Quietly, Loving Everyone

A striking debut collection by one of Montreal’s brightest young writers.

Quietly, Loving Everyone, Curtis McRae’s debut collection of stories, assembles a meditative and often profound cycle of portraits pulled from everyday Canadian life. A young boy raises James Dean from the dead, only to find out the cult icon is not the playmate he’d hoped for. A university student riddled with ulcers silently spirals after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. A young girl takes a road trip with her older sister to Cape Cod, and years later reconstructs the tragic circumstances behind what she remembers. A couple goes on a date at an old porn theatre that is the last remaining vestige of a neighbourhood that has moved on. McRae plays witness to characters at those crucial beginnings or ends of relationships, with lovers, friends, family, and most importantly themselves.

REVIEWS

“The eleven stories in Quietly, Loving Everyone move like ripples across water: subtle, insistent, spreading outward from moments of grief, longing, and human connection. It is not a loud book. Instead, it asks the reader to lean in, to slow down, to pay attention.” -Elena Sénéchal-Becker, The/temz/Review

“Quietly, Loving Everyone captures the bittersweet tension between individuality and community, solitude and connection – a tension at the heart of what it means to be human…McRae deftly tackles the intertwined and stalling emotions of grief, mourning, nostalgia, and guilt, and how they figure within the relentless march of time.” -Emma Dollery, Montreal Review of Books