From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them.

Beautifully cohesive across the stunning depth and range of setting and subject, there is nothing predictable about My Thievery of the People.

Montrealer Leila Marshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland heritage--she can tell a good joke, but it bombs. She has been a filmmaker, a baker, an app designer, a marketer, a farmer, and editor of online culture journal Rover Arts. She founded the Friends of Hutchison Street, a groundbreaking community group bringing Hasidic and non-Hasidic neighbours together in dialogue. She has published stories and poetry in Canadian and American journals and anthologies. The Philistine is her first novel.

Leila Marshy's profile page

"A household in a Montreal suburb suffused with marital tension, a dusty village in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a mysteriously archaic travelling circus: My Thievery is a delightfully engrossing and awe-inspiring collection that transports us from the mundane to the exotic and spaces in between, all in the service of the sort of satisfying, trend-defying morality tales in which the consequences of our choices can include death---or at least retribution." Anita Anand, A Convergence of Solitudes

"This collection is exhilarating. Marshy uses her distinctive style and wild strength to draw the reader at high speed from geopolitical reality to psychological peril, through the inner lives of refugees, queers in love and grief, wives, workers, and so many others fighting their way out from under." ?? Elise Moser, Because I Have Loved and Hidden It