Other Worlds by Andre Alexis
In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto.
These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres, including gothic horror and isekai, and referencing works from greats like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Yasunari Kawabata, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tomasso Landolfi.
Masterfully crafted, blending poignant philosophical inquiry and wry humour tinged with the absurd, here are worlds refracted and reflected back to us with pristine clarity and stunning emotional resonance as only André Alexis can.
Other Worlds is available in May 2025.
André Alexis was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and raised in Ottawa. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (now known as the Amazon.ca First Novel Award) and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral, Asylum, The Hidden Keys, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Days by Moonlight, which won the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist.
André Alexis's novel Fifteen Dogs, championed by Humble The Poet, won Canada Reads 2017 and the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Inteviews with André Alexis
André Alexis reads from Fifteen Dogs
8 years ago
Duration 1:09
André Alexis reads the most memorable sentence he wrote for Fifteen Dogs. The novel will be championed by Humble The Poet on Canada Reads 2017.
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CBC
09-07-2025
- CBC
Tanya Talaga and André Alexis among longlisted authors for 2025 Toronto Book Award
Social Sharing Tanya Talaga and André Alexis are among the longlisted authors for the 2025 Toronto Book Award. Established by Toronto City Council in 1974, the Toronto Book Awards honour books that are inspired by the city. This year, the prize amounts were doubled, with the winner receiving $20,000 and the shortlisted writers each winning $2,000. Talaga is longlisted for her book, The Knowing, which charts the life of her great-great grandmother Annie and the violence she and her family suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church and Canadian government. "I had to find out about Annie," said Talaga on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I was just enraptured by her. I mean, she's been a mystery for my entire family for over 80 years. "Part of the reason why I wrote this book ... was to empower other First Nations people to do the same thing, to try and look back. And by looking back in our family trees, we're going to find those people that are crying out to be found. They need to be recognized and heard." The Knowing is also a four-part documentary, which can be streamed on CBC Gem. Talaga is a journalist, author and filmmaker of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Talaga also wrote the nonfiction work Seven Fallen Feathers, which also won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2018. Seven Fallen Feathers also received the RBC Taylor Prize and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations, Talaga explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. Canada Reads -winning author Alexis is longlisted for his short story collection Other Worlds. Spanning from 19th-century Trinidad and Tobago to a small town in Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to modern-day Toronto, Other Worlds explores characters encountering moments of profound puzzlement in these diverse settings. André Alexis tries to answer a question we've all wondered: what if dogs had human consciousness? Alexis was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and raised in Ottawa. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (now known as the Amazon First Novel Award) and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral, Asylum, The Hidden Keys, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Days by Moonlight, which won the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. André Alexis's novel Fifteen Dogs, championed by Humble The Poet, won Canada Reads 2017 and the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Many of the shortlisted books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website. The complete longlist is below. The jury is comprised of Sam Hiyate, Sophie Jai, Wanda Nanibush, Don Oravec and David Silverberg. The shortlist will be announced later this summer. The winner will be named on October 15 at a ceremony in Toronto.
