Inside the House Inside

Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning.

In Rosalind Goldsmith's remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins.

Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers.

In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.

Rosalind Goldsmith's short stories have been published in over fifty journals in the US, UK, and Canada, including filling Station, Orca, Litro, the Temz Review, Fairlight Books, Chiron Review, The Lincoln Review, the Bryant Literary Review, Fiction International and the Masters Review. She loves to experiment with language and form. Before writing short fiction, she wrote radio plays for CBC Radio Drama, a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival and translated and adapted short stories by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández for CBC Radio. She is a volunteer facilitator with the Writers Collective of Canada and tutors literacy for adults. Rosalind lives in Toronto.

ISBN: 9781553807261
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
Publisher: Ronsdale Press
Published: April 11, 2025

"Like the characters centred in these stories, Inside the House Inside is unconventional. This literary risk of a collection is meant for readers who want to feel things and aren't too hung up on whether or not those feelings are pleasant. It is about the brute savagery of survival. It is about the complicated haven our minds weave out of denial and delusion and hope and love after our cries for help go unanswered." - Brittany Coy-Pinnock, Humber Literary Review

"Inside the House Inside inhabits a space somewhere between our dreams and our nightmares. Moving deftly between realism and something much stranger, these stories are uncanny and moving at once. They excavate the basement and the attic in language at once direct and lyrical, and their brevity haunts." - Kate Cayley, award-winning author of Lent and How you Were Born

"On every level - the phrase, sentence, story, collection - this book vibrates with the intensity of distilled experience. The stories are bite-sized wonders. They explode once ingested, like you've swallowed whole worlds. They chart the incomprehension, loss, scarcity, insecurity, and fear that are the outcome of our world's economic inequality and unfolding climate catastrophe. Like Kafka's stories, they can overflow the bounds of the real to illustrate the true. Like George Saunders', they replicate with delightful exactitude the rhythms of the characters psyches. The motivating core of them is love and compassion, but not those two alone. Love. Compassion. And warning." - Anne Fleming, author of Giller-nominated Curiosities