Hugh Graham captures the passage of years, the progression of accumulation and recurrence, the present as dammed up history. Without warning, a world on the road to epiphany. And that world, threatened with disaster. Figures emerge, often from twilight. Children who do not fear death, travelers doomed to inertia, concupiscent women, bloody-minded intellectuals, haunted drunks, decaying diplomats, and Death as the man in the attic room. In the end, the gaze of a child become a man. Eleven stories of clarity and dark empathy.
"Graham excels at writing about the common circumstances of individuals in clear, truthful ways. His prose is like a deep wound wrapped in the gauze that is our shared and common predicament." —Austin Clarke, winner of the Giller, Commonwealth, Trillium and Writers’ Trust prizes
"A truly decisive and impressive collection of stories that breaks away from the contemporary formulas of story writing." —Leon Rooke, author and winner of the Governor General’s Award
Hugh Grahamhas written for theToronto Starand theWalrus, and his fiction has appeared inDescant, theAntigonish Review, theFiddlehead,ELQ/Exile QuarterlyandNew Quarterly. He has twice been short listed and once won the Carter V. Cooper $15,000 Short Fiction Competition, those stories then appearing inCVC1,CVC4, andCVC5. He has published two books, with Exile Editions:Ploughing the Seas, andWhere the Sun Don’t Shine.
These stories are about time, history, failure and nightmares, about loss and outsiders, in a real way, in real time. The perspective is universal, without relying on the conventional, hollow, quirky characters that all too often are utilized as an inaccurate representation of those around us, or us, in our contemporary society.
![Last Words: Stories [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/4/3/9/2_6870040.jpg "Last Words: Stories [Paperback]")