Showing results by narrator "Stephanie Belding" in All Categories

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays - funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient - which seek answers to burning questions. In over 50 pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic.

Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny.

Lily Litvyak is no one's idea of a fighter pilot: a tiny, dimpled teenager with golden curls who lied about her age in order to fly. But in the crucible of the air war against the German invaders, she becomes that rare thing—a flying ace, glorified at home and around the world as the White Lily of Stalingrad.

Elliot is a first responder in New York, a man running from past failures and struggling to do the right thing. Emma is a pregnant singer preparing to headline a benefit concert for victims of a growing outbreak - all while questioning what kind of world her child is coming into. Owen is the author of a best-selling novel with eerie similarities to the real-life crisis, and as fact and fiction begin to blur, he must decide whether his lifelong instinct for self-preservation has been worth the cost.

Throwaway Daughter tells the story of Grace Dong-mei Parker, whose biggest concern is how to distill her adoption from China into the neat blanks of her personal history assignment. Aside from the unwelcome reminders of difference, Grace loves passing for the typical Canadian teen—until the day she witnesses the Tiananmen massacre on the news.

Reminiscent of Stephen King's brilliantly cinematic short stories that went on to inspire films such as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, here's a collection crackling with Craig Davidson's superb craft and kinetic energy: in the visceral, crystalline, steel-tipped prose; in the psychological perspicacity; and in the endearing humor.