“The Cartel and Other Cover Stories is not like any book you’re likely to have ever read.”
—Margaret Atwood, from her Foreword to The Cartel
The stories in Wayne Grady’s ground-breaking collection are inspired by stories written by other writers, at a different time, in a different place. “I think of mine as ‘cover stories,’” he writes in his Introduction, “because although they are related to the original stories, they have lives of their own, independent of the stories that inspired them.”
All art is transient. Yet many of the best contemporary writers dip back into the past to rescue, resuscitate, reshape the literature that has shaped them: Peter Carey recast Dickens’s Great Expectations as Jack Maggs; Percival Everett retold The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as James; Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a contemporary take on David Copperfield that clearly mirrors the original. Like Steven Heighton with his translated poems he called “approximations” and Teju Cole’s lifting of James Joyce’s “The Dead” into Open City.
Grady makes no effort to hide the roots of these stories: he celebrates his conversations with the past. As with music, where cover songs constitute a rich tradition, Grady’s cover stories are more than homage; they are important, original works, stories that continue the interplay among writers working decades, sometimes centuries apart, giving longevity to Literature.
Read an Excerpt from “The Woman with the Dog”
Events
See Wayne Grady at Kingston WritersFest, October 1-4, 2026, in conversation with Jess Gibson, author of the debut collection of stories The Good Eye—praised by André Alexis as “witty, ironic, stylish, and funny, very funny.”