Everything Is So Political: A Collection of Short Fiction by Canadian Writers

Brimming with wild imagination and stunning variety, this is one of those beautiful literary anthologies that comes along once a generation, that we’ll look back upon as the beginning of a whole new vision of Canadian fiction.” — Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game The stories within Everything Is So Political explore the intersection between politics and the contemporary short story. From the overt to the subtle, this collection tackles a broad range of topics and themes, from women’s rights and Aboriginal culture to environmentalism, terrorism and totalitarianism. This is one of the few Canadian anthologies that focuses on political fiction, and it does so in a very powerful and artful way, flying in the face of readers, writers and critics alike who claim that writing with a political agenda occurs at the expense of literary quality. Consisting of twenty short stories, this collection is proof that it is increasingly difficult, even impossible, for fiction not to be political. But make no mistake, the stories in this anthology are stories first: stories that are meant to be read, shared and enjoyed, but stories that will make you see things differently and question the world around you. “Sometimes the political seems so ugly that we would like to take the high road and avoid it. Yet everything is political for a reason. Freedom is never safe from greed, be it for money or power. Democracy exists only in the exercise. Therefore, the more we know, the more we must tussle and spin.” — From the foreword, by Fred Stenson