The Journey Prize Stories 22

Book excerpt: Discover the next generation of great Canadian writers with this highly acclaimed annual anthology. For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been presenting the best short stories published each year by some of Canada's most exciting up-and-coming new writers. Previous contributors — including such now well-known, bestselling writers as Yann Martel, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Crummey, Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, Heather O'Neill, Pasha Malla, Timothy Taylor, M.G. Vassanji, and Alissa York — have gone on to win prestigious literary awards and honours, including the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and CBC's Canada Reads competition. The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Journey Prize, which is made possible by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener's donation of Canadian royalties from his novel Journey. The winner will be announced in fall 2010.