The Sign For Migrant Soul

Description

“Cumyn does what an artist does best: charting what lies underneath our daily lives and surprising us with what we might find there.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“The migrant souls in Richard Cumyn’s new story collection move like shoals of fish, not fully aware that the structures they create together make them, sometimes despite their own wayward inclinations, social beings. Cumyn is a superb stylist with a wry sense of humour. These stories will churn inside you long after you’re finished reading them.” — Kevin Chong, author of Beauty Plus Pity

“Crowded with vivid life and bursting with desperate, jumbled cares, these stories do fiction’s best job: they show us the way we live now. The fragility of body and soul revealed here is painful, but Cumyn’s ordinary people still do the laundry and get to the hospital and look after the kids, at least partly; and even through the dirty joke of existence, they find ways to salvation.” — Marina Endicott, internationally acclaimed author of Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows, and Close to Hugh 

“Richard Cumyn’s long dedication to the short story is evident in the collection. His prose is understated but graceful, and his characters are like all of us: imbued with complications and contradictions of which we ourselves might not even be aware.”— Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories

“In Bruegel’s painting, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, humdrum life unfolds in the foreground while, almost unnoticed, the boy Icarus falls to the sea. So it is in Richard Cumyn’s stories. Meticulously he documents the to-and-fro of ordinary lives while Colin, or Melissa, or Brian, or Melanie wax their wings unconsciously, preparing to fly towards their personal, unforgiving sun.” —Nicholas Ruddock, author of Night Ambulance

In nine memorable new stories and with tragicomic flair, acclaimed master of the short form Richard Cumyn dramatizes lives in tumult and transition. If the sign for migrant soul is an enigma, this remarkably upbeat and innovative collection is anything but.

Praise for Famous Last Meals:

“Cumyn has absolute control over the very clear and clever narration of his characters, and can draw them into madness and violence without also drawing his prose into histrionics.” — Antigonish Review

Praise for The Young In Their Country:

“ …the prose and characterization are so good that I trust them at least as much as myself.” — Joel Deshaye, Literary Review of Canada