Planet Earth: Stories

International award–winning stories of life and love in the midst of planetary decline

In Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock moves nimbly through a range of styles―from conventional to flash-fiction to his unique mastery of the long sentence―in stories exploring themes of love and passion, all with an awareness of our species-specific carelessness burning up the world.

This collection showcases a gifted writer at the top of his game, each story fresh and unexpected: the time Mario Vargas Llosa sucker-punched Gabriel García Márquez at a theatre in Mexico City inspires a young Marxist couple’s violent act of revenge in Toronto years later; an anxious young man finds solace in the employ of Prince, the musician; we get a haunting glimpse of Toronto’s polio epidemic at its peak in 1953; a young Canadian student bears witness to the Algerian protests and police violence in 1961 Paris; a pair of naive young women find themselves involved with a mysterious circus troupe in Nice. These provocative but contemplative stories are paradoxically positive and quick-witted, with a humorous fondness for humans and all our failings.

NICHOLAS RUDDOCK is a writer and physician whose novels, short stories, and poetry for adults have won multiple prizes in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. His novel The Parabolist was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2011. Most recently, in 2023, he has won the Nona Heaslip Prize from Exile Quarterly and been shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Award. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.