Hitting the Charts
Selected Stories
According to Russell Banks, North Carolina ex-pat Leon Rooke's work charts "what the short story form can and cannot do, for he works out there in the terra incognita mapping limits." Hitting the Charts, a nineteen story Best-Of compilation, offers stories as free from constraint as a Monk solo, and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. Dancing is not forbidden.
Leon Rooke: Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and critic. He was born in rural North Carolina, but has been a resident of Canada for many years. He has published 28 books, and nearly 300 short stories have been published. Over the course of his career, Leon Rooke has been writer-in-residence at numerous North American universities, including the University of Victoria, Southwest Minnesota State University and the University of Toronto. Rooke is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1981), the Governor General's Award for English Language Fiction for Shakespeare´s Dog (1985), and the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990).
John Metcalf: John Metcalf was Senior Editor at the Porcupine's Quill until 2005, and is now Fiction Editor at Biblioasis. A scintillating writer and an almost magisterial editor and anthologist, he is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow and Kicking Against the Pricks. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Myrna.
