Other Worlds - by André Alexis (Paperback)

About the Book

"Stories inspired by Swift, Kawabata, Austen, Stoker, Landolfi, and others, from a Giller Prize winner"--

Book Synopsis

The award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs conjures up worlds--real, invented, uncanny --in this ingenious, electrifying collection.

A Trinidadian obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child; a writer takes up a seasonal job as a caretaker for a set of mysterious large sacks hanging from the rafters of the houses in a small town; a woman starts a relationship with the famous artist who painted portraits of her mother; the contents of a sealed envelope upends a woman's understanding about a tragic crime she committed at the age of six . . .

In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, or at a crossroads, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto.
These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres, including gothic horror and isekai, and referencing works from the greats like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Yasunari Kawabata, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tomasso Landolfi.

Masterfully crafted, blending poignant philosophical inquiry and wry humour tinged with the absurd, here are worlds refracted and reflected back to us with pristine clarity and stunning emotional resonance as only André Alexis can.

Review Quotes

Praise for Other Worlds

"Alexis dazzles with these stark and enchanting stories . . . Taken as a whole, the collection offers striking connections and layers of meaning . . . This deserves to be the author's U.S. breakout."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Stupendously vivid, astonishingly original . . . In Alexis's deft imagination . . . each story is a compact revelation about human contradictions, unreliable history, and the stories we tell when understanding is not an option."
--Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review)

Praise for André Alexis

"Pure storytelling magic. André Alexis is alchemically, necromantically, spell-castingly talented. He's a writer who makes the world so much bigger than it really is--even bigger than he himself has imagined it--by always allowing for the possibility of transformation."
--Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

"[Alexis's] stories are thoughtful, lyrical, and formally ingenious."
--Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times

"[Alexis delivers] engaging, precise, and funny writing."
--Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

"Alexis is one of our most distinctive and exacting prose stylists . . . [His work holds] sentences that attain the level of the best music."
--The Gazette (Montreal)

"Alexis's work displays a mastery of literature's history and a startling power of invention, balancing intellectual sophistication with a sense of humor, pathos, and beauty . . . His work feels ever current, even as it delivers all the humor and warmth of a well-told tale."
--The Windham-Campbell Prize

About the Author

André Alexis is the author of novels, short stories, and plays. His novel Fifteen Dogs won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada Reads, and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was short-listed for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He is also the author of Days by Moonlight, which won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; The Hidden Keys; Pastoral; Asylum; and Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa. Alexis lives in Toronto.