The Third Person by Emily Anglin

Audiobook Sample:

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.

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Praise for The Third Person:

“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, Trillium Book Award winning author of How You Were Born

“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, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time

Press Coverage for The Third Person:

Most Anticipated Fall 2017 Fiction Preview —49th Shelf

“Straddling the line between realism and uncanny dreamscape, The Third Person has a tone that is singular, consistent, and very involving.” —Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, The Winnipeg Review

“Anglin’s stories creep up on a reader, occupying mental space for quite some time after reading them. The concealed details continue to percolate and develop over time.” —Tatum Dooley, Quill and Quire

“Each of these stories feels like it could go in the direction of the weird and otherworldly, but then that ends up not being the point. The true source of the uncanny, The Third Person seems to say, isn’t the paranormal – it’s other people.” —Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail

Stacked Lives Unfolding: An Interview with Emily Anglin —Catriona Wright, The Town Crier

“Anglin masterfully draws on the familiar, creating worlds that readers will quickly identify, until these worlds begin to fall apart. Anglin’s controlled yet nuanced voice is refreshing, and a welcome addition to the short story genre.” —Jessica Rose, Room Magazine

Getting to know Emily Anglin: Unrequited Teenage Love, the Allure of Gorey Covers, & the Book that Left Her Shaken —Open Book

First Fiction Friday: The Third Person —All Lit Up

Emily Anglin: “I like compartments in my writing” —49th Shelf

Writer and freelance editor Emily Anglin grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. Emily Anglin’s creative work has appeared in The New Quarterly, the Whitewall Review, and in the chapbook The Mysteries of Jupiter. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and a PhD in English Literature from Queen’s University, and also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Michigan’s English Department. Prior to her graduate studies, she studied English at the University of Waterloo. The Third Person is her debut book.