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Faithful and Other Stories
Guernica Editions, Fall 2017
168 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771831680
ISBN10: 1771831685
English
$6.95 Canada, $6.95 US
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.
What the family does not know is that on Saul's last night he broke his silence. Emphatically. At dusk. After four days without words, my husband said, quite loudly: Were you there? He raised his head from the pillow. Yes, he said, certainly you were there. I leaned in from my bedside chair, I took his hand, you'd think I would've been shaken, wouldn't you, after so much silence, to hear his voice, but no silence can be held indefinitely, except perhaps the silence of God.
A man lies on his deathbed and begins to speak—not to his wife, who sits by his side, but to his memory of the woman with whom he had an affair. It is his wife’s response, and her voice—calm, measured, reflective—that makes “Mine” the story it is. Thickly imagined and expertly executed, this is the sort of writing that reminds us of the possibility of redemption and the very hard work of being human.
Jury Citation, CBC Short Story Prize
Daniel Karasik’s “Witness” explores, with haunting eloquence, various states of isolation, the basic human need for communication, and the value of art in the face of violence … A story of longing in a world peopled with thugs, “Witness,” with its poetic reverberations, will stick with me for a long time.
Judge’s Citation, The Malahat Review’s, Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction
Reviews
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Faithful and Other Stories
Quill & Quire - January 12, 2018
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A Writer to Watch
Toronto Star - November 25, 2017
Books by Daniel Karasik
