Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning.

In Rosalind Goldsmith's remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins.

Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers.

In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.

Rosalind Goldsmith's profile page

Rosalind Goldsmith's short stories have been published in over fifty journals in the US, UK, and Canada, including filling Station, Orca, Litro, the Temz Review, Fairlight Books, Chiron Review, The Lincoln Review, the Bryant Literary Review, Fiction International and the Masters Review. She loves to experiment with language and form. Before writing short fiction, she wrote radio plays for CBC Radio Drama, a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival and translated and adapted short stories by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández for CBC Radio. She is a volunteer facilitator with the Writers Collective of Canada and tutors literacy for adults. Rosalind lives in Toronto.