International award–winning stories of life and love in the midst of planetary declineIn Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock moves nimbly through a range of styles—from conventional to flash-fiction to his unique mastery of the long sentence—in stories exploring themes of love and passion, all with an awareness of our species-specific carelessness burning up the world.This collection showcases a gifted writer at the top of his game, each story fresh and unexpected: the time Mario Vargas Llosa sucker-punched Gabriel García Márquez at a theatre in Mexico City inspires a young Marxist couple's violent act of revenge in Toronto years later; an anxious young man finds solace in the employ of Prince, the musician; we get a haunting glimpse of Toronto's polio epidemic at its peak in 1953; a young Canadian student bears witness to the Algerian protests and police violence in 1961 Paris; a pair of naive young women find themselves involved...

Two young men and a girl go scavenging for fossils—but find something entirely different instead. A girl inherits a baby from the estate of her older sister. An apparently aimless young man turns out to have surprising powers. From Journey Prize-nominee Nicholas Ruddock comes an outstanding new collection of short fiction. How Loveta Got Her Baby is a set of linked stories about growing up unsure of the world and trying to stand up straight, about love from afar and love up close, love imagined, love going right and wrong and sideways, about being young and imperfect. Stories that are by turns, funny, tender, sexy, painful, passionate, heartbreaking, and joyous: Ruddick writes with deft insight into who we are, and how we change.