All the Lonely People

These are tales told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the “ordinary” – all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that “happiness is overrated.” The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humor, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty. To quote the important American critic, M.L. Rosenthal, “His is one of the few story collections I’ve seen that even begins to pick up from the method of Dubliners. Like Joyce, Callaghan gets so deeply and honestly into the local world that it is the international place we all inhabit."

"With a tiny detail, in one well-crafted scene (he is a master short-story writer, after all), Callaghan offers a window onto the souls of the wounded, damaged, even slightly deranged characters . . . Callaghan displays his tonal range, from the emotionally searing to the playfully rueful." —Globe and Mail

"A master of the short story form working at the top of his game." —Quill & Quire

“Beside Still Waters is a breathtaking novel. Callaghan's prose is pure poetry . . . Yet the novel is also deeply disturbing in the violence that piles up and in which one becomes implicated, in its exploration of the evil that can penetrate and compose a life . . . With a tiny detail, in one well-crafted scene (he is a master short-story writer, after all), Callaghan offers a window onto the souls of the wounded, damaged, even slightly deranged characters . . . [whose] lives are ‘populated by ghosts.’ And with this leitmotif, Callaghan displays his tonal range, from the emotionally searing to the playfully rueful." —Globe and Mail on Beside Still Waters

“Beside Still Waters [is] an ambitious and eccentric work.The story is episodic, with fragmented chronologies and plot pieces strewn across the streets of Toronto, the casinos and hotels of Puerto Rico, and the swampy wilds of Gabon. There are discussions of Verdi, the blues, the metaphysics of evil, and the fallen state of humanity. There’s enough sex to embarrass a pornographer. There are surrealist touches, like a Bavarian polka band showing up to a firefight in a sub-equatorial shantytown.” —Quill & Quire on Beside Still Waters

"The stories in Barry Callaghan’s new collection are written in a plain style reminiscent of Hemingway. And as with Hemingway, there are depths of emotion roiling beneath the deceptively simple surface of Callaghan’s prose . . . Between Trains showcases a master of the short story form working at the top of his game. It is a collection of melancholy tales about people dealing with what has to be dealt with. As the girl from the gas station tells her one-night stand, 'What has to be dealt with is miracle enough.'" —Quill & Quire on Between Trains

Barry Callaghan, the well-known novelist, poet, and man of letters, is included in every major Canadian anthology, and his fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. His works include The Black Queen Stories, The Way The Angel Spreads Her Wings, When Things Get Worst, A Kiss Is Still A Kiss, Barrelhouse Kings, Between Trains, and Beside Still Waters. Margaret Atwood (Preface) is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist.