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list price: $17.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Fiction
published: Oct 1995
ISBN:9780921833406
publisher: Signature Editions

A Quiet Night and a Perfect End

by Denise Roig

tagged: short stories (single author)
Description

The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They're peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people's extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone.

Roig takes her characters, and her readers, on Munro-like passages through miscarriages, infidelities, and disappointments through the motions of everyday life. It may be coping with the feeling of academic failure or coming to terms with the loss of a child who has died too young, an unexpected pregnancy or the intrusion of house guests who are no longer friends. What is uplifting, finally, is the achievement of forgiveness, the small, daily victories over despair. These are stories that remind us why our days and nights are so worth living.

About the Author

Denise Roig moved to Montreal from Los Angeles in 1989 when her twelve-year-old daughter, Ariel, convinced her they should run away so Ariel could join the circus. Her daughter went to study with Montreal's Cirque du Soleil and Denise spent the next twenty years as a Montrealer. Roig wrote professionally for twenty years before publishing her first short-story collection. She also taught magazine writing and editing at Concordia University and story-writing for more than a decade in Quebec high schools. She has published three collections of critically acclaimed short stories -- A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, Any Day Now, and Brilliant, as well as the delectable non-fiction memoir Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School. After three years freelance writing for The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, Roig now makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario.

Contributor Notes

Denise Roig moved to Montreal from Los Angeles in 1989 when her twelve-year-old daughter Ariel convinced her they should run away so Ariel could join the circus. Ariel went to study with Montreal's Cirque du Soleil and Denise has been living in Montreal ever since. A Quiet Night and a Perfect End is Roig's first collection, but she has been writing professionally for twenty years, specializing in corporate magazine writing. She has also taught magazine writing, magazine editing and creative writing at Concordia University and has developed a prototype program for teaching story writing to elementary school children. She has been a book reviewer for CBC radio, and is the editor of Hochelaga Press.

Editorial Review

“Roig's first short story collection, the wonderfully titled A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, is invested with the kind of compassion for its characters and honesty about their actions that is not just rare but unheard of in a first collection.”

—Quill & Quire

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