Countries of Invention: Contemporary World Writing

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

In this remarkably diverse collection of stories, writers from Nigeria,
Chile, China, Russia, and Australia mingle with those from Jamaica,
India, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Poland, the United States,
Antigua, Egypt, Italy, Colombia, Belgium, Ireland, Peru, and the United
Kingdom. Canada is represented by the cream of the crop—Margaret
Atwood, Timothy Findley, Robert Fulford, Janette Turner Hospital, Alice
Munro, and Rohinton Mistry. Among the non-Canadian contributors are
Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Ben Okri, William Trevor, and Marguerite
Yourcenar. Generating more questions than they do answers, these stories
demand an active participation on the part of the reader. Their quality
is consistently high, but each one offers its own particular delights.