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Nowadays and Lonelier
A vibrant debut story collection about loneliness and love, privilege and poverty, addiction and isolation—the search for connection and meaning in a workaday world..
Winner of the 2021 BMO Winterset Award.
For fans of Heather O'Neill's Daydreams of Angels, Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World, and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, Nowadays and Lonelier features a cascade of characters seeking connection in the darkest alleyways and meaning in the mundane.
In these pages, a ballet dancer navigates complex family ties that are frayed by addiction; a young girl discovers sex and sexuality in the nineties in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; a lover sojourns in Egypt and exacts an unexpected revenge; and a barista and a painter weather an apartment fire in Montreal. The collection is concerned with the contrast experienced by working- and middle-class millennials, between access to education and art compared to a relative lack of access to secure jobs and housing - and how these conditions leave many straddling a world where mental health, addictions, and sex work are daily realities as they try to carve out space for themselves in times that are increasingly alienating.
Nowadays and Lonelier, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove's debut story collection, features vivid portraits of unsure yet hopeful people struggling to find a good life in a hard world.
Winner of the 2021 BMO Winterset Award.
For fans of Heather O'Neill's Daydreams of Angels, Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World, and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, Nowadays and Lonelier features a cascade of characters seeking connection in the darkest alleyways and meaning in the mundane.
In these pages, a ballet dancer navigates complex family ties that are frayed by addiction; a young girl discovers sex and sexuality in the nineties in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; a lover sojourns in Egypt and exacts an unexpected revenge; and a barista and a painter weather an apartment fire in Montreal. The collection is concerned with the contrast experienced by working- and middle-class millennials, between access to education and art compared to a relative lack of access to secure jobs and housing - and how these conditions leave many straddling a world where mental health, addictions, and sex work are daily realities as they try to carve out space for themselves in times that are increasingly alienating.
Nowadays and Lonelier, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove's debut story collection, features vivid portraits of unsure yet hopeful people struggling to find a good life in a hard world.
- GenresShort Stories
220 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2021
3 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 19, 2021
NOWADAYS AND LONELIER by Carmella Gray-Cosgrove is a stellar debut short story collection! I loved these stories! Within 213 pages are 22 stories about struggling characters dealing with poverty, addiction, loneliness and the grind of everyday life in Canada.
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As with all short story collections I loved being able to pick up this book and read a couple stories at a time in between my other reads. I really enjoyed all the stories and my faves were Fourth Floor Looking North which is about a gay man set in 1980’s Vancouver and The Cull which is also set in Vancouver but in 2010 which brings me right back to my own memories of the city during the Winter Olympics. The Cull also features coyotes which is still a major issue in Vancouver today. I loved that connection I had to all the stories set in Vancouver.
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The writing shines in this book which brings these characters and settings to life in stories as short as two pages. I definitely recommend this collection and I can’t wait to read more from Carmella in the future!
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Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for my gifted review copy!
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As with all short story collections I loved being able to pick up this book and read a couple stories at a time in between my other reads. I really enjoyed all the stories and my faves were Fourth Floor Looking North which is about a gay man set in 1980’s Vancouver and The Cull which is also set in Vancouver but in 2010 which brings me right back to my own memories of the city during the Winter Olympics. The Cull also features coyotes which is still a major issue in Vancouver today. I loved that connection I had to all the stories set in Vancouver.
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The writing shines in this book which brings these characters and settings to life in stories as short as two pages. I definitely recommend this collection and I can’t wait to read more from Carmella in the future!
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Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for my gifted review copy!
August 2, 2022
Delicious writing.. my only complaint is that these are short stories - I am continually left wanting more. Please! ....let me keep some of these characters in my head for longer - much longer.
Cannot wait to read more by CGC
Cannot wait to read more by CGC
September 16, 2021
This a beautiful collection of stories, stories that keep coming back and haunting me like memories. Gray-Cosgrove writes about place and struggle. These are stories of people living in the margins, trying to carve out beauty in a political and social environment where it has become increasingly difficult for anyone, except those born into privilege, to thrive.
