Congratulations!

I've mentioned before on this site that it excites me when people I know have success in publishing work of various sorts, and it gives me pleasure to draw people's attention to it. I know at least half a dozen people who are working on book projects of one sort or another at the moment, so I hope this is something I get to do frequently over the next couple of years.

In this case, the successful author is Ahmad Saidullah, someone I did social change work with for a couple of years. In January, Coach House Books is releasing his first collection of stories, Happiness and Other Disorders. It recently got its first review, and a very positive one at that, in Quill & Quire, the trade journal of the Canadian publishing industry. Reviewer Heather Birrell commends its "stunning prose and subtle sense of the symbolic" and concludes that the author "possesses an entirely singular form of ominous and lovely second sight; he also has the literary chops to give it voice. Saidullah is a tale-spinner of the first order, and this collection is both a mystery and a treasure."

Congratulations Ahmad, and I look forward to picking up a copy when it comes out in January!