Immigrant City

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEAward-winning author David Bezmozgiss first story collection in more than a decade, hailed by the Toronto Star as intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympatheticIn the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal, where he discovers new designs on the past in How It Used to Be. A grandfathers Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in Little Rooster. In Childhood, Marks concern about his sons phobias evokes a shameful incident from his own adolescence. In Romans Song, Romans desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his fathers request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, where his loyalties are tested by the man he might have been in A New Gravestone for an Old Grave. And, in the noir-inspired The Russian Riviera, Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs. In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.