Riptides New Island Fiction

Description

A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine.  The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of  “the land of Anne.”

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