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Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

Not Anyone's Anything

by (author) Ian Williams

Publisher
Freehand Books
Initial publish date
Apr 2011
Category
Short Stories (single author), Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781551119953
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $21.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781460400104
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $10.99

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Description

Ian Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything is a trio of trios: three sets of three stories, with three of those stories further divided into thirds. Mathematical, musical, and meticulously crafted, these stories play profoundly with form, and feature embedded flash cards and musical notations, literal basements, and dual narratives, semi-detached. Roaming through Toronto and its surrounding suburbia, Williams’s characters wittily and wryly draw attention to the angst and anxieties associated with being somewhere between adolescence and more-than-that. They are disastrously ambitious, performing amateur surgery or perfecting Chopin; they are restless and bored, breaking into units of new subdivisions hoping for a score; they continually test the ones they love, and, though every time feels like the last time, they might be up for one more game.

About the author

Ian Williams is the author of the Giller Prize–winning novel Reproduction. His last poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize.
Williams holds a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program.

Ian Williams' profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Danuta Gleed Literary Award

Editorial Reviews

"In these nuanced, restless stories, Williams subverts our conventional expectations of narrative. Minutely observed, his characters’ disconsolate lives swerve off one another, as they again and again attempt to connect. And yet this oblique, intense approach to story and character profoundly captures the real. Not Anyone’s Anything discloses a radical new voice in Canadian fiction."

Rhea Tregebov

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