Journey Prize Stories: Short Fiction from the Best of Canada's New Writers #21: The Journey Prize Stories 21: The Best of Canada's New Writers

“[The anthology] amuses, astonishes, and enlightens; it is a delicious cacophony of voices and engaging stories . . .”Books in Canada

The Journey Prize Stories is Canada’s most celebrated annual fiction anthology, presenting the best stories published each year by some of our most exciting up-and-coming writers.

Among the stories this year: Desperate to reinvent himself, a disgraced diplomat on what will be the last assignment of his career goes in search of a woman from his past in Eastern Croatia. As a teacher begins to unravel in the aftermath of a school shooting, a series of surprising encounters with her former students reveals their differing degrees of resiliency. Bench presses and Wonder Woman comics create an unexpected intimacy between a teenager and her Ukrainian-language tutor, a former female champion weightlifter. After his junkie uncle moves into the basement to hide out from his dealer and get clean, a lonely boy’s longing for a male role model threatens to lead him astray. When a famous author finds himself embroiled in a sex scandal while on his book tour, he discovers the only person he has left to turn to is his handler, a woman with secrets of her own.  Cultural tradition gives way to modern-day Japanese efficiency when a long-married couple attend a meeting of Concerned Parents of Unmarried Offspring, a speed dating event for parents in search of spouses for their adult children. 

The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. The winner will be announced in fall 2010.

For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been Canadas most celebrated annual fiction anthology, presenting the best stories published each year by some of our most exciting emerging writers.

In a vividly evoked story set in the offices of a Jewish newspaper in 1920s Cleveland, the unassuming writer behind a successful advice column discovers just how difficult it can be to navigate matters of the heart. A dwindling group of Chinese-Canadian lepers spend their final days fighting for survival and dreaming of escape after they are exiled to a remote island at the turn of the twentieth century. In what might prove to be the most important race of their careers, two competitive runners put everything on the line in the hopes of achieving the “miracle mile.” After the strange facts surrounding a girls disappearance from a small Japanese town decades earlier come to light, one of her former classmates recalls their charged but confusing last encounter. When an aging painter visits his estranged son, a gifted artist now gravely ill, old rivalries are reignited in a seductive story of art, love, desire, and betrayal.

The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Writers Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. The winner will be announced in fall 2009.

Lee Henderson is the author of The Broken Record Technique and The Man Game. A two-time nominee for the Journey Prize, he lives in Vancouver.

Rebecca Rosenblum is the much-talked-about first-time author of Once. A finalist for the Journey Prize in 2007, she lives in Toronto.

Camilla Gibb, Lee Henderson, and Rebecca Rosenblum

ADRIAN MICHAEL KELLY

Lure

(from Prairie Fire)

LYNNE KUTSUKAKE

Away

(from Grain Magazine)

JESUS HARDWELL

Easy Living

(from Exile: The Literary Quarterly)

PAUL HEADRICK

Highlife

(from Event)

DAVE MARGOSHES

The Wisdom of Solomon

(from The Dalhousie Review)

ALEXANDER MACLEOD

Miracle Mile

(from The New Quarterly)

YASUKO THANH

Floating Like the Dead

(from Vancouver Review)

SARAH L. TAGGART

Deaf

(from The Malahat Review)

SARAH KEEVIL

Pyro

(from Event)

SHAWN SYMS

On the Line

(from PRISM international)

FRAN KIMMEL

Picturing God's Ocean

(from Grain Magazine)

DANIEL GRIFFIN

The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale

(from The Dalhousie Review)

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