The Isolation Booth is the third volume in Hugh Hood's Collected Stories; it contains short fiction written between 1957 and 1966. While all of the stories have been previously published in various magazines, this is the first time they are available in book form. The title story was first published in The Tamarack Review in 1958; the paid to Hood for that story represents the first income he ever made from his writing.

Since then, Hugh Hood has become 'one of Canada's most prolific short-story writers and novelists.' (William French, The Globe & Mail) He has authored more than twenty books, including novels, short-story collections and essays. The Porcupine's Quill has previously published Flying a Red Kite and A Short Walk in the Rain as part of our continuing series of Hood's Collected Stories.

The stories in this collection are varied in form and content, from 'The Isolation Booth', which Hood describes in his introduction as '... typical media folklore, the tale of a human sacrifice', to 'The Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper' which is concerned with the moral: 'Never oppress the shiftless and the idle; they may have powerful friends.' These stories reflect the variety of Hood's experiments with the form, as well as his continuing concern with the human condition, which prompted William Blackburn to comment, 'Hood's thirty-year career demonstrates his profound and compassionate sensitivity to our human predicament.' (Canadian Book Review Annual).

As Hood writes in the introduction to The Isolation Booth, 'Surely the society that invents a space called ''the isolation booth'' isn't far removed from the subliminal motivations of the torturers in prisons and camps of one kind or another. I've always shuddered remembering the phrase, yet it was in common use among millions of weekly viewers of big-money TV quiz programmes like ''The $64,000 Question''.' These concerns are (unfortunately) as meaningful now as when 'The Isolation Booth' was written in 1958.

Hugh Hood was born in Toronto in 1928 and studied at the University of Toronto, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1955. He worked as a university teacher for over forty years -- over thirty of those years spent at the Universit? de Montr?al. He was married to painter and printmaker Noreen Mallory and had four children. He died in Montreal in August of 2000.

Hood wrote 32 books, amongst them novels, collections of stories and essays, an art book, and a book of sports journalism. His most extended project, begun in 1975 and occupying him right up until the time of his death, was a twelve volume roman fleuve entitled The New Age / Le nouveau si?cle. The last book in this series, Near Water, was published by Anansi in 2000.

Hugh Hood's profile page

'Storytelling is not only a gift, but a craft that evolves during the course of a writer's life. The Isolation Booth, Hugh Hood's collection of stories never published in book form before, is an interesting example of such an evolution.'

Kingston Whig-Standard

'Hood writes that this volume is the result of his unending struggle with the short-story form. It is exciting to watch him triumph in that struggle, as he accurately paints such diverse portraits as those of a crass game-show host; a stuffy self-deceptive businessman; a shockingly insensitive divorc? and a distinguished teacher of metaphysics and phenomenology.'

Canadian Book Review Annual

'Hood at his best has created visions as strong as this. Long after his stories and his characters have drained from my memory I can recall certain intensely realized mystical images -- the ghost ship under the lake, the return to life of a human being frozen to the point of death in some horrible concentration-camp ''medical'' experiment, and above all that red kite of his, fluttering triumphantly over a fallen world.'

Essays on Canadian Writing