WINNER OF THE 2018 QUEBEC WRITERS' FEDERATION CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY FIRST BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR THE 2018 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 A QUILL & QUIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR Fantastical, magnetic, and harsh--these are the women in Paige Cooper's debut short story collection Zolitude. They are women who built time machines when they were nine, who buy plane tickets for lovers who won't arrive. They are sisters writhing with dreams, blase about sex but beggared by love--while the police horses have talons and vengeance is wrought by eagles the size of airplanes. Broken-down motorbikes and housebroken tyrannosaurs, cheap cigarettes and mail bombs--Cooper finds the beautiful and the disturbing in both the surreal and the everyday. Troubling, carnal, and haunting, these stories are otherworldly travelogues through banal, eco-fabulist dystopias. Zolitude is a gorgeous, sad, and sexy work of slipstream and an atlas of fantastic isolation. The monstrous is human here, and tender.

"The right story, at the right time, if you happen to be open to it ... can perhaps move you so far outside of yourself that you will not consider going back." "Like meeting a stranger, much of the pleasure of a story is its unknown power," writes Best Canadian Stories 2020 guest editor Paige Cooper. "The right story, at the right time, if you happen to be open to it ... can perhaps move you so far outside of yourself that you will not consider going back." From Festival du Voyageur to the shores of Lake Erie, Tbilisi to Toronto, the Amisk River to a hotel-turned-hospital in the midst of a mysterious pandemic, this wide-ranging anthology brings together the real and the speculative, small towns and big cities, grief and humour, introducing readers to stories that startle us into new understanding-of ourselves and each other, the worlds we inhabit and the ones they help us to imagine. Featuring work by: Maxime Raymond Bock * Lynn Coady * Kristyn Dunnion * Omar El Akkad * Camilla Grudova * Conor Kerr * Alex Leslie * Thea Lim * Madeleine Maillet * Cassidy McFadzean * Michael Melgaard * Jeff Noh * Casey Plett * Eden Robinson * Naben Ruthnum * Pablo Strauss * Souvankham Thammavongsa