Stuffed Animals is a collection of haunting, sparsely wrought micro fiction. Each story invites the reader in and then delights and torments them with surprises and plot twists. Whether you are in the mood for black humour, spine-tingling horror, or soul-wrenching tragedy, you will find it within these pages. While the stories explore a wide range of themes and genres, they share an interest in word play and conceptual games.
With complex imagination, compelling characters, and gripping storylines, Stuffed Animals asks the reader to sit down, dig in, and not let go. It captures an unsettling balance of beauty and repulsion, the writing versing more as artistic expression than conventional storytelling.
Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. After a brief stint in pre-Med, Wayne obtained a BA in English from Memorial University. He worked as a reporter for the St. John's Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing.
En route to being published, Wayne earned an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. Then he got off to a quick start. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada in that year. The Divine Ryans was adapted to a film, for which Wayne wrote the screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoire dealing with his grandfather, his father and Wayne himself, won the Charles Taylor Prize. Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York were on bestseller lists in Canada and have been published in the US, Britain, Germany, Holland, China and Spain. Colony was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced.