Two's company, three's a crowd--and sometimes it's more than that.
In The Third Person, a collection of uncanny short stories by Emily
Anglin, a sequence of tense professional and personal negotiations
between two people is complicated when a third person arrives. Within
these triangulated microworlds, disorienting gaps open up between words
and reality: employees dissolve from job titles, neighbours overstep
comfortable boundaries, voices distanced by space or time make their
presence felt. Uneasiness builds among these separate but entangled
lives.
Anglin's darkly humorous stories contemplate situations in which
characters refashion themselves to fit a new competitive milieu. The
Third Person reveals how people can become complicit in these milieus,
even desire them, often while being led into the loneliness they can
instil.
Praise for The Third Person:
Emily Anglin is a master of evasion and inference, a connoisseur of
every kind of secret. Each story in this remarkable collection is alive
with casually blistering intelligence tempered with compassion for human
loneliness. This is a dispatch from the heart of modern incongruity, in
which corporate jargon crosses over into poetry, then crosses back, in
which lives are upended on a whim. Reading this book is like walking
into an apparently familiar room and having all the details add up to
something unsettling and new. --Kate Cayley, author of How You Were
Born
Prepare yourself for spontaneous empathy and foreign body sensations,
for specters, knowledge brokers, and an oddball cast of characters who
feel, at once, both familiar and strange. Reading Emily Anglin's The
Third Person is like watching the opening sequence of Hitchcock's Rear
Window. As a character in one of the stories tells us, everyone has
public, private and secret lives. Anglin gives us access to all of these
lives--offering a unique perspective that combines both the intimacy of
the first person and the sweeping distance of the third. --Johanna
Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of
Time
Straddling the line between realism and uncanny dreamscape, The Third
Person has a tone that is singular, consistent, and very involving.
--The Winnipeg Review
Anglin's stories creep up on a reader, occupying mental space for quite
some time after reading them. The concealed details continue to
percolate and develop over time." --Quill and Quire
Each of these stories feels like it could go in the direction of the
weird and otherworldly, but then that ends up not being the point. The
true source of the uncanny, The Third Person seems to say, isn't the
paranormal - it's other people. --The Globe and Mail
