new from above/ground press: AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories, by Stuart Ross

AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories
Stuart Ross
$6

     Everyone watched from all over the world as Meredith and Craig sat in their kitchen, night after night after week after month playing songs by Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin and Fats Waller and Jimmie Rogers. People from Russia and Japan and Denmark and the Netherlands and Israel and Canada and Argentina watched them, and of course people from all over the United States, and meanwhile, Meredith and Craig sat in their kitchen in San Francisco and played their guitars and zithers and ukuleles and banjos and xylophones, and sometimes Meredith played her lips like she was playing a trombone.
     You’d have thought it was a real trombone, I’m telling you.
     There was also this: You could be sure that while you were watching them play and sing, you were not also getting the plague. In fact, you were having fun. You were part of a family, every night for hundreds of nights for about forty minutes every night.
     (“MEREDITH AND CRAIG SIT IN THEIR KITCHEN AND PLAY STRINGED INSTRUMENTS”)

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirtieth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
August 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover design by Stuart Ross

Cover art by Laurie Siblock

Stuart Ross has published three book-length story collections, Henry Kafka and Other Stories (The Mercury Press, 1997), Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009), and I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022), as well as a bunch of poetry, novels, memoirs, and rants. He has won the Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, across the lake from Rochester, New York.

This is Ross’ fourth chapbook with above/ground press, after ESPESANTES (2018), NINETY TINY POEMS (2019) and BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS (2023). above/ground press also produced the festschrift Report from the Ross Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com