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How You Were Born
How You Were Born | Kate Cayley
1 post | 3 read | 2 to read
How You Were Born is a collection of short stories looking at the bizarre, the tragi-comic and the unbelievable elements that run through our lives. An aging academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children believe their neighbours are war criminals in hiding. A dwarf in a circus dreams of a perfect wedding. An eleven-year-old girl becomes obsessed with the acrobat who visits her small town. Two women fall in love over a painting of the apocalypse. A group of siblings put their senile Holocaust survivor father into institutional care, while failing to notice that he is reliving the past. Each story examines, from a different angle, the difficult business of love, loyalty and memory. With elegance and restraint, in spare language, these narratives run the gamut from realistic to uncanny, from ordinary epiphanies to extremities of experience. Settings range from present-day Toronto, to small town Ontario in 1914, to West Virginia in 1967, characters ranging from the very young to the very old, the manifestly unhinged to the ostensibly sane. These are dark stories in which light finds a foothold, and in which connections, frequently missed or mislaid, offer redemption. - Guest editor: Alayna Munce
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merelybookish
How You Were Born | Kate Cayley
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An excellent collection of short stories by Canadian Kate Cayley. (Originally published in 2014, this new edition is coming out soon with 3 additional stories.) Each story is a little gem, a careful observation of human behavior. Indeed in many of the stories, characters are observing others, and figuring out their own reliance on/distance from/ connection to other people. #netgalley

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