It was a wonderful day for J. Ashley-Smith as his stunning collection, THE MEASURE OF SORROW gets highly commended at the 2024 ACT Book of the Year Awards. Who says genre fiction can’t be literary? Joseph’s gorgeous prose is just one element that put this book on the radar for this year’s award. Deep character development and heavy themes helped too. We are so proud of this fella and super happy that this book is getting the attention it deserves!
The Measure of Sorrow: Stories
Shirley Jackson Award-winning author J. Ashley-Smith’s first collection, The Measure of Sorrow, draws together ten new and previously acclaimed stories of dark speculative fiction. In these pages a black reef holds the secret to an interminable coastal limbo; a father struggles to relate to his estranged children in a post-bushfire wilderness; an artist records her last days in conversation with her unborn child; a brother and sister are abandoned to the manifestations of their uncle’s insanity; a suburban neighborhood succumbs to an indescribable malaise; teenage ravers fall in with an eldritch crowd; a sensitive New Age guy commits a terminal act of passive-aggression; a plane crash opens the door to the Garden of Eden; the new boy in the village falls victim to a fatal ruse; and a husband's unexpressed grief is embodied in the shadows of a crumbling country barn. Intelligent and emotionally complex, the stories in The Measure of Sorrow elude easy classification, lifting the veil on the wonder and horror of a world just out of true.
More info →
