Fiction Short Stories (single Author)
Island
Kanata Classics Edition
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2025
- Category
- Short Stories (single author), Nature & the Environment, Literary
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771023576
- Publish Date
- Jul 2025
- List Price
- $24.00
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Description
Alistair MacLeod has been hailed internationally as a master of the short story. Now MacLeod’s collected stories, including two never before published, are gathered together for the first time in Island. These sixteen superbly crafted stories, most of them firmly based in Cape Breton even if its people stray elsewhere, depict men and women living out their lives against the haunting landscape that surrounds them. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, MacLeod maps the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child, and invokes memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations, even in the midst of unremitting change. Eloquent, humane, powerful, and told in a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, the stories in this astonishing collection seize us from the outset and remain with us long after the final page.
About the authors
Alistair MacLeod was born in Saskatchewan in 1936 and raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two new stories, were published as Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod. In 1999, MacLeod's first novel, No Great Mischief, was published to stellar critical acclaim. The novel won the Dartmouth Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, The Trillium Award, the CAA Award, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year. In 2001, No Great Mischief was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes.
Alistair MacLeod's profile page
Kate Beaton est auteure de Diantre! un manant, un recueil de bandes dessinées classé au palmarès du New York Times et de l'album illustré La princesse et le poney. Elle est lauréate de nombreux prix Harvey et ses dessins ont paru dans le New Yorker. Kate a grandi sur l'île du Cap-Breton, en Nouvelle-Écosse.
Kate Beaton is the author of The Princess and the Pony, which received four starred reviews and was selected as an ALA Notable Children's Book, and Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops!, both #1 New York Times bestselling comics collections. Kate is the recipient of multiple Harvey awards, and her cartoons have been featured in the New Yorker. Kate lives in Canada, and you can find her online at www.beatontown.com, or on Twitter and Tumblr as @beatonna.
Editorial Reviews
“Alistair MacLeod’s stories are as regional and universal as the work of Faulkner or Chekhov. And they are, I think, as permanent.”
–Michael Ondaatje
“Stunning. . . . The quality of the writing matches the very best in the world. . . . The stories are about us and here is that rare voice, a unique voice, to illuminate our experience.”
–Edmonton Journal
“The book is a treasure. . . . These are stories well worth returning to, with layers to uncover gradually. . . . It doesn’t get any better than this.”
–Toronto Star
“If you buy one book this year, let it be Island. . . . You will have in your possession not only some of the best short stories written in the twentieth century, but some of the best short stories ever written in the English language. . . . These are universal stories for all time.”
–Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“Every story is touched with the beauty and truth of genius”
–Irish Times
“One of the finest masters of prose in the world . . . these short stories have established MacLeod as a writer whose every word is set in place with clean and enduring perfections.”
–Scotsman
“These stories have slowly become famous for their control of tone and cadence and for MacLeod’s ability to handle pure, raw emotion. . . . Neither contemporary trend nor modern ironies interest him. The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”
–Colm Tóibín
“MacLeod’s lyricism succeeds in leaving a reader both harrowed by and envious of all the sorrow, violence and ravenous love.”
—New York Times Book Review
Other titles by
Island
Penguin Modern Classics Edition
Running the Whale's Back
Stories of Faith and Doubt from Atlantic Canada
To Every Thing There is a Season
A Cape Breton Christmas Story
Lives of Short Duration
An Orange from Portugal
Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland
Atlantica
Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland
Brigh an Òrain - A Story in Every Song
No Great Mischief
Gifts to Last
Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories
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Two Years in the Oil Sands
Shark Girl SIGNED
Shark Girl
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour
La princesse et le poney
King Baby
Step Aside, Pops
A Hark! a Vagrant Collection
The Princess and the Pony
Beethoven Birthday Party
A 2013 Hark! A Vagrant Calendar
There she blows: A 2013 Hark! A Vagrant literary calendar
Kate Beaton 2013 Calendar