Fiction

A Jesus Christ look alike has trouble with his girlfriend . . . a bodybuilder does sit ups from the window of a speeding car . . . a burn victim and his freakishly beautiful love interest creatively loot homes while a forest fire approaches . . . a female cult member tries to convince a young man to let doctors harvest his recently-deceased wife’s organs . . .

In a second to none engagement of the reader, James Marshall’s stories bristle with fictional restlessness. This debut collection is a true literary “find” and Marshall’s an exciting new voice.

“James Marshall’s wit is acidic, salvaged by a deep, although shaken, humanism. His stories are charmed with the glow of small-time Canadian losers and dreamers living in a broken, plugged-in world. This is Heinrich Böll for our time, Alice Munro dressed in jeans and leather, pumped up on testosterone and fear, Raymond Carver taken north to drown in the middle of a forest fire, each alcoholic bubble bursting into flame, and, always, the wounded, broken, and oddly heroic Canada of a thousand ironies we all live in but haven’t yet had in a book, and, thankfully, miraculously have in this book now.”
— Harold Rhenish

• Shortlisted for the Best First Book category in the Caribbean & Canada region of the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
• Finalist for the 5th Annual ReLit Awards.