Quietly atmospheric and darkly foreboding, A Plea for Constant Motion is an ominous, and occasionally unnerving, new work of fiction by award-winning author Paul Carlucci

Penetrating and visceral, yet always offset by small moments of tenderness and humour, A Plea for Constant Motion is a powerful examination of the innate desire in everyone to change their lives and strive for something better.

Two couples share a disastrous dinner after their children are killed in a botched kidnapping overseas. A teacher with a passion for cartography orchestrates a bizarre apology after intentionally hitting a student. Desperate to be friends, a man ignores his neighbour’s strange behaviour to the peril of himself and others. A young girl babysits for a family friend, dimly aware that her presence is required for more than just childcare.

Dexterously divided into two parts and a surreal intermission, the characters in these stories find themselves confronted by situations that leave them either struggling to escape or firmly rooted in place. Paul Carlucci’s formidable work is by turns familiar and disquieting, sober and surreal, a stark and carefully crafted examination of the human condition.

Paul Carlucci’s first collection of short fiction,The Secret Life of Fission, won the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second collection, A Plea for Constant Motion, was published to critical acclaim in 2017. His stories have also been published in numerous magazines and journals, including Malahat Review, subTerrain, Fiddlehead, and New Quarterly.

A former journalist, Carlucci has lived across Canada — including eighteen months in Hay River, NWT, while writing The High-Rise in Fort Fierce — as well as Ghana and Zambia. He now resides in Ottawa.

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Completely absorbing (in a guided-tour-through-hell kind of way), the stories sketch poor choices and malfunctioning moral compasses with a festering or atrophied backdrop of corruption, brutality, abuse and death. . . a rewarding collection.

Winnipeg Review

It doesn’t make for easy reading, but A Plea for Constant Motion has an air of urgency to it, a sense of relevance which is at once odd for a collection of short stories and disturbing in and of itself. Carlucci . . . writes beautifully of ugliness, immersing the reader in the minds and hearts of characters most of us would like to avoid, or, more critically, would prefer to believe didn’t exist. It’s a perfect collection for a world which confronts us with increasing violence and ugliness every day.

Toronto Star

The manipulation of tone within and across stories in A Plea for Constant Motion is enhanced by an overall structure that is carefully and deliberately constructed . . . [there is] much to appreciate in this tough and challenging collection.

Globe and Mail

A powerful collection of stories that draw you into their reality.

Ottawa Magazine