"For the members of country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive." Margaret Atwood, Survival.

The view from my office - a room the size of a closet dwarfed by piles of paper, books, and dirty clothes - has been an odd source of inspiration to me in compiling this anthology. Many times, I've been distracted from my reading by the goings-on outside. Maybe it's the red glow of the Kentucky Fried Chicken logo, or the orange taunt of the Beer Store sign. Whatever it is, the light is always dim and surreal on my little block, the people anonymous, the corner - littered as it is with take-out garbage and dog shit - as seedy and unpleasant as any likely to be found in Canada.

And yet, it does not disgust me. I revel in the scuffles that break out late at night, the drunks lurching past, the cops pulling into the KFC parking lot or running down the alley across the street with their flashlights shining and their hands on their holsters. This is my neighborhood, and I, no better or worse than the rest, am just a passerby pausing on the sidewalk. Like my fellow residents, I take a perverse pride in these scenes, I point to them as evidence of the dangerous, fallible, changing times we live in. It is as if they are, in fact, a kind of anthology in and of themselves, not so incredibly different from the moments of need, fear, tenderness, and frustration that make up the book you hold in your hands. Some nights, the view from my window is so uncannily reminiscent of the readings that await you, I imagine the scene as the entire book reduced to a few moments of terrifying energy: A late night argument; the shuffle of strangers; the rumble of street-cars on their never ending way.

In putting this collection together I've relied on my own judgements and experiences - that view from my window. But my relationship with the Canadian city, my sense of what it means to be a denizen of this collective place I call the concrete forest, could only take me so far. I wanted to go beyond my limited experiences and travel, through this collection, into undiscovered territory.

In order to find this place and make it habitable for you, the reader, it wasn't enough to select twenty or so stories set, the way movies are 'set', in some anonymous city. This new urban literature does not transpire in generic cities, host to interchangeable plots (though the redundant sameness of the urban landscape informs the happenings in this book). In choosing what represents Canada's new urban literature, I had to sense from each story that the work not only took me through a wholly other, distinctly original place, it also ended up in a landscape recognizable to those whose lives are interlocked with the conflicts and crises of the urban environment.

I knew that I was reaching this place when I began to identify in the stories not just the distinct quintessence of their authors' independence and bravery, but also their collective energy, their tremendous capacity to depict the concrete forest in all its multitude of possibilities. Not only do the stories in this anthology demonstrate a new kind of perspective and style, they are also, in and of themselves, great works of prose, daring, transcendent tributes to the on-going passion Canadian writers bring to their art.

When I came across Native writer Richard Van Camp's testosterone infused account of a house party in a small town in Northwest Territories, I was amazed at his ability to evoke the parties I once held in my parents' suburban home thousands of kilometers from the Arctic. I've never met Richard, but we were born in the same year - 1971 - and, judging from the excerpt that appears in this book, we both spent time in our adolescence drinking, smoking, and yearning for something that we would later find in writing. I was equally appreciative of the velocity of Van Camp's narrative, the speed of his sentences, his ability to turn a potentially generic set of circumstances into a dramatic and personable account of a boy's struggle toward an uncertain future. Reading fictions by writers like Van Camp, Dany Laferrière, Lisa Moore, and Daniel Richler (to name a few), reminded me not just of the multiplicity of people, regions and orientations that make up urban Canada - and are represented in this book - but also the way this multiplicity works together to give Canada an explosive and unparalleled urban literary presence.

Up here in my little office, the anthology became a mirror image, a prismed reflection of what this country looks like. I pressed my nose to the cold glass and saw the new Canada, country of cities, country of whispering voices lost in the crowded distance between our self-same dreams.

from Purgatory's Wild Kingdom
by Lisa Moore

Julian is thinking about the woman and child he left in Newfoundland when he moved to Toronto. He's remembering Olivia preparing him a sardine sandwich, the way she laid each sardine on a paper towel and pressed the extra oil out of it. Then she cut off the head and tail, each sardine, until they were laid out carefully on the bread. Her head was bent over the cutting board, her blonde hair slid from behind her ear. He could see the sun sawing on her gold necklace. The chain stuck on her skin in a twisty path that made him realize how hot it was in the apartment. She was wearing a flannel pajama top and nothing else, a coffee-colored birthmark on her thigh. Eight years ago.

Julian is sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee. His bare feet are drawn up on the chair, his knees pressed into the edge of the table. It's a wooden table top that has been rubbed with linseed oil. There are scars from the burning cigarettes his wife occasionally leaves lying around. Small black ovals. There are thousands of knife cuts that cross over each other like the lines on a palm. He runs his finger over the table, tracing the grain of the wood. He pours another cup of coffee, and glances at the phone. Sometimes the university calls for Marika before ten, although they have been told not to do it. Marika requires only seven hours sleep, but if she's disturbed she's tired all day. She wakes up exactly at ten every morning. She's proud of the precision of her inner clock. Julian likes to pick up the phone before it rings twice. Lately the phone has been ringing and when Julian answers, nobody speaks.

