Sunday, July 10 at 2 PM (ET)
Live on Zoom
Join Thistledown Press and Another Story Bookshop for the virtual book launch of Phoebe Tsang’s debut short story collection Setting Fire to Water! Phoebe will be in conversation with Christine Fischer Guy.
This event will take place live on Zoom; please register here.
You can pick up a copy of the book at Another Story Bookshop here or on our website here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Shifting restlessly from dark to light and back again, written in lithe, precise prose, the stories in Phoebe Tsang’s debut collection illuminate the lives of those who exist inside otherness.
A young Asian woman, an artistic over-achiever turned drifter, endures a mind-bending night of reckoning as she struggles to find her way “home,” careening between flirtation and thievery, dream and memory. A reality TV star obsesses about the real stain that blemishes the set of her fake, made-for-TV life. A modern fairytale is told from the point of view of a fox having an argument with its enemy, hunger. A heart-broken accountant goes on a pilgrimage to India to get his fire back, and his attempt to attain mercy from the most holy of rivers fizzles like his former fiancée’s tepid devotion.
The seventeen stories in Setting Fire to Water unfold outside the Canadian mainstream, where longing—for home, for love, for artistic achievement, for spiritual fulfilment—is a given, and acceptance—of self, of the knowability of others, of the limits to knowing—is always in question. Using unconventional storylines and slippages in time and space, these stories explore the mystical possibilities inherent in contemporary life.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PHOEBE TSANG is a Hong Kong-born Chinese, British, and Canadian poet, author, librettist, and playwright who makes her home in Toronto. She has published a poetry collection, Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books, 2009), and her short stories have appeared in Geist, Broken Pencil Magazine, Litro Magazine, Rivet Journal, Asia Literary Review, The Bombay Review, and other places. Her writing is informed by lyricism and rhythmic sense, inherited from her background as a professional classical violinist. Setting Fire to Water is her debut collection of stories.
CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY is a Toronto writer and journalist who was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2021. Her short fiction has been published in Canadian, American, and British journals. Her debut novel, The Umbrella Mender, appeared in 2014. She won a National Magazine Award in 2012 for her profile of Métis activist Chelsea Vowel and contributes to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Globe and Mail.
