After All (Collected Stories; 5) - Tapa blanda

In this, his last book, Hood plays with words, revelling in the freedom of fantasy and mocking the norms of narrative. Readers will thoroughly enjoy this final collection.'--Patricia Morley "Canadian Book Review Annual "

"After All!" is a marvellous collection, busting out of its margins with authorial confidence and zany exuberance, showcasing an elegant stylist at the height of his storytelling prowess. It has been said that Hood populates his works with characters caught in situations that tantalize the senses, who insinuate themselves into their readers' hearts and minds. It is, however, the indelible sheen of life, the sweet commingling that a good Hood invariably leaves in your soul, that ensure his body of brilliant work -- from the unforgettable story collections to the absorbing sports writing to the masterful dozen-volume series of interconnected novels, "The New Age/Le nouveau si?cle" -- will live on. I loved the guy shamelessly. I am made peaceful by the knowledge of our friendship, by all he taught me, some of it to do with writing, all of it to do with living better gracefully, utterly human, divinely blessed.'--Judith Fitzgerald "Globe & Mail "

[Literary critics -- both those in academic institutions and those in the public press -- must wake up to the fact that in Hugh Hood Canadian literature now possesses a major figure who needs to be read and appreciated both at home and abroad.'--W. J. Keith "The Antigonish Review "

After All! contains the last of Hugh Hood's short stories, seventeen in all, written between September 1991 and December 1994. It was his practice to intersperse publication of short stories, essays, or other materials between the appearance of the individual novels in his ambitious series The New Age / Le nouveau siè;cle, which appeared at two- or three-year intervals between 1975 and 2000. This collection should have been published in 1996 or 1998, but because of failing health in the later 1990s, he devoted all his energies to the completion of the New Age series, and thus never got around to presenting the typescript to a publisher. (Hood died, sadly, a few weeks before the publication of the final volume of the New Age series.) The stories in this collection, however, are not only complete in themselves but complete as a collection. They are presented in the order in which they were written, which was the order in which he wanted them to appear.

Like his earlier collections (from Flying a Red Kite, 1987, onwards), these stories encompass a remarkable variety of tones. They include humorous stories of everyday life, fantasies, problem stories, satires on the excesses of modern civilization, documentary sketches, stories that amuse, stories that entertain, stories that set one thinking, stories that disturb. All are written with the stylistic elegance, and filled with the inquiring intelligence, that we have come to expect from Hood. Though written in the last decade of his life, they show him at the top of his form. Here we experience the flowering of one of the most skillful and probing Canadian practitioners of the short story as a subtle and concentrated literary form.