The Cunning to Be Strange

a collection of short stories by Gregory J. Reid

About the author

Gregory J. Reid, BA, MA, GDCS, Ph.D., teaches in the English and Intercultural Studies and Comparative Canadian Literature programs of the Université de Sherbrooke. He is a co-editor of The Bibliography of Comparative Studies in Canadian, Québec and Foreign Literatures ( Sherbrooke : GGC, 2001) and the author of A Re-examination of Tragedy and Madness in Eight Selected Plays from the Greeks to the 20th Century ( Lewiston , NY : Edwin Mellen, 2002).

Read an Excerpt

Flat on his back on the planks of a loading palette, one leg akimbo, Lyrette studied the heave of Seraphina Beaulieu’s breasts as she stood above him against the darkened sky. Her gaze was locked on the horizon beyond the stockyard; as if she could see Loth Lyrette more clearly in the infinite distance than there, as he physically was, at her feet: this glue of molecules, that dries then rots then finally dissolves. Seraphina sniffed the sweet stench of Lyrette’s gin and decaying flesh.

Lyrette pulled a scrap of crumpled, onion-skin paper from his breast pocket. Seraphina had only to glance at his outstretched hand to know the page, the chapter, the verse, the black vinyl covered book, the bedside table, the faded, red-checked bed spread, the musty sheets, the bending wood-panel walls, the numbered door, vacancy in neon hovering alien and solitary in the night sky off Highway 8 north of Massicotte.

From “Lyrette” in The Cunning to Be Strange.

ISBN 0-9698258-7-0
147 Pages, Paperback

Price $13.95 US