About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what "postmodern" actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bowering has put together a new collection of Canadian short fiction that takes the theme of postmodernity one step further. And Other Stories offers not just more stories of difference, of other-ness and the race, gender, class and politics of the other, but stories where our most talented writers become, and reflect on being, other(s).
And so, in spite of postmodern theorists trying to hammer home to us that there is no universal self, no universal truth, this collection brings into question whether or not there might actually be something universal after all—even if it is only our (temporary) experience of being an other. There is always only Our Story, And Other Stories, in this case by:
Gail Scott, Matt Cohen, Suzette Mayr, M.A.C. Farrant, Timothy Findley, Dionne Brand, Candas Jane Dorsey, Audrey Thomas, Sheila Watson, Dany Laferrière, George Bowering, Leon Rooke, David Arnason, Clint Burnham, Hiromi Goto, Guillermo Verdecchia, André Alexis, George Elliot, Diane Schoemperlen, Brian Fawcett, Thomas King, Keath Fraser, Margaret Atwood, and Clark Blaise.
