Jill
Sexsmith
Jill Sexsmith's imagination goes where no imagination has gone before. Sexsmith's story collection breaks all the shackles and runs free with its heart in its fist. Sure-footed, really funny, poignant and wise. Here is the love-child collection of George Saunders and Joy Williams. Move over Miranda July, there’s a new voice in town.
— Lisa Moore, author of February
The Collection
Nominated for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, McNally Robinson Book of the Year and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer.
The off-kilter heroes and heroines in this debut collection of short stories find themselves camping beneath elm trees set to be felled; seeking refuge in a spare bedroom carved out of an opal mine; commiserating with a New York City carriage horse.
As her characters struggle with relationships, Sexsmith deftly cuts through raw and intimate moments to show how strangely impervious to their desperate circumstances people can be. Witty and unapologetic, the stories in Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You traverse the everyday and the unexpected to delightful effect.
Reviews
Sexsmith's deft, penetrating debut collection embraces deadpan absurdity. These 11 stories showcase impressive confidence and skill. ...the stories remain of a high caliber right through to the end.
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...Jill Sexsmith writes offbeat and funny characters who do weird and sometimes outrageous things. But they exist for more than a cheap laugh (though there are plenty of jokes).
But a tree in a Jill Sexsmith story isn’t like a tree in some other story. Sometimes the unexpected happens: in fact, often.
Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You is a combination of magic realism and sharply observed characters that will take you to a very special place where the two are artfully mingled.
About
Jill Sexsmith is the author of Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You, a short story collection nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. She won the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and her fiction has appeared in The Walrus, Fiddlehead and other notable anthologies. Jill holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.