56 very short stories about death from Giller Prize finalist John GouldThe End of Me is an astonishing set of sudden stories about the experience of mortality. With an ear attuned to the uncanny and the ironic, John Gould catches his characters at moments of illumination as they encounter the mystery of their finite being. A marooned astronaut bonds with a bereft cat; kids pelt a funeral procession with plums; a young girl ponders the brief brutality of her last life, and braces herself for the next one.Rife with invention, with fresh ideas and arresting voices, this collection of flash fiction shimmers with compassion and vitality.

"If there is reincarnation, I'm selfish enough to wish that next time around John Gould would come back as a writer again." —Mark Kramer in the Wall Street JournalIn these observations on the inhabitants of his Maine seacoast village, Mr. Gould addresses important matters. For example, there is the question of why there are two churches in a town of 800 souls, some of whom were atheists. It seems that the split between the two congregations was a matter of both free will and logic. The devotional division was caused by the question of whether Balaam's ass spoke or whether Balaam just said his ass spoke. There is more, wonderfully much more, in this joyful journey into the mind and memory of John Gould: how giving a child a calf to raise provides "top-notch instruction in agronomy, economics, subsistence, and merchandising," as well as milk in the shoes; how lobstermen can communicate without uttering a word; or his comment on women's yearning for equality: "If...

Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good opens with a postcard from forty-something Matt to his oldest friend Zane. Zane is dying, but maybe he doesn’ t need to be. Matt has to do something about it. And that’ s not Matt’ s only problem. His father is disappearing into dementia and his marriage is in tatters. It seems the oft-postponed trip from Vancouver to Toronto is now critical— if Matt is to save his friend, say goodbye to his father and perhaps find something of himself he lost so long ago.In Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good, John Gould treats mortality, morality and modernity with equal measures of reverence, wit and sympathy.