Marika is fifteen years older than Julian. The people on this street are very rich. The brick houses are massive. Some of them have been broken into apartments and rented. There's almost no traffic. The trees block most of the noise. He and Marika don't know their neighbors. Once, while out taking photographs, Julian met a man three houses up who was riding a sparkling black bike in circles. The man said he was Joe Murphy, of Joe Murphy's Chips, and they sold a large percentage of their chips in Newfoundland. He gave the silver bicycle bell two sharp rings.

"The bike's a birthday present from my wife. It's a real beauty isn't it?"

The trees shivered suddenly with wind and sloshed the bike with rippling shadows. Joe Murphy was wearing a suit and tie. The balls of his feet pressed against the pavement and there were sharp little crevices in his shined leather shoes. Julian noticed a crow leave a tree and fly straight down the center of the street. He lifted his camera and took a picture of Joe Murphy. In the far distant corner of the frame is the crow. Julian leaves Joe Murphy out of focus, a blur in the center of the picture, his face full of slack features. The crow is sharp and black.

"That makes me very uncomfortable," said Joe Murphy. "I think you have a nerve." He gave the bell another sharp ring, and pushed off the curb. His suit jacket flapped on either side of him.

For the past two years Julian has been sleeping a lot. It's taken him two years to fall away from any kind of sleeping pattern. This way he's always awake at different hours. This seems exotic to him, but the cost is that he can't will himself to sleep. He sleeps in the afternoon and then finds himself awake at four in the morning. At dawn he's sometimes wandering around the neighborhood. The light at dawn allows him to see straight into the front windows of the massive houses on their street, all the way to the back windows and into the backyards. It makes the houses seem like skeletons, with nothing hanging on the bones.

Sometimes Julian is asleep when Marika gets home from work. If there's no supper cooked for her she'll eat white bread and butter with spoonfuls of granulated sugar. Julian likes to cook for her and she likes what he cooks. But she's also happy to eat bread and sugar. She makes coffee and folds the bread and sinks it into her coffee. The soaked bread topples and she catches it in her mouth. The cats slink in from all the different rooms of the apartment and curl around her feet, or on her lap. She lifts the kitten and puts it inside her jacket. If Julian stumbles down the stairs, half awake, and he sees Marika bathed in the light of a baseball game on t.v. with her sugar bread, he feels that he has failed her. The sense of failure makes him even sleepier. He can't keep his eyes open.

Marika is not one for dwelling on the past. Julian knows very little about her past. Not that she's secretive. It's the kind of conversation that bores her. Marika has a powerful charm. She's a physics professor, but most of her friends are artists or writers. At parties, for conversation, she offers crystallized stories about nature or the stars. If someone interrupts her to ask about her parents, or something back in France, you can see the charm moving out of her face like a receding blush. She answers in only one or two sentences, faltering.

She thinks of memory only as a muscle that must be exercised to keep the whole mind sharp. She is interested in sharpness. If asked, she could recall exactly what she did on any date two years ago, she will remember what she wore, what Julian wore, what they ate, the content of any conversation that occurred on that day. But this is just a game.

Marika thinks about infinite tracts of time, about meteorology, about hummingbirds, about measuring the erosion of coastlines, and whether the continents could still lock together like a jigsaw puzzle, or a jaw grinding in sleep. She thinks about fish that swim up the walls of fjords as if the walls were the lake bottom, or the tower of Babel. What such swimming against the stream does to their skeletons. When she isn't thinking things like this, she watches baseball, or drives in her car, or cooks, or she and Julian make love.

Julian has watched Marika simulate theoretical galaxies on the computer. She has found this program mostly to amuse him. He has seen two galaxies blinking together, dragging their sluggish amorphous bodies toward each other across the black screen. Each blink represents a million years, until they pass through each other. The gravitational pull of each galaxy affects the shape of the other until some stars are clotted in the center, and the rest spread on either side of the screen like giant butterfly wings. Marika has shown him thousands of things like this. She has described the path of the plague in the middle ages, drawing a map on a paper napkin at Tim Horton's. She told him that in Egypt they have found the preserved body of a louse, on the comb of Nefretiti. A drop of human blood, perhaps Nefretiti's blood, was contained in the abdomen of the louse. They have discovered many things about ancient disease from that one drop of blood.

Julian collects every story Marika tells him. They often lose their scientific edges. He can't remember how old the louse was. For some reason the only thing he remembers about the plague is a costume. It was a long robe with the head of a bird. The doctor looked out through two holes cut in the feathered hood, over a protruding beak.

When he is awake, Julian also pursues the moral of these stories, something other than what lies on the surface. Just as he can't imagine how much time it took to create the universe from a black hole, he can't get at that hidden meaning.

Recently Marika contracted a virus, a nervous disorder. If not diagnosed, this disease can spread quickly through the body and destroy the tips of all nerve endings irreparably. It started with a numbness in Marika's left cheek. She had it checked immediately. Of course, she had access to the best medical care in Toronto. The disease was arrested before any serious damage was done, but the nerves in Marika's saliva ducts grew back connected to her tear duct. Now when she eats her left eye waters.

