to move up and down
Summer Fiction: The Fine Art of Basking
This summer saw the publication of No Rest For The Dead, a crime novel with an unusual twist: Authorship was shared by 26 different writers. Around the same time it was released, we were in the midst of planning our own Summer Fiction issue, so when the book came across our desk we decided to ask some of Canada’s literary luminaries to team up for a similar experiment, albeit on a much smaller scale — a short story. The only thing we provided was a sentence (“He’d/She’d always hated the summer”), which was promptly ignored, though it does in fact appear in a slightly altered form. The story began with Steven Heighton, who passed it on to the next writer, and so on, until all 11 writers had contributed a section. We hope you enjoy The Fine Art of Basking (the title was suggested by Kate Pullinger) as much as we do. (Illustration by Julie McLaughlin)
