Author Description

Edited by acclaimed novelist Lynn Coady, this anthology of new Atlantic Canadian fiction is named for the Victory Meat Market in downtown Fredricton, a place that features prominently in Rabindranath Maharaj’s fine story, “Bitches on All Sides.” This is the story of Ramjohn, the ultimate outsider -- a West Indian immigrant and lapsed Muslim who finds himself in a society where being “from away” is considered only a step or two above having been in prison. This is a new kind of East Coast story, the kind celebrated in Victory Meat. The Maritime provinces are currently awash in great writing. Cities like Halifax and Saint John are humming with a revitalized sense of culture and possibility. Fiction writers like Newfoundland’s Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and Michael Crummey, and Nova Scotia’s Carol Bruneau and Christy Ann Conlin have won rave reviews in literary circles by breaking with the stereotypes of East Coast literature. This collection of exciting writers and fresh new works will redefine what Atlantic writing is: searing, potent, unflinching in its depiction of the East Coast as it enters the twenty-first century as a hybrid of new and old, traditional and iconoclastic, Celtic and cosmopolitan. Featuring works from well-known authors as well as relatively new voices, Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada is a showcase of the present, the multi-hued, multi-cultural fictional world of Atlantic Canada in all its gritty glory.