Famous Last Meals

Famous Last Meals is a trio of contemporary novellas about the roles we play in an age when everyone is an actor. The curtain opens on “Candidates,” a gentle satire starring a recent university grad who knows and cares little about politics but who finds himself working as a summer intern on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. “Famous Last Meals” examines two couples and their complex relationship as they re-enact the final repasts of famous people who died before the age of 30. “The Woman in the Vineyard” completes the triptych with a compulsive story about literary jealousy and the danger of becoming lost in the labyrinth of another writer’s sources.

RICHARD CUMYN is the author of nine books of fiction. A past fiction editor of The Antigonish Review, he has been published widely in Canada in such literary journals as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Grain, PRISM International and Event. He has been shortlisted twice for the ReLit Award, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award (essay), and was long-listed for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. His screen adaptation of Susan Kerslake's novel, Penumbra, won a 1998 Linda Joy Media Arts Award. He has taught fiction at the Maritime Writers' Workshop, read his work in the Dalhousie University, St. Jerome's (Waterloo) and Lorenzo (UNBSJ) reading series and has been short-term writer in residence at St. Mary's University. He lives in Edmonton.