Anna’s greatest artwork would have also been her last: live-streaming her death of exposure on a remote stretch of tundra. Part love triangle, part meditation on performance art, and part archival document of a creative prodigy, this genre-bending short novel is an intelligent and emotionally resonant work from a bold and ambitious new literary voice.

SHORT NOVEL

108 pages

Cover design | A. Light Zachary

ISBN | 978-1-988355-02-3

Fall 2016

Blurbs

“An expertly-written dream of a book that can be read on a train ride, The End, by Anna is beautiful and lush and will provoke reflection long after it’s put down.”

– Casey Plett, author of Little Fish

“The End, by Anna is glorious literature for our post-internet age. Queer, subversive, with a delicate melancholy that has stared at the screen for long enough and now wants to embrace the world. Literature as performance but better than that. This short book has all the space it needs to cut us to the quick.”

– Jacob Wren, author of Rich & Poor

“The End, by Anna goes beyond our reality to become something that straddles art, literature, poetry, and pure sensation. I read it in one big gulp.”

– Jess Taylor, author of Pauls

A. Light Zachary is a writer, editor, and teacher, recently awarded fellowships for their poetry by the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts. An autistic, bigender human being, Light lives in Canada. They are a poetry editor with The Puritan and the host of Light Reading. Their work has appeared in over 35 magazines and anthologies. The End, by Anna is their debut novel. Their second collection of poetry, I build it better, will be published by Rahila’s Ghost Press in 2021.

Press

The Globe and Mail | “This is a quick hit of fiction and it’s just the right length: mess without maudlin, the white-hot burn of young ambition, the shimmer of spectacle before it’s all cut short.”

CBC Radio | "Far-out yet resonant. I couldn't put it down."

The Town Crier | “I think my fiction is only successful when I treat it as non-fiction; when I imagine an altered version of myself sitting and writing the story of their life as honestly as possible. The End’s narrator is often unreliable, but not as far as they know. In doing that, I want to try to never shy from saying what things actually are and what is really happening. If subtlety escapes me, so be it.”

Vagabond City | “Vibrant and experimental, it is a true success in fiction writing by a self-proclaimed poet, whose work addresses the fundamental question: What does it mean to make good art?”

Entropy | “That a novel expressing so much lack of sentiment about death can make the reality of a death so shocking, carry the horror and ugly finality of it into the text, is powerful.”

Coach House Books | “An elegant and radical little read, stuffing questions of poetry, art and performance into just 100 pages.”

Worn | “This novel by A. Light Zachary is a piece of art. Zachary is astounding.”