Red Girl Rat Boy

A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year A Globe & Mail Best Short Fiction Title A National Post Best Short Fiction Title A January Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2014 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor Award "Complicated, passionate, genuine."—Chatelaine Women. Young women, old women. The hair-obsessed, the politically driven, the sure-footed, the bony-butted, the awkward and compulsive and alone. Sleep-deprived and testy. Exhausted and accepting. Among the innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity throughout this short story collection, Cynthia Flood’s protagonists stand out as citizens of a reality that the rest of the world will only partially understand. New from the Journey Prize-winning author, Red Girl Rat Boy is a collection of astonishing range and assured technique, whose voices—gothic, peculiar, domestic, and strange—remain as passionate and complex as ever. Praise for Red Girl Rat Boy “Revenge and politics season this potent and passionate collection of stories. Flood excavates indelible histories that haunt even those who’ve shaken the dust of the past.” —Aritha van Herk, author of Judith “Flood’s eye is unflinching, her language energetic and precise, her vision bracing, passionate and entirely lacking in sentimentality.”—Nancy Richler, author of The Imposter Bride “The notary in ‘Dirty Work’ has ‘retired from witnessing how rough human existence is.’ Fortunately for us, Cynthia Flood has not … these stories prove her to be among our great North American fiction writers.”—Betsy Warland, author of Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing “Raw energy is Cynthia Flood’s territory. This is a superb collection.”—Laurie Lewis, author of Little Comrades “Cynthia Flood is full of surprises. If there’s one thing that characterizes her elegant, crystal-sharp short stories, it’s that element of surprise … they reward the attentive reader with surprise and delight”—Dave Margoshes, author of A Book of Great Worth

Gathering the best twenty stories from Cynthia Flood’s career, these spare, stylistically inventive stories explore subjects ranging from the domestic to the political. In this collection, Flood navigates a wide range of subject matter with a writing style which gradually becomes more intense, tighter, and sometimes experimental with each story. Most themes are familiar—love, hate, children, the natural world, parents, failure, despair, anger, regret. Other stories are more unusual, dealing with topics such as far-left political activity. Containing what may be some of Flood’s most poignant work, You Are Here is a sharp and engaging exploration of the world today.

Enjoy Red Girl, Blue Boy and the other standalone titles in Bloomsbury's contemporary If Only romance line centered around an impossible problem: you always want what you can't have! Sixteen-year-old Katie and Drew really shouldn't get along. After all, her father is the Republican nominee for President of the United States while his mother is at the top of the Democratic ticket. But when Katie and Drew are thrown together in a joint interview on a morning talk show, they can't ignore the chemistry between them. With an entire nation tuned into and taking sides in your parents' fight, and the knowledge that--ultimately--someone has to lose, how can you fall in love with the one person you're supposed to hate? This title in the If Only line is a frank and funny romance that shows how sparks fly when opposites attract.

Editor John Metcalf has inspired, challenged, and championed countless writers over his long career. In Off the Record, he encourages six to reveal what one rarely discusses in polite society: how they became writers instead of radio announcers or cabinet makers. The essays collected here, each accompanied by a short story, offer fascinating insight into the relationships between writers, their editors, and their fiction. Off the Record brings together work by six noted Canadian writers, among them the winners of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Butler Book Prize, and the Marian Engel Award: Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page. Their essays are candid, moving, and surprisingly relatable—providing plenty of inspiration for those among us who want to write.

"John Metcalf has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country."—Alice Munro The Argus-eyed editor; the magisterial prose stylist; the waggish, inflammatory cultural critic; the mentor and iconoclast. John Metcalf is a literary legend whose memoir maps the underground he labored tirelessly to establish.

No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be far less without his efforts. Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, Metcalf’s magisterial The Canadian Short Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List, Metcalf’s critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its author’s most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us all.

Firmly rooted in historical events, Atacama tells the story of Manuel Garay, the son of a communist miner/union leader and an anarchist organizer of working-class women, and Lucía Céspedes, the daughter of a fascist army officer and a socialite. A fateful turn of events leads to twelve-year-old Lucía befriending twelve-year-old Manuel, inextricably connecting them to a common denominator: Lucía’s adoring father and the perpetrator of the heinous crimes that have caused both children immeasurable suffering. Manuel and Lucía forge a friendship that grows as they come of age and realize that their lives are not only linked by Ernesto Céspedes’ actions, but also by a deep understanding of the other’s emotional predicaments, their commitment to social justice and their belief in the power of writing and art. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but resonating loudly with today’s changing times, beautifully crafted Atacama covers themes related to class, gender, trauma, survival and the role of art in society.

Now in its 47th year, Best Canadian Stories has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many of the writers, throughout their respective careers, who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon. Caroline Adderson, Margaret Atwood, Clark Blaise, Lynn Coady, Mavis Gallant, Zsuzsi Gartner, Douglas Glover, Steven Heighton, Isabel Huggan, Mark Anthony Jarman, Norman Levine, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Diane Schoemperlen, Russell Smith, Linda Svendsen, Kathleen Winter, and many others have appeared in its pages over the years and decades, making Best Canadian Stories the go-to source for what's new in Canadian fiction writing for close to five decades. The short story is perhaps Canada's greatest contribution to literature, and in this edition established practitioners of the form—including Tamas Dobozy, Cynthia Flood, K.D. Miller, and Lisa Moore—are joined by powerful emerging talents—like Paige Cooper and CBC Short Story Prize winner David Huebert—in a continuation of not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters.