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.

Daniel Karasik is a writer of plays, poetry, and fiction. He is a winner of the CBC Literary Award for Fiction (2012) and the Toronto Arts Foundation's Emerging Artist Award (2013). His plays have been produced across Canada, in the US, and frequently in translation in Germany; The Biographer, produced in Toronto in 2013, garnered a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for Outstanding New Play. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Western Magazine Award for his fiction and the National Magazine Award for his poetry, he is the author of two previous books of plays published by Playwrights Canada Press, a poetry collection with Cormorant Books, and a short story collection forthcoming in 2017 from Guernica Editions. His newest plays are in development with Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, where he is an incoming playwright-in-residence, and Whynot Theatre; off-Broadway's The New Group; and the Stratford Festival, from which he holds a commission. He writes about art and politics at www.danielkarasik.com. Connect with Karasik on Twitter @daniel_karasik.

Daniel Karasik's profile page

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

Faithful’s strongest selection is its title story, which seems to aspire to Alice Munro territory, leaping across swaths of time and lighting upon hinges in the trajectory of a strange, unmoored existence.

Quill & Quire

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