Dead Writers by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, et al.
Canadian | CBC News | Posted: February 13, 2025 1:26 PM | Last Updated: February 13
A collection of stories exploring the high cost of moral corruption
In this collaborative omnibus-style fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the "bargain" in novella-length stories. The lives of a biographer surveying the career of a "haunted" literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor's complicity in a colonial scandal, stand side to side within this macro-narrative of interlocking themes.
These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.
(From Invisible Publishing)
Dead Writers is available in March 2025.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is a Toronto-based writer of Mauritian descent. His books include Grand Menteur, Kilworthy Tanner and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and his writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean's, Hazlitt, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The Toronto Star.
Michael LaPointe is a writer and critic from Toronto. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of the thriller novel The Creep.
Regina-raised Cassidy McFadzean is a past finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her poetry books are Drolleries, Crying Dress and Hacker Packer, which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. She also wrote a crown of sonnets called Third State of Being. She currently lives in Toronto.
Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto journalist and writer. His 2017 book Curry is an engaging and insightful long-form essay that connects the dots between the popular dish and how it functions as shorthand for brown identity in representing the food, culture and social perception of the South Asian diaspora.
Under the pseudonym of Nathan Ripley, he is the author of Find You in the Dark, which was an Arthur Ellis Awards finalist for best first novel. Your Life Is Mine, his second thriller using the pseudonym, was published in 2019.