Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair

Wise and humorous stories that explore people’s extraordinary lives in suburbia’s little wild spaces. Routinely maligned as a bastion of boredom and conformity, the suburb is examined in a different light in Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair. At the heart of these fourteen short stories is refusal of the monotonous and the struggle for individuality in a place so relentlessly homogenous. In his third short story collection, Mark Paterson introduces the town of Montclair, a fictional suburb in the North Shore of Montreal, where he celebrates characters who, out of restlessness, out of nothing, make their lives on the outskirts of the big city a little bit – or a lot – out of the ordinary. With Paterson’s trademark humour and emotion, Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair explores suburbia’s little wild spaces: the places hidden away in overgrown fields behind commercial buildings, beneath concrete schoolyard staircases, and in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.