Something About the Animal

Cathy Stonehouse's debut fiction collection Something About the Animal arrived from the printer on Monday, and copies will be finding their way to book stores and reviewers across the country over this week and next. It is in the top handful of fiction debuts we've published at the press: real life horror stories imbued with tremendous humour and understanding. One of four short story collections we're publishing this year -- alongside collections by Clark Blaise, Laura Boudreau and Rebecca Rosenblum -- you can test-drive both the title story (Something About the Animal) and read a brief two-page Afterword about it in the just-released new issue of The New Quarterly (Certainly the best literary mag in the land).

i've also just been made aware of the first review of Animal, in the current (May) issue of Quill & Quire. Chelsea Murray writes, in part:

Cathy Stonehouse’s debut collection contains one heartbreaking situation after another: sexual abuse, mental illness, loneliness, and death pervade the book. However, Stonehouse’s spare prose reveals the hidden layers of her vulnerable characters with great precision, making it difficult to turn away.
...
Despite the sombre material, Stonehouse can be darkly funny. ... Gaynor, the confused kid mourning her mother’s death in “A Special Sound,” repeatedly recites the incorrect words to what she calls the “necklace prayer”: “Hey old Mary, full of grace, the law deals with thee. Blessed art thou, a monk’s woman, and, blessed tart, the Fruit-of-thy-Loom, Jesus.”