Cover Image: The Night Piece

The Night Piece

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Member Reviews

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of
This book via netgalley!

A beautiful Canadian book!! Highly recommended especially for anyone living or haven’t lived in Ottawa! You will laugh and smile at the familiar places described in This book while being totally intertwined in the beautiful language of these short stories. Makes you crave more!

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Andre Alexis's novels are a bit hit and miss for me in terms of piquing my interest, so I should have guessed his short stories would be as well. The consequence is that as a collection The Night Piece feels uneven to me, possibly also because of the wide time range in which the stories were written. This book took me forever to finish because, while some of the stories were perfect, others I'd have to talk myself into finishing.

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THE NIGHT PIECE: Collected Short Fiction by André Alexis was so compelling! Admittedly I’m not a huge fan of short stories but Fifteen Dogs is one of my fave books ever so I was very excited to read more of his writing. I loved how many of the stories featured Ottawa or Toronto and I really loved all the unexpected humour throughout the whole book. It was also really fun to read a story with the same characters in his novel The Hidden Keys which I just read earlier this month. My fave work in this book is the novella A which is about Alexander Baddeley, a book reviewer, who meets his favourite writer. I could totally relate to him. I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s a fan of Alexis or Can Lit in general!

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The Night Piece is the collected short fiction of André Alexis, and if, like me, you’ve only known Alexis from the novels that make up his “quincunx” project, these stories might seem to be from the mind of a different author. With tales for the most part weird and uncanny, Alexis pushes the reader to confront those things that go bump in the dark — even if, or perhaps especially if, they only bump around in the dark of one’s own mind — and they ultimately expose relatable truths about community, connection, and dislocation. Consistently interesting and unpredictable, in smooth and polished prose, this beefy collection masks psychoanalysis in Gothic storytelling and I am happy to have met this other side of an author I thought I already knew.

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