With his first novel, Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers, Chilean-Canadian author Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco was heralded as a fearless writer-to-watch and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Now comes Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando--twelve tales that rip the veils between the moral and the mundane, the prim and the grim, and rough trade--especially rough trade--and the men and women who love them too much and to no good end.

Genre-blurring and gender-bending, these stories of love gone wrong cement Ibáñez-Carrasco's reputation as one of Canada's reigning bad boys of lit. Here is the Canada that lies in the shadow of the maple leaf: demented drag queens, mail order brides, illegal aliens from everywhere--even out-of-this-world shapeshifters, machos y maricones, gringos and grifters, homeless squeegee kids, sons stalking fathers, people living with AIDS, third-string academics, fallen hand models, the hideously burned and the easily forgotten.