August 6, 2024
Read over about a week before bed and the stories and characters were indistinguishable from dreams. The stories are all so different and so quick it’s like if you don’t make effort to remember them, they fade into an area of “was that real?” or “was it a dream?”
Abrupt, poetic, sad, snapshots of lives. Like a fever dream. I read it on my e-reader from the library but I plan to buy a physical copy to return to and spend longer with the stories.
Abrupt, poetic, sad, snapshots of lives. Like a fever dream. I read it on my e-reader from the library but I plan to buy a physical copy to return to and spend longer with the stories.
December 8, 2021
This year I have been having a love affair with Short Fiction and Nowadays and Lonlier was one of the best collections I read!
A fantastic debut! Nowadays and Lonlier consists of 22 stories that are not light and easy. These characters are struggling with addiction, poverty, lonliness and lack of opportunities. These stories show the murkiness and struggle that is reality to many in Canada. Loss and messiness are consistent themes throughout.
I love that this book is influenced by Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Growing up in BC I have seen it several times and appreciated that the author and publisher are giving thoes lives and stories a place. These characters hit so hard, their ever reaching for more, for improvement in a social and political climate that is geared against them. It pulled so much emotion and compassion from me.
Gray-Cosgrove does a fantastic job proving there is so much feeling in the darkness, there is empathy and hope in the dark, desire and humor but above all these stories show the tenderness life can possess the beauty and brutality of getting to live. I emplor your to check this book out. Nothing I say can capture this one, its truly a breathtaking read.
Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me this book opinions are my own.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
A fantastic debut! Nowadays and Lonlier consists of 22 stories that are not light and easy. These characters are struggling with addiction, poverty, lonliness and lack of opportunities. These stories show the murkiness and struggle that is reality to many in Canada. Loss and messiness are consistent themes throughout.
I love that this book is influenced by Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Growing up in BC I have seen it several times and appreciated that the author and publisher are giving thoes lives and stories a place. These characters hit so hard, their ever reaching for more, for improvement in a social and political climate that is geared against them. It pulled so much emotion and compassion from me.
Gray-Cosgrove does a fantastic job proving there is so much feeling in the darkness, there is empathy and hope in the dark, desire and humor but above all these stories show the tenderness life can possess the beauty and brutality of getting to live. I emplor your to check this book out. Nothing I say can capture this one, its truly a breathtaking read.
Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me this book opinions are my own.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
June 6, 2022
A compelling set of stories, Nowadays and Lonelier shows Carmella Gray-Cosgrove as a new and distinctive voice in Canadian letters. Her stories follow people who are going through moments of epiphany- they’re suddenly in over their their head or realizing a way out or just trying to make it through another day when something happens. Frequently they deal with addicts, a topic Gray-Cosgrove handles delicately: they’re not heroized or demonized, just treated like people. And indeed, throughout this book I felt that Gray-Cosgrove has a lot of sympathy for her characters, a lot of heart. I quite enjoyed this one - she’s one to watch.
May 6, 2022
A very typical collection of stories for my recent experience: stories that press all my buttons, mixed in with stories that didn't quite hold my attention. What I appreciate in this collection is a writing style that experiments with a condensed abruptness in its storytelling...and dares you to take it or leave it. Sometimes it doesn't work for me...but sometimes it does.
February 12, 2022
These stories are so readable, so absorbing, so fascinating. The author creates vivid characters and lets us live with them for a short while. I loved this book!
October 3, 2021
What a great collection of stories about people who might be down-and-out but are trying, trying to be better. There's misery but also a smidgen of optimism, candour and lack of judgment about drug use and transactional sex. Gray-Cosgrove passes along her observations of people who are ordinary in their own contexts but extraordinary in just about any other, from the closeted gay construction worker who buys an elderly neighbour tickets to see Baryshnikov - who might have once been her lover - to the variety of women who try to make love work for them, and, having failed, move on. I devoured this in an afternoon.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews