Bill Stenson Ordinary StrangersHalf Brothers and Other Stories a novella and four fictions
Illustrated by David Lester
September 2021
$19.95
Order NowWinner of the Great BC Novel Contest"Reading these stories is much like showing up at a party and discovering that, though everyone there is a stranger, every stranger makes you glad you'd come. Once I'd read them all, I wanted to read them again ––especially the novella that gives the collection its title.”–
Jack Hodgins, author of Spit Delaney's Island and A Passion for Narrative.
"These Cowichan Valley stories from Bill Stenson share a timeless quality, and a classic feel. They tease with sly humour and, like all great stories, never fail to surprise. When they sometimes widen in bleakness, it’s only to make room for their main strength, an abundance of heart.”–
Bill Gaston, author of Just Let Me Look at You and The World.
“Stenson's observations of the ordinariness of people are keen and revelatory.”–Prairie Fire
"The characters in Bill Stenson’s quirky story (Ordinary Strangers) are used to catching life’s curve balls, and dealing with luck, whether good or bad, as they find it.”– The Star
Half Brothers and Other Stories These stories shimmer in summer heat under the gaze of a two-humped mountain and belong to the Cowichan Valley. Children born to ex-cons, lawyers, longshoremen, wood carvers, boxers, investors and gamblers write their own new-generation stories, at times melodic, often discordant, always determined to carry a tune.
Half Brothers is a masterly and unsentimental novella of the lives of two brothers left unchanneled by parental review. One brother is tough and likes to fight, the other does not. One is the father’s favourite and the other hides when he can. But in an extraordinary reversal of roles, and as the years pass, readers ultimately learn which one has the true grit. In the four short stories;
Ball and Chain, Bon, Dick and Jane and Super Reader, Stenson uses wry wit to capture the voices of the young and old of small-town Duncan and area, in edgy juxtapositions. This is Canadian Literature at its best — calling forth a country that already exists. Flying beneath the radar, Stenson is one of our best fictionists.
Bill Stenson won the Great BC Novel contest with his compelling novel,
Ordinary Strangers (Mother Tongue). His books of fiction include
Translating Women, Svoboda and
Hanne and Her Brother (Thistledown). He was also a finalist for the Prism International Fiction Contest and the Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest. Stenson was born in Nelson, B.C., went to a one-room schoolhouse on Thetis Island and grew up on a small farm in Duncan. He became a teacher because he loved literature and taught English and Creative Writing at various high schools, the Victoria School of Writing and the University of Victoria. Many of his stories have been published in Canada and the US in
Grain,
The Malahat Review, Event, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Blood and Aphorisms, Wascana Review, Prairie Fire, Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prism International, Scarlet Leaf Review, Darkhouse Books and the
Nashwaak Review. Stenson and Terence Young founded the
Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for young adult writers. Bill Stenson lives with his wife poet Susan Stenson in the Cowichan Valley and writes every day.
978-1-896949-85-7 | 180 pages
