Description
“A writer only feels like a writer when in the act. And the will, I said, is never enough . . . Where does inspiration, that sacred rage, originate? Maybe it’s just a matter of stubbornly starting something new and writing your way into the slot.”—Steven Heighton
In the years before his unexpected death, returning to short fiction after a long absence, Steven Heighton wrote to his longtime editor John Metcalf to say that he understood that the short story marked his most important contribution to literature, and that “after the novels, rereading and writing short stories again felt like returning home.” In the fifteen stories taken from across his four collections, Sacred Rage offers us Heighton as the moral explorer of the global suburbs, as chronicler of our innermost stories of love and fear, sleeping and waking, of a rebel “unabashedly devoted to the old pursuit,” as he once called it, “of truth and beauty.” These are stories of grace and the lack of it; of elegy and requiem; of hope and care in a world where these seem increasingly alien, stories by one of our most sharp-eyed and generous writers, whether you’re discovering them for the first time, or once again.
Praise for Steven Heighton
“To read work like Heighton’s knowing that we won’t get more of it . . . inspires fury in all directions . . . Every story in this collection has ‘it,’ whatever Heighton decided ‘it’ would be: pacing that thrills; fragile love and blind hate; descriptions you can smell and taste and hear.”
—New York Times
“Heighton, who died last year at 60, draws on our most vulnerable moments in this moving collection, full of understated tension and exacting detail. The characters feel both recognizable and one-of-a-kind.”
—New York Times
“To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient . . . As good a writer as Canada has ever produced.”
—National Post
“These stories, by a Canadian novelist, poet, and musician who died last year, peer keenly into the penumbra surrounding death.”
—New Yorker
“To create so many small worlds and characters that feel so real and populate is an act of transcendence. To do it well is to offer a gift. In Instructions, the late Steven Heighton has managed both, and the gift is ours.”
—Globe and Mail
“As a poet and later as fiction writer Steven Heighton had this stunning range of voice in his stories. He would go anywhere. He always surprised you. His death as a still young writer is a tragedy and a great loss. He was a writer who grew so much with each book. You could always witness it happening.”
—Michael Ondaatje
“Steven Heighton is one of our most ethical, profound writers. These stories face delusion and illumination, rebellion and surrender, they shock with their beauty and their understanding . . . ”
—Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“As these stories demonstrate, human life is a means of exploration and celebration, threaded through with darkness and loss. In the midst of death, Heighton seems to say, we are in life: it should be savoured.”
—Toronto Star
