National Network for Equitable Library Service

Sean Johnston will leave readers smiling at the acrobatics of his words and techniques in this eagerly anticipated second short story collection after the Relit award winning A Day Does Not Go By. Several stories, such as “We Don’t Celebrate That”, explore the difficulty of survival in an increasingly indifferent political reality, while others artfully probe the Pandora’s box of life’s relationships. Johnston’s treatment of a man’s interactions with his Alzheimer’s inflicted father-in-law in “You Didn’t Have to Tell Him” and the weighted sadness of losing a life partner in “He Hasn’t Been to the Bank in Weeks” permits the reader to view such occurrences in fresh light. This collection proves that there is always a way to discover new clarity and meaning in the everyday. Previous praise for Sean Johnston: “Johnston does not posture . . . [he] relies on the intelligence of his ideas, on the beauty of his cadences, and a judicious selection of silence . . . Wonderful!” — M. Travis Lane, Fiddlehead “Sean Johnston has an original approach to the short story genre . . . Literature, like all other creative endeavours, evolves and grows and (one hopes) progresses, and the short story has come a long way from the days of de Maupassant and Somerset Maugham, whose stories, whether comic or tragic, were like polished mirrors held up to life. In Johnston’s stories, the mirror has shattered, and you pick up the fragments carefully, at risk of cutting yourself in the process.” — Prairie Fire