The Journey Prize Stories 26: The Best of Canada's New Writers

Description

For more than twenty-five years, The Journey Prize Stories has been Canada's most celebrated annual fiction anthology and a who's who of up-and-coming writers. With settings ranging from Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music to a hospital ward in Thailand, from British Columbia's Burrard Inlet to St. John's Bowring Park, the stories in this collection represent the year's best short fiction by some of our most exciting new writers. Among the stories this year- A woman's quest to trend on social media blinds her to her inability to connect with her own adult daughter. The delicate equilibrium maintained by a newly pregnant expat living in Israel is shattered when a missile lands in her backyard. An unusual guide to caring for an exotic pet highlights the many opportunities owners will have to learn valuable life lessons - beginning with the pet's death. The tender relationship between two musical prodigies is no match for the machinations of the adult world. After a woman returns to her parents' house to recuperate from a life-changing surgery, she discovers how difficult it is for others to accept who she has become. A terrible act of cruelty forces the tensions between two workers at a fish processing plant to spill out into the surrounding waters. When a former couple has a chance encounter on a B.C. ferry, old grievances and desires alike resurface with surprising results.

Craig Davidson has written three other books- The Preserve (as Patrick Lestewka), Rust and Bone, and The Fighter. His nonfiction has appeared in Esquire, The Washington Post, Nerve, Salon, Real Fighter, The London Observer, and elsewhere. Currently, he s hanging his hat in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he is the deputy editor of an alt-urban weekly. Saleema Nawaz has published fiction in journals including Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and Prism International and she is an alumnus of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. a The White Dress, a the final novella in her short story collection Mother Superior, won the inaugural Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis at the University of Manitoba; another of the stories, a My Three Girls, a appeared in the 2008 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize Anthology.

Praise for The Journey Prize Stories: * "The collection consistently does what the oeuvre does best: communicate intense emotion with force, give life to characters that struggle with their circumstances, illuminate the universal through the specific and the particular, and turn the commonplace into art." Globe and Mail * "A quarter century of great work has gone onto the pages of Journey Prize anthologies. Canadian Literature is flat-out lucky to have such an institution." Alexander MacLeod