Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2018 QUEBEC WRITERS' FEDERATION CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY FIRST BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR THE 2018 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 A QUILL & QUIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR Fantastical, magnetic, and harsh—these are the women in Paige Cooper’s debut short story collection Zolitude. They are women who built time machines when they were nine, who buy plane tickets for lovers who won’t arrive. They are sisters writhing with dreams, blasé about sex but beggared by love—while the police horses have talons and vengeance is wrought by eagles the size of airplanes. Broken-down motorbikes and housebroken tyrannosaurs, cheap cigarettes and mail bombs—Cooper finds the beautiful and the disturbing in both the surreal and the everyday. Troubling, carnal, and haunting, these stories are otherworldly travelogues through banal, eco-fabulist dystopias. Zolitude is a gorgeous, sad, and sexy work of slipstream and an atlas of fantastic isolation. The monstrous is human here, and tender.