Julian has begun to suspect Marika talk about her past because she is afraid she will seem old. It was the eye, filling of its own accord, that started him thinking this way. The eye is the first sign of Marika's age. When her eye waters he's filled with fright. That fright causes its own involuntary response in him. He's remembering things he hasn't thought about in years. He has noticed that the skin on Marika's face looks older than before. The pores are larger. There are more wrinkles. The soft white pouches beneath her eyes are larger. That skin seems as vulnerable to him as the flesh of a pear he is about to bite.

He was going through their wedding photographs. He took them himself, so most of the pictures are of Marika. She is wearing a white silk jacket, cut like a lab coat, and the apartment is full of white blossoms. Her face looks so much younger that for a moment he has the feeling the photographs have been doctored.

They're eating a dinner of lamb and fresh mint. Marika's knife is whining back and forth on the dinner plate.

"Could you stop that noise?"

Marika's body jerks, as if she didn't realize he was sitting beside her.

"I was just lost in thought. Thinking of crabs."

A tear is running down her cheek.

"In Guatemala" she says, "There's a species of crab that burrows into the ground and brings up in its claws shards of ancient pottery."

She lays down her knife and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand.

"The crabs descend beneath layer after layer to different cities that have been piled on top of each other, over time. Each city is hundreds of years younger than the one below it. The crabs mix all the pottery shards together, all these ancient layers mixed together in the light of day. You really know very little about me. You know nothing about science."

Julian notices that both Marika's eyes are watering now and realizes she's crying. for the life of him remember it.

from Mandate
by Ken Sparling

We were supposed to hire a bunch of people from other countries. People from other countries, and women. They had to look like people from other countries. They didn't actually have to be from other countries. As long as they looked like they were from other countries. You had to be able to tell that their ancestors were from another country just by looking at them. The best were women who looked like their ancestors were from other countries. If a woman who looked like her ancestors were from another country came in and applied, we hired her right away. We didn't even interview her. We just asked how much she expected to be paid and then told her when to start.

At first it was sort of fun. It was like a big party. All these foreign looking women wandering around the office. No one had a clue what they were supposed to do. It was sort of funny. Everyone was having a good time. A couple of the women didn't speak English very well and anytime anyone said anything to them they would laugh. There was a lot of laughter and happiness.

After a few weeks, though, the party atmosphere disappeared and things began to get tedious. No one smiled anymore. Every now and then an argument broke out.

Then the boss started dropping by. He called me over one day and said he wanted to talk to me. "Lets get a coffee," he said. He took me around the corner to the coffee shop. "I want to see everyone smiling when I come in. I want everyone to be happy. If the employees are happy, the customers will be happy."

I didn't tell him that we didn't have any customers. We'd lost all our customers a few weeks after we hired all the foreign looking women. No one was terribly worried about having customers, though. We were an equal opportunity employer. We had fulfilled our mandate.

The boss didn't come back to the office. After we left the coffee shop, he stood out on the sidewalk with me for a moment. It was just starting to feel like spring. The sun was out, and it was warm. It was a day like the day my father was born. I knew this because my father had told me a few months before he died. "I was born," he told me, "on a day when spring was starting to seem like a serious threat." He was lying on his bed in his pyjamas, cancer cells migrating through his bloodstream like puppies broken out of the pound.

I told the boss, "This is the same weather as the day my father was born." The sun reflected off the parking meters.

"I'm glad to hear that," he said. He slapped me on the back and gave me a fatherly smile. He got into his car and drove away.

In the elevator, on the way back up to the office, I decided a memo would be the best thing.

Me and a girl named Jane were the Human Resources Department. I told Jane what the boss wanted.

"Memo?" Jane asked.

"I think so," I said.

Jane did the memo. Memos were her speciality.

My specialty was photocopying. I had that right on my resume, about the photocopying. It's what got me the job.

I photocopied the memo and put it in everybody's tray, and then Jane and I sat down at our desks and waited.

We received a directive from Head Office telling us not to call our customers customers anymore. Customers should now be referred to as patrons, the directive said.

The boss dropped by. "I'm not actually your boss," he told me in a whisper. He looked at me and smiled. "I work for Head Office, just like you. There really isn't any boss." He laughed.

"Is this some sort of new directive?" I asked.

Candy had perfect skin and came to us from Southern Georgia. She sat back in chairs, her long fiery hair falling down her back in curls that she painstakingly recreated each morning. She looked relaxed wherever you found her, like she'd never been anywhere else, had always been right there in her present form forever. I couldn't look at her.

One afternoon Candy failed to lock the door on the staff washroom, which we all used the men and the women and I came upon Candy with her pants down around her ankles and her big orangecoloured legs fanned out over the toilet seat and she looked at me with a face that made me think she must have been born on the toilet.

Candy's lips moved when she read things she saw on her computer screen. Her lips were red and glossy, like maraschino cherries. They looked like they belonged in coke, and her body in a white bathing suit. The motion she carved as she moved to gather up the phone. Finally, we got her a headset, but she had difficulty managing her hair.

Jane came into the staff kitchen. I was buttering bread.

"I want to show you something," Jane said, unbuttoning her blouse. Her face looked for the surface of the window, reflected back at her, crossdressed in light, like some ancient prediction of photography.