The Third Person

Fiction. Two's company, three's a crowd—and sometimes it's more than that. In THE THIRD PERSON, a collection of uncanny short stories by Emily Anglin, a sequence of tense professional and personal negotiations between two people is complicated when a third person arrives. Within these triangulated microworlds, disorienting gaps open up between words and reality: employees dissolve from job titles, neighbours overstep comfortable boundaries, voices distanced by space or time make their presence felt. Uneasiness builds among these separate but entangled lives. Anglin's darkly humorous stories contemplate situations in which characters refashion themselves to fit a new competitive milieu. THE THIRD PERSON reveals how people can become complicit in these milieus, even desire them, often while being led into the loneliness they can instill.

"Reading this book is like walking into an apparently familiar room and having all the details add up to something unsettling and new."—Kate Cayley

"Prepare yourself for 'spontaneous empathy,' and for specters, knowledge brokers, and an oddball cast of characters who feel, at once, both familiar and strange. Reading Emily Anglin's THE THIRD PERSON is like watching the opening sequence of Hitchcock's Rear Window."—Johanna Skibsrud