The Old World and Other Stories

Stirred by a series of found photographs, critically acclaimed author Cary Fagan brilliantly imagines the lost stories behind them in this dazzling story collection.

Many years ago the photographs in this book became separated from their original owners, faces unrecognized, settings a mystery. They floated through this world, as if on a sorrowful wind… I have given them stories to replace the ones they have lost.

So begins the bewitching new collection from acclaimed author Cary Fagan, and a journey into a world that is both achingly familiar and wonderfully strange. A man hangs onto a runaway horse. A woman paints in the nude. A child sparks a revolution. These stories, each inspired by a found photograph, are by turns realistic and surreal, bloody and tender, delightful and appalling.

Here are stories that playfully vary in technique and form: monologues, dialogues, interviews, letters, transcripts, tall tales, and capsule histories form a single portrait, belonging — in the words of the author — “to one history, found in an album that might belong to any of us.” Fagan paints a portrait of re-imagined lives that is comic and tragic, profound and unforgettable. The beauty, humour, and the horror of days gone by haunt these pages and resonate in the world we find ourselves in today.