A Second Coming: Canadian Migration Fiction

by Michael Mirolla, Don Mulcahy (Editor), Caterina Edwards (Editor)

Migration stories are an essential component of Canada's historical/literary continuum; we need to know of such writings to rationalize about who Canadians really are, and where they are from. Aren't we all the children of migration? Where we came from, how we got here, who we were, and are, and who may become in time … such themes should interest all those naturally concerned about identity and origin; that eternal enigma wrought of migration. These short-fiction stories tell much about migration and Canada, in ways that are funny, ribald, tragic or contemplative, but never dull.

369 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 11, 2016

About the author

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, MICHAEL MIROLLA describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include the novel Berlin (a 2010 Bressani Prize winner); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named “Giulio” battles for freedom from his own creator. Other publications include the short story collection The Formal Logic of Emotion; a punk novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; and two collections of poetry: Light and Time, and The House on 14th Avenue (2014 Bressani Prize). His short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads, from Red Hen Press in California, took the 2016 Bressani Prize. The novel Torp: The Landlord, The Husband, The Wife and The Lover, set in 1970 Vancouver during the War Measures Act, was published in 2016 with Linda Leith Publishing out of Montreal. And 2017 saw the publication of the magic realist short story collection The Photographer in Search of Death. A novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Readers View Award, was published in the fall of 2019. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Islands & Other Galaxies, is scheduled for the fall of 2020. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and “The Sand Flea” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer’s residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton. For more information, http://www.michaelmirolla.com/index.html.