" A career-spanning collection of stories from the author of Fifteen Dogs, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Canada Reads. Vivid, profound, moving, and with moments of sly humour, the stories in The Night Piece reveal worlds both familiar and deeply strange. Drawing from Alexis's acclaimed debut collection, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and the highly original Beauty and Sadness, and including previously uncollected stories, here is the surreal and brilliant short fiction of André Alexis--one of Canada's most extraordinary writers."-- Provided by publisher.

Wilderness --Ottawa 1 -- Ottawa 2 -- Ottawa 3 -- Ottawa 4 -- The night piece -- Kuala Lumpur -- Metaphysics of morals -- Despair: five stories of Ottawa -- The third terrace -- Horse -- My anabasis -- The road to Santiago de Compostela -- Letters (on a book lately circulating in the offices of Transport Canada) -- Maupassant -- Cocteau -- Mylène Saint-Brieuc (Henry James/Carlos Fuentes) -- Kawabata -- Quim Monzó -- A -- Toronto 1 -- Toronto 2 -- Toronto 3 -- Toronto 4 -- Afterword / Madeleine Thien.