Kate Cayley Knihy

Linked short stories about families, nascent queers, and self-deluded utopians explore the moral ordinary strangeness in their characters' overlapping lives. A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. From a university campus to an underground bunker, a commune in the woods to Toronto and back again, the linked stories in Householders move effortlessly between the commonplace and the fantastic. In deft and exacting narratives about difficult children and thorny friendships, hopeful revolutionaries and self-deluded utopians, nascent queers, sincere frauds, and families of all kinds, Kate Cayley mines the moral hazards inherent in the ways we try to save each other and ourselves.

First published in 2014, this tenth-anniversary edition of the award-winning collection includes three new stories. A young mother intrudes in the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what's best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin's predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures. The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life--whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century--Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.

Exploring imaginative scenarios, the poetry delves into intriguing "what if?" questions that blend historical figures and fantastical situations. It contemplates the afterlife meeting of Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson, the whimsical plight of a miniature physician, and the voices of blind twins captured in a Victorian photograph. Additionally, it ventures into the possibility of discovering an alternate Earth. Cayley's work invites readers to ponder the boundaries of reality and the richness of possibility through her curious and studious lens.