About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bowering has put together a new collection of Canadian short fiction that takes the theme of postmodernity one step further. And Other Stories offers not just more stories of difference, of other-ness and the race, gender, class, and politics of the other, but stories where our most talented writers become, and reflect on being, other(s).
And so, in spite of postmodern theorists trying to hammer home to us that there is no universal self, no universal truth, this collection brings into question whether or not there might actually be something universal after all—even if it is only our (temporary) experience of being an other. There is always only Our Story, And Other Stories, in this case by:
Gail Scott, Matt Cohen, Suzette Mayr, M.A.C. Farrant, Timothy Findley, Dionne Brand, Candas Jane Dorsey, Audrey Thomas, Sheila Watson, Dany Laferrière, George Bowering, Leon Rooke, David Arnason, Clint Burnham, Hiromi Goto, Guillermo Verdecchia, André Alexis, George Elliot, Diane Schoemperlen, Brian Fawcett, Thomas King, Keath Fraser, Margaret Atwood, and Clark Blaise.

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

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