Coexistence: Stories
Indigenous peoples fiction, Short stories
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature&’s most boundless minds.Across the prairies and Canada&’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are… searching for connection. They&’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt&’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.