Winnipeg Free Press
31-05-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Alexis's beguiling stories feel like a search for home
André Alexis has never let his novels worry too much about reality — witness, for example, the talking dogs in his 2015 masterpiece Fifteen Dogs. In his most recent novel, 2021's Ring, Aphrodite's ring allows the wearer to wish three changes in her beloved. The foremothers of one of the protagonists, Gwen, used the ring to change their men. Should she? Intriguing love relationships and philosophizing about love follow. His new story collection Other Worlds is more puzzling. That the soul of Tam Modeste, an old Trinidadian buyeis (a Carib shaman), enters a dying 11-year-old boy in Petrolia, Ont., seems like the Toronto-based Alexis's attempt to make a gut-level connection with his lost Trinidadian past — a past that recedes the more he tries to grasp it. Almost a novella within the collection, Contrition: An Isekai is the most captivating story of the nine pieces in the collection. Waking up in Paul Williams, Tam hates the sound of English (except for Ogden Nash). Paul's parents, though celebrating their dead son's revival, are troubled by this new, not-so-huggable version, less so the hugging mother than the father, who finds it harder to hide his promiscuity from a buyeis than from an adolescent. In Alexis's hands, the dual soul becomes a way of expressing an estrangement from Canada, although eventually the boy becomes more Paul than Tam. Jamie Hogge photo André Alexis Even stranger is The Bridle Path, in which the lawyer telling the story wants very badly to fit in with an über-wealthy group around his client Edward Bryson. 'It felt,' the lawyer says, 'as if I'd arrived somewhere I belonged.' Thus, when Bryson's wife Miranda explains that the main meat dish at the party is a boy, the lawyer isn't sure whether to take her literally, metaphorically or ironically. Is cannibalism a shibboleth to keep out the unsophisticated? The lawyer doesn't want to commit a faux pas that might nudge him out of the group. Alexis, however, hints that that he isn't quite as tight with Bryson as he imagines: one of the parties at which he feels honoured to be a guest is 'for tradespeople' who have helped Bryson. Despite the humour — the lawyer, for example, feels 'chastised' when, after he shows dismay at the meat dish, Bryson calls him an 'accountant' — the story is too macabre to enjoy, and Alexis's ending never answers the lawyer's confusion. Without the specific critiques in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (to which Alexis alludes), it's difficult to discern the target of the satire. Is it rich people generally? If so, that seems unfair. Or is Alexis telling a lawyer joke, mocking the narrator for ultimately fitting in so well as a factotum to the wealthy, the equivalent of today's Todd Blanche to Donald Trump? Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Other stories go in a variety of directions; one concerns another buyeis, and one another son who, much like Paul, speculates about his unfaithful Trinidadian father. In the final piece An Elegy (an essay, not a story), Alexis explicitly states that his writing is a 'search for home' which, he soon adds, is 'Trinidad, circa 1957' — in other words, the country and year in which he was born. He concludes that his father wanted to escape his home territory, Belmont in Port of Spain. Other Worlds Alexis also reveals that for a year in his youth, he traded the name he didn't like — André — for a name he did: Paul. Here and elsewhere, Alexis's work has the air of a puzzle. If you can answer the questions posed in Other Worlds — 'What is a rabbit when tied to a sofa?' or 'When is a lake most likely to yield?' — then you're ready for Alexis. (Spoiler alert: the answers are 'Western' and 'midnight.') Reinhold Kramer is a Brandon University English professor. His most recent book is Are We Postmodern Yet? And Were We Ever?.
Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Globe and Mail
In his new short story collection, André Alexis summons the avatars of his parents, and himself
When I tell him I found his new book of short stories, Other Worlds, wistful as well as witty, André Alexis isn't surprised. The collection was written after the loss of his mother and father, so 'the avatars of the parents are really strong in it,' he says. 'Loss' is in a manner of speaking. Alexis's father died in 2019. His mother, who read early drafts of his work and helped edit his first novel, Childhood (she even, at his recommendation, read the Beckett trilogy: 'not something that moms generally do') is alive but afflicted with dementia. She doesn't always recognize her son and can no longer read. At 68, Alexis says death and mortality are never far from his mind. (When we spoke, he was in London, England, where he'd flown the previous day to say goodbye to a close friend who was about to enter hospice.) He casually surmises that he has one or two novels left in him, though he wouldn't rule out short stories. And yet Alexis's youthful appearance, the vigour and ease with which he talks about his passion – literature – and the fact that, over the past decade, he's produced a book almost every year, all suggest he might be selling himself a little short. Other Worlds continues, on a smaller scale, the genre experiments that Alexis embarked on in his Quincunx cycle: the five novels – published between 2014 and 2019 – that include Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, Ring, The Hidden Keys and Days by Moonlight. Writing the stories in Other Worlds, he says, was as a means of grasping not just his birth parents but his literary parents: a global crew that includes the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, the Polish writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, the Chinese classical short-story writer Pu Songling and the Italian literary eccentric Tommaso Landolfi. You'd think that approach would result in a stylistic crazy quilt. But the parent-child relationships – and accompanying themes of revenge, innocence and alienation – that run through Other Worlds give it a satisfying sense of cohesion, to the degree that several of the stories feel interlinked. The first one Alexis wrote, Houyhnhnm, about a man who becomes enraptured with his late physician father's horse after discovering the latter can talk (the unpronounceable title is from Jonathan Swift), was published in The New Yorker in 2022 – the first of Alexis's stories to be picked up by the magazine. Two years later, The New Yorker also published Consolation, whose Trinidadian immigrant narrator shares a number of biographical similarities with Alexis, including a father who's a doctor and a mother with dementia. And though Winter, in Palgrave, a beguilingly strange tale about a writer who finds himself unwitting caretaker to a town's unfriendly residents, who 'hibernate' in winter by hanging in sacks from their homes' rafters, isn't explicitly about parents, Alexis points to the symbolism of its setting: 'Winter is the maternal space, isn't it? Where it's just care, care for things in the womb.' Alexis's professed love of Jane Austen, meanwhile, is apparent in The Bridle Path, a comedy of manners involving a lawyer who, having adopted his Trinidadian immigrant father's socially striving ways, nabs a coveted dinner invitation at the home of a couple from the wealthy Toronto enclave who may or may not be eating the help. Asked, on this major Austen anniversary year, what his favourite novels are, Alexis doesn't hesitate: Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey – the latter because of its playfulness and mockery of Gothic fiction. 'It shows you she's not just writing stories. She's thinking about what literature is. How amusing its effects can be. She has written that one in a comedic mode. But it could just as easily be tragic. She's not some naive person that just happened to write good sentences. She's extraordinarily aware of what's going on.' Other Worlds ends with An Elegy, a brief personal essay – inspired by Walter Benjamin's The Art of Storytelling – in which Alexis lays out his literary M.O. His love of genre, he explains, comes from his 'immigrant self,' which he also considers his most creative self. Mastering the rules and conventions of a new genre, and the fear that process engenders, feels, Alexis writes, like 'a kind of emigration.' The essay also sheds retrospective light on the book's opening story, Contrition, an isekai (a traditional Japanese folktale, huge in manga, usually involving a character being transported through time into a parallel world) about an elderly Trinidadian healer who, after he dies at the hands of British soldiers in 1857, is reborn a century later in the body of a boy named Paul who lives in Petrolia, Ont. Turns out (per An Elegy), that when he was a child living in Petrolia – and his race and French name marked him as different – Alexis went by 'Paul' for about a year, until his parents discovered the name change and put the kibosh on it. He writes that he still 'resents' his birth name. A foray into psychoanalysis convinced Alexis that his brief incarnation as Paul had a deeper motivation, one related to the central trauma of his childhood. From infancy to the age of 4, he'd been left in the care of Trinidadian relatives after his parents went to Canada. When he saw them again, half his short life had passed, and his parents were effectively strangers. 'André was the name of the boy who was left behind. If I was Paul, perhaps there was a chance that I wouldn't be abandoned. That I would be okay,' he says. Alexis's next project is a rewriting of the entire Quincunx cycle. His principal aim is to correct some chronological and logistical errors, but he also wants to revise parts of Fifteen Dogs – the novel that won him a hat trick of big Canadian awards (the Giller, Writer's Trust, Canada Reads) and that was adapted to the stage in 2023 (the show was revived early this year by Mirvish Productions in Toronto and will be mounted at Ottawa's National Arts Centre this fall). In October, the book's publisher, Coach House Books, will commemorate its 10th anniversary with a special hardcover edition. Alexis wants to add 'a little something, at most a page' to Rosie, a character from Fifteen Dogs that was important to him, and to whom he feels he gave short shrift, perspective-wise. I ask if altering finished work like that isn't considered verboten. Akin to George Lucas's controversial reworking of the original Star Wars trilogy. Alexis counters with the example of another of his favourite authors, Henry James, who rewrote, often extensively, 24 of his novels, which he republished in a collection known as 'the New York Edition.' 'And they're all worse!' Alexis says with a laugh. 'Because they're written in his later style. So you've got to be really aware of what you're doing.'
