The O. Henry Awards are regarded as America’s most prestigious awards for short fiction. Mary Swan’s story ‘The Deep’, first published in The Malahat Review, was included in the 2001 O. Henry anthology, which featured such illustrious names as Alice Munro, Dan Chaon and Louise Erdrich. ‘The Deep’subsequently walked away with first prize.
In September, 2002, the Porcupine’s Quill published The Deep in novella format. The book was shortlisted for the Canada/Carribean Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, ‘Best First Book’ category.
Now, the Porcupine’s Quill is pleased to bring you Emma’s Hands. These stories range in their settings from an Israeli kibbutz to Ontario lakeside cottages to the beach at Ostend. Most of the stories are quietly cadenced and elegiac in tone and the prose is marked, as Alice Munro says, by ‘the urgency of feeling and the calm beauty of the telling.’