Author Description

From the Back Cover Ed Kleiman's new book of stories, The World Beaters, expands the territory he has made his own. Jane Conklin wrote of A New-Found Ecstasy: All of the stories exude such good sense, such decency... while Sharon Drachey's review in the Calgary Herald stressed the dry, merciless wit and special toughness which is almost supernatural. Similarly, The World Beaters has its roots in the immigrant Jewish enclave of the North End of Winnipeg, but the stories deal with the world which replaced that community - a more comfortable and individualistic world, with far wider horizons and opportunities, but with all the perils of the 1980s, the me-decade. Kleiman's characters are heroes of a sort: eccentric and bold but klutzes. From every walk of life - academics, artists, con-men and -women, a rabbit rancher, a builder, a lost Chinese laundryman - they are touched by romance, and shpaed by their eccentricities. Some tell their own stories; others are observed with fascination by Michael and Christine Buchalter, the same couple who threaded the stories in A New-Found Ecstasy and who Kleiman allows, in Jamie Conklin's words, to encounter temptation and to emerge unscathed. Ed Kleiman treats his characters with wit and affection, but behind the yarn spinning lies a real sense of the corrosion of old values,,and a scepticism about the substitution of selfishness, however flamboyant, for traditional community and family values. About the Author Born and currently residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ed Kleiman is the author of two previous short story collections: The Immortals (NeWest, 1980) and A New-Found Ecstasy (NeWest, 1988). A self-employed writer, Ed has received a B.A. from the University of Manitoba and a M.A. from the University of Toronto. He has worked as an English professor and creative writing teacher at the University of Manitoba. Growing up in Winnipeg's fabled North End, Ed has had a wealth of cultural and artistic influences that h