Eva Crocker (CA)
Barrelling Forward
Barrelling Forward
Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Writer Award, Barrelling Forward is a brilliantly crafted debut collection from one contemporary fiction’s newest literary star.
Eva Crocker sees life in sharper focus than the rest of us. The objects, rituals, and scenes of everyday life take on an almost mythic quality in these stories, even while remaining intimately recognizable to us all. Crocker peers at the underbelly of poverty and work, ambition and apathy, loneliness and love, to find the sliver of beauty in each spot. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems: the boundaries between friendship and sex dissolve; power relationships are turned on their heads, if only long enough to examine them from all angles; transgressions and escapes become new kinds of traps. In “Auditioning,” a young twin makes a desperate attempt to reclaim her individuality. In “Serving,” a father and a son give parallel accounts of what it looks like when you let life eat you from the inside out. In “Star of the Sea,” a man watches his past get literally torn down before his eyes. And in the Cuffer Prize-winning “Dead Skin,” an after-school walk through the barrens leaves two boys forever changed.
In stories that ache with longing even as they pulse with new possibilities, Crocker gives us an unforgettable array of ordinary people, sometimes soaring, sometimes sinking, but always, ultimately, barrelling forward towards what’s next.
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House of Anansi
Bio
Bio
EVA CROCKER grew up in Ktaqamkuk (Newfoundland) and currently resides in Tiohti:áke (Montreal). Her debut novel All I Ask was longlisted for the 2020 Giller Prize and won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award. Her short story collection Barreling Forward was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award. She is a PhD student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.