LEILA MARSHY IS HAIKUBOXER: WRITER, EDITOR, FIERCE PUNCTUATOR
March 2025!
From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them.
Beautifully cohesive across the stunning depth and range of setting and subject, there is nothing predictable about My Thievery of the People.
"Tightly woven, electric and exciting! Rooted deeply in place, My Thievery of the People depicts the everyday life of a host of characters: a Cairo daughter daunted by her brother’s return, a paranoid Montreal snow plow driver, a Russian “knife guy” working at a circus in Las Vegas, an Egyptian waiter serving a tourist family on a boat, or a mysterious Quebecois beekeeper off the side of the road. No matter whose journey we’re following, Marshy’s stories never lead you where you were expecting. Emotionally unpredictable and incredibly immediate, Marshy’s voice is both stark and like a pulsing half-dream, caught between reality and something else. Each story left me wondering but not dissatisfied, curious to know what the next story would bring. An excellent follow-up to her wonderful debut, The Philistine."
–– Eli Tareq El Bechalany Lynch, The Good Arabs (Winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal, 2022)
"This collection is exhilarating. Marshy uses her distinctive style and wild strength to draw the reader at high speed from geopolitical reality to psychological peril, through the inner lives of refugees, queers in love and grief, wives, workers, and so many others fighting their way out from under.”
–– Elise Moser, Because I Have Loved and Hidden It
“A household in a Montreal suburb suffused with marital tension, a dusty village in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a mysteriously archaic travelling circus: My Thievery is a delightfully engrossing and awe-inspiring collection that transports us from the mundane to the exotic and spaces in between, all in the service of the sort of satisfying, trend-defying morality tales in which the consequences of our choices can include death––or at least retribution.”
–– Anita Anand, A Convergence of Solitudes