The Journey Prize Stories 32 The Best of Canada's New Writers

For more than three decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been Canada's most celebrated annual fiction anthology and a who's-who of up-and-coming writers. With settings ranging from a wildlife rescue centre to a Living Body exhibit, the thirteen stories in this collection represent the year's best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging literary talents.

On Sunday afternoons, a coven of teenagers gathers at The Lois Lanes bowling alley to discuss their shared obsession with the second hottest boy in school. A patient joins her therapist and her therapist's granddaughter for an unconventional session--a field trip to confront the reviled Feed Machine. Troubled by dreams and trailed by crows, a woman far from home struggles to confront an old guilt. As a half-remembered Beach Boys song plays in the background, a daughter recalls the man her father used to be through a tender inventory of their time together. In a community plagued by petrochemical-induced diseases and environmental ruin, a man spends his nights caring for his dying partner and his days navigating a dangerous workplace. An android watches her creators' relationship break down before her eyes. A gang of girls roams the streets of a ravaged city, hunting their would-be predators. In her journey to become a woman and a healer, a Cree girl enters the woods alone to learn the stories and medicines of plants, only to be transformed by an unexpected connection.

The stories included in this volume are contenders for the $10,000 Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.

AMY JONES is the author of two novels, We're All in This Together, a national bestseller and finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and Every Little Piece of Me, which was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of a collection of stories, What Boys Like. Her short fiction has won the CBC Literary Prize for Short Fiction, appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories, and been selected as Longform's Pick of the Week. Originally from Halifax, she now lives in Hamilton.

DORETTA LAU is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? and the poetry chapbook Cause and Effect. She splits her time between Vancouver and Hong Kong, where she is writing a comedic novel about an inept company struggling to open a theme park about death.

Born in Congo-Kinshasa, TÉA MUTONJI is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection, Shut Up You're Pretty, is the first title from Vivek Shraya's imprint, VS. Books. It was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and the Trillium Book Award. Mutonji lives and writes in Toronto.