Us, Now roves from Indonesia to the Middle East, Taiwan, Mexico, China, Africa, Jamaica, Barbados, India, Pakistan, and points in between, converging in Newfoundland. These stories by racialized Newfoundlanders are by turns joyous, tender, hilarious, and heart-wrenching. They confront racism and celebrate the act of enduring. They are about settling and getting unsettled, about parents and their children, about language, about facing down the horrors of homophobia, about the joy of love, about lifelong relationships or the glee of a magnificent crush. Here social and domestic violence are countered with tenderness and the penetrating power of narrative. This is a book about distance and coming together, about what it means to be seen and understood, or—devastatingly—to be seen and judged, or to be invisible and misunderstood. What it means to belong. These are new writers and new visions of an in-the-present-moment Newfoundland, stories shaped by powerful voices, stories urgent, radical, and sparking with beauty.
“By presenting a diversity of stories and experiences from writers who have moved into, out of, and through […] Newfoundland, […] Us, Now capture[s] the plurality of [this place].”
“[Something] these well-crafted pieces share is voice, not just the overarching-author-perspective but in the words spoken within, what they convey and how they chime off the page.”