Daydreams of Angels: Stories, Paperback/Heather O'Neill

The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night , she transforms the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She describes the smallest of things--a stray cat or a secondhand coat--with an intensity that makes them otherworldly. In Daydreams of Angels , O'Neill's first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In "Swan Lake for Beginners," generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In "The Holy Dove Parade," a teenage cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood--fairy tales, fables, Bible parables--to uncover the deepest truths of family life. About the Author: Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life , and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine , among other publications. Her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals , an international bestseller, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition in 2007; was short-listed for six prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Literary Award; and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night , was short-listed for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She lives in Montreal, Canada.