The Journey Prize Stories 24

The Best of Canada's New Writers

Author Various
Ebook
On sale Sep 18, 2012 | 240 Pages | 978-0-7710-9587-0

The Journey Prize Stories is Canada’s most celebrated annual fiction anthology. With settings ranging from Mount St. Helens, Barcelona, Halifax, Victoria Island, and Alberta’s Red River Badlands, these stories represent the year’s best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging writers.
Among the stories this year: After months of trying to sell the worthless collection of sports cards his no-good father left behind, a boy is unprepared for a bizarre and surprisingly hilarious encounter with the “pile of human being” who wants to buy a card to complete his collection. In a story that balances wry humour with moments of sharp tension, a teenager with a crush on her high school English teacher blithely channels her frustrations by going on online dates with an older man. Two brothers embark on a road trip to bring their recovering father home from the hospital, in a poignant mediation on family and the things we try to recover of the past. Over the course of a single summer in 1970s Halifax, as shifting social mores lead to a crisis within his family, a boy obsessed with comic books begins to question his once unshakable faith in his uncle.

The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan. View titles by Various

About

The Journey Prize Stories is Canada’s most celebrated annual fiction anthology. With settings ranging from Mount St. Helens, Barcelona, Halifax, Victoria Island, and Alberta’s Red River Badlands, these stories represent the year’s best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging writers.
Among the stories this year: After months of trying to sell the worthless collection of sports cards his no-good father left behind, a boy is unprepared for a bizarre and surprisingly hilarious encounter with the “pile of human being” who wants to buy a card to complete his collection. In a story that balances wry humour with moments of sharp tension, a teenager with a crush on her high school English teacher blithely channels her frustrations by going on online dates with an older man. Two brothers embark on a road trip to bring their recovering father home from the hospital, in a poignant mediation on family and the things we try to recover of the past. Over the course of a single summer in 1970s Halifax, as shifting social mores lead to a crisis within his family, a boy obsessed with comic books begins to question his once unshakable faith in his uncle.

Author

The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan. View titles by Various