Planet Earth: Stories

by Nicholas Ruddock

International-award-winning stories of life and love in the midst of planetary decline.


In Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock moves nimbly through a range of styles—from conventional to flash-fiction to his unique mastery of the long sentence—in stories exploring themes of love and passion, all with an awareness of our species-specific carelessness burning up the world.


This collection showcases a gifted writer at the top of his game, each story fresh and the time Mario Vargas Llosa sucker-punched Gabriel García Márquez at a theatre in Mexico City inspires a young Marxist couple’s violent act of revenge in Toronto years later; an anxious young man finds solace in the employ of Prince, the musician; a haunting glimpse of Toronto’s polio epidemic at its peak in 1953; a young Canadian student bears witness to the Algerian protests and police violence in 1961 Paris; a pair of naïve young women find themselves involved with a mysterious circus troupe in Nice. These provocative but contemplative stories are paradoxically positive and quick-witted, with a humorous fondness for humans and all our failings.

184 pages, Paperback

Published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[Daniel Kukwa]

A pretty standard mix of stories that spoke to me & stories that did not. However, as a champion of the art of conciseness, I did appreciate how I found a number of the two page stories more powerful and effective than the longer tales. An interesting mix.

[Richard Archambault]

Some solid stories here (I especially liked “Wolverine”, but too much uses (abuse, even) of long sentences, commas, over multiple pages. One or two stories like that is fine, it’s a different style, experimentation. But it got to the point where it was exhausting to see the same technique over and over again.

Wonderful art on the cover, by the way. The author’s wife is quite the artist.