Eating Habits Of The Chronically Lonesome will leave you struck, yet, exhilarated. The exploration of starvation and consumption is at the core of each character; what does our hunger reveal about the state of our soft hearts? Ellen jumps rope on rooftops in the searing Korean sun. She has sworn off carbohydrates until she can find pants that fit. Damon resents his two dollar chow mein bought on a Montreal curb. There are half-eaten poutines on living room floors and greasy corn kernels stuck to chins. There are weak cocktails, cheap coffees, white plastic forks, and cigarettes. Everywhere.These interwoven stories are propulsive. They pull back the blast shield to reveal blinding interior voices; unrepentant and raw. Coles' irreverent characters scorch, and strangely comfort us, as they struggle to process the permeable nature of their thoughts. Such are the sardonically complex and humourous Eating Habits Of The Chronically Lonesome.

Megan Gail Coles is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and the National Theatre School of Canada. She is co-founder and co-artistic director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company. Megan is currently working on a trilogy of plays examining resource exploitation in Newfoundland and Labrador titled Falling Trees, Building Houses and Wasting Paper. She is a member of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, Playwrights' Guild of Canada, Playwrights' Atlantic Resource Centre (NL Rep) and Playwrights' Workshop Montreal. Her completed plays include Our Eliza, The Battery and Bound. Megan, originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula, currently resides in St. John's, NL. Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome is her first collection of short stories.

Megan Coles' profile page

• Short-listed, John and Margaret Savage First Book Award
• Winner, BMO Winterset Award

"Characters are the crux of this breed of lively, unrestrained short fiction, and the cast in this book are endearing, gut-busting, and memorably real." Chad Pelley, The Overcast.

"...the tone is pitch perfect. Appropriately restrained and conversational. Coles is not your average newbie. She's a serious talent who deserves to be mentioned alongside other young Newfoundland writers like Joel Thomas Hynes and Sara Tilley." Mike Heffernan, Atlantic Books Today

"Coles, whose background is in theatre and playwriting, is the real thing. Deft with prose, gifted with voices, writing from a wry, wise and empathetic perspective, she is undoubtedly part of the established tradition of fine Newfound short story-writing." Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This blog

"The stories are often very short, even only four pages, but in each she compresses situation (relationship fracture and reknit), character (distilled to their absolute wants), and setting (St. John's, Montreal or Korea) like a literary Oreo cookie. It's all about the crux, the crisis, propelled from the first sentence...Where does someone belong and with whom are core questions here, posed and answered with crisp, lyric prose." Joan Sullivan, The Telegram