Pretending

Hugh Oliver is editor-in-chief at the OISE Press.

The dozen or so short stories in this collection are essentially mood
pieces, most of them based on everyday experience such as the chatter of
guests at a dinner party, the reflections of a dying man, the dating
difficulties of a teenage boy, a child’s lakeside view of mirages
stripped of their “reality” by scientific explanation. As with most
fragments of this kind, plot tends to be thin, and the appeal lies in
the interaction of the characters and the familiarity of the
situations—“What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”
The style is colloquial, thoughts drifting through the narrator’s
mind; at the same time, the underlying vision is often quite poetic.