Zero Gravity

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The Porcupine's Quill, 2006 - Fiction - 182 pages

In this remarkable new anthology of stories, mostly set in Vancouver, Sharon English provokes, shocks, amuses, and finally satisfies the reader with her insights and her character studies. In lucid detail, she captures the lives of a series of slightly skewed protagonists. Using a blend of descriptive detail, convincing dialogue, and social comment, she creates scenes and characters that linger in the mind long after one has finished each story. Corporate inanity, coastal weather, personal foibles and neuroses -- all are evoked with wit and verbal dexterity.

The characters are the more fascinating because they are so ordinary, so recognizable, yet the reader becomes involved with each to such an extent that one regrets that the story must end. A young woman, gradually detaching from reality in her Toronto corporate position, flees to Vancouver where the dream state persists. Another successful executive can no longer see himself. A lightly dressed tourist survives a mountain night by immersing himself in a hot spring. A sixty-eight year old woman encounters, on a nude beach, the woman who stole her sweetheart forty years earlier. From these seemingly innocuous plot lines emerge stories that are fascinating and thought provoking and often very funny.

 

Contents

The Cosmic Elfs
9
Lawless
33
Devotion
49
In the Woods
67
This Side of Thirty
87
Nine Outtakes from the Life of Mark
105
Ship of Fools
127
The Road to Delphi
149
The Flying Woman
167
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About the author (2006)

Sharon English is the author of two collections of short stories. Zero Gravity (Porcupine's Quill, 2006) was long-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize, short-listed for the 2007 ReLit Award, and included as a Globe and Mail notable book for 2006. English's first collection, Uncomfortably Numb, was praised by the Globe and Mail, THIS Magazine and Books in Canada, among others, for being `highly readable,' with a deft use of `language that ambushes the read

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