Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the acclaimed short-fiction collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth, editor of the award-winning Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow and former fiction editor of Vancouver Review. Her fiction has been published recently in The Walrus, Maisonneuve and SubTerrain, broadcast on CBC and NPR, won a National Magazine Award and is widely anthologized, including in Best Canadian Stories. She is the founding director of Writers Adventure Camp at The Point in Whistler, B.C.  Her most recent book Better Living through Plastic Explosives was a finalist for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Whether she takes on evolution and modern manhood, international adoption, real estate, the movie industry, science and faith, art or terrorism, Zsuzsi Gartner fillets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, heartbreaking and glorious measure. Angels crash land, lovers speak IKEA, a mountain swallows West Coast properties, a killer stalks the great motivational speakers of North America. These stories ruthlessly expose our covert fears and fathomless desires and allow us to snort with laughter – while grieving – at the grotesque world we’d live in if we all got what we wanted.

Darwin’s Bastards

The 23 stories in Darwin’s Bastards take us on a twisted, wild ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a dead boy, a one-legged international actuarial forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest.

The collection, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner, includes the first new short story by William Gibson to be published since 1997, as well as original, previously unpublished fiction by Lee Henderson, Timothy Taylor, Heather O’Neill, Mark Anthony Jarman, and others.

From recent Trillium Award-winner Pasha Malla‘s hilarious take on the apocalypse, where Prince is the only man left alive, to newcomer Matthew J. Trafford‘s brilliant triptych about the fallout from the cloning of Jesus Christ, to iconoclast Sheila Heti‘s meditative romp about beleaguered physicists and Oracle of Delphi-like BlackBerrys, Darwin’s Bastards is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza.