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    Cover Before Striking
    Cover Before Striking
    Cover Before Striking
    Ebook219 pages2 hours

    Cover Before Striking

    By Priscila Uppal

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    About this ebook

    The most common phrase in print is "cover before striking," a warning to those about to innocently strike a match to be careful not to burn their fingers.

    Uppal's characters in Cover Before Striking are all people pushing their lives to new levels of intensity, danger, or passion as they test their limits and those of the world. The pyromaniac at the heart of the title story — winner of the Gloria Vanderbilt Short Fiction Prize — desperately uses fire to reconnect with lost lovers and family members. In "Vertigo," an injured Olympic athlete becomes a research guinea pig in a surreal scientific experiment. In "The Boy Next Door," a teenager recounts how her mother took her and fled Canada for Brazil, along with the local Catholic priest.

    Implacable and just a little unhinged, the stories of Cover Before Striking each move toward that moment of contact when the sparks begin to fly, when destruction and beauty seem to blur together. With this collection, Priscila Uppal offers the literary equivalent of playing with fire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJan 19, 2015
    ISBN9781459729544
    Cover Before Striking
    Author

    Priscila Uppal

    Priscila Uppal was an internationally acclaimed poet, prose writer, and playwright. A York University professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she was the author of Ontological Necessities and Cover Before Striking. Her memoir, Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and a Governor General’s Award.

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      Cover Before Striking - Priscila Uppal

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