The Inanimate World is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within The Inanimate World traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of people living through rapid social transformation and an unstable changing economy.

Sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing - for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace.

Praise for Inanimate World:

"Consistently well-written, intelligent, witty, wry." (Prairie Fire)

"Wildly inventive and striking." (Joy Gugeler, Editor, Raincoast Books)

"Strandquist's The Inanimate World is well named - it is a collection of stories surrounding events, notions, reactions that take place within the realm of the emotional, the intellectual, even the unconscious. And Strandquist is masterful at capturing the fierce momentum of this supposedly inactive place." (The Antigonish Review)

Robert Strandquist's work has appeared in subTerrain, The Capilano Review, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, Grain, Event, and Canadian Fiction Magazine. Mr. Strandquist has an MFA from the University of British Columbia and has received several writing awards, including a Canadian Authors' Association award for poetry. He grew up in Nelson, BC and now resides in Vancouver. Strandquist has one novel, The Dreamlife of Bridges, and two collections of short stories, A Small Dog Barking and The Inanimate World, published by Anvil Press.

Robert Strandquist's profile page