Other Worlds — Andre Alexis

Playful, stirring stories of the strange and the everyday, inspired by Swift, Kawabata, Stoker, and more.

The sister of grief is gratitude.

In nine stories, Other Worlds quickly takes us deep into the very heart of questions around connection, loneliness, loss, reconciliation, and whether we can ever really know those we love most (or even ourselves).

As playful as they are meditative, as ingenious as they are emotionally arresting, as interested in genre as they are in character, each of these stories is a marvel of construction and imagination. They are, fundamentally, stories of immigration. They span time and place on the page and through their inspirations: “Pu Songling,” inspired by the seventeenth-century Chinese writer, tells about a twentieth-century professor of magic and medicine and his apprentice in Toronto; “Houyhnhnm,” inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, sees a son through bereavement as he cares for his late father's very literary horse; through the conventions of anime, “Contrition” follows a Carib man who dies in nineteenth-century Trinidad and awakens in the body of a child in twentieth-century Canada.

A writer of sentences as well as heart, André Alexis crafts stories that beg to be read again and again -- for their incantatory, mischievous prose, for their quiet insistence on searching out truth and investigating interpretation, for their moments of thrilling insight.