The Old World
CBC Books | CBC News | Posted: April 7, 2017 5:05 PM | Last Updated: July 9, 2017
Cary Fagan
These 35 brief stories — and the found photographs that inspired them — are by turns realistic and surreal, bloody and tender, delightful and appalling. Award-winning author Cary Fagan has created a mesmerizing series of narrative tales, giving readers a vivid peek into lives of strangers.
A man hangs onto a runaway horse. A woman paints in the nude. A shop window advertising a sale on blankets hides much more behind it. A lone tombstone on a hill speaks of a years-long feud. The stories — capturing portraits, objects, moments in time — while dizzyingly varied, form a single image that, in the words of the author, "belong to one history, found in an album that might belong to any of us." (From House of Anansi Press)
From the book
It was the first adult party I ever held, although we weren't really adults, not quite. But it was the end of high school, when everything would change and we all knew it and so I desperately wanted to mark it in some way — not by getting drunk at the lake, or racing in some boy's car, or just by the graduation ceremony and the dance that would follow. I wanted a party of my own, where people would act civilized and talk about interesting things and we would see in ourselves the women and men we were about to become.
From The Old World by Cary Fagan ©2017. Published by House of Anansi Press.