On the Sunshine Coast of Canada, people live and die, come and go, caught in webs of their own making. The stories in Any Day But This follow those webs to their probable conclusions. Everyone has bad days and in these stories, people can hardly tell the bad days from the good. But the spirit is stronger than circumstance, and memory vies with determination. One thing remains true in all the variations of fate: life hardly ever turns out as you expected. Here are stories of love and loss; of claiming, losing and reclaiming dignity, heartbreak, grief and joy. In these tightly wrought stories, characters find their masks removed to reveal their true selves within. One woman slowly realizes she belongs to a class she secretly despises, while another finally decides to face her worst fears and then cannot find them. A gregarious man unexpectedly finds himself alone and friendless while another bravely walks into life's worst nightmare and discovers it's not so bad. The dilemmas and conflicts Gunnars' characters face are those all of us encounter.

Kristjana Gunnars is the author of five cross-generic prose books from Red Deer Press, including The Prowler and The Substance of Forgetting. She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Exiles Among You and Silence of the Country. Her books of short stories are The Axe's Edge and The Guest House. Gunnars has been a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Alberta since 1990, and is no living on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

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