Acting on the Island and Other Prince Edward Island Stories: New & Selected gathers together 21 stories set on PEI from the nearly 500 wide-ranging and eclectic stories that J.J. Steinfeld has written in his over forty years of living and writing on the Island.

Steinfeld’s twenty-third book is a thought-provoking collection of Island stories embracing and exploring the themes and the psychological terrain that has pervaded all his writing, from the absurd to the existential, the surreal to the spiritual, the realistic to the fantastic. These stories are interwoven with the tragic, the comic and sometimes the darkly humorous as he grapples with the desire for meaning and sense in the human condition while confronting the chaotic, painful and sometimes strange aspects of history and people’s lives, both ordinary and extraordinary. Steinfeld’s work is concerned with the influence of the past and memory on the present; the significance of love, creativity and madness in the lives of individuals as they attempt to deal with their lives on the Island and within the larger world.

Poet, fiction writer, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published twenty-two books: two novels, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (1987) and Word Burials (2009), thirteen short story collections—The Apostate's Tattoo (1983), Forms of Captivity and Escape (1988), Unmapped Dreams (1989), The Miraculous Hand and Other Stories (1991), Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993), Disturbing Identities (1997), Should the Word Hell be Capitalized? (1999), Anton Chekhov was Never in Charlottetown (2000), Would You Hide Me? (2003), A Glass Shard and Memory (2010), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (2015), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (2016), and Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles (2019)—and seven poetry collections, An Affection for Precipices (2006), Misshapenness (2009), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (2014), Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (2017), A Visit to the Kafka Café (2018), Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement (2020), and Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential (2021).

J.J. Steinfeld's profile page