell you: frost on their whiskers, eyes like cut glass, a half-dozen pairs, on me and the dead man. And then they start licking. Licking at the snow I mean, the blood in the snow, they lap it up like mother's milk. And all the while from their throats, from their whole bodies, there issues this sound, you hear it with your skin, it's like an engine running under your palm. That's when I realize they are purring, man, purring as they feed on the midget's death.”