Licia Canton introduces readers to a panoply of characters and places: a bar in Sicily graphically celebrating fertility, a park in east-end Montreal where cultural values clash, a river bank in Italy where the course of two young people’s lives is altered, a suffocating sixth-floor apartment with little way out for its occupant… The stories in Almond Wine and Fertility are imbued with sensitivity and optimism, peopled by characters struggling to accept themselves as they attempt to negotiate between languages and cultures, between people and places, between the modern and the traditional.

Licia Canton is a Montreal writer, literary critic and the editor-in-chief of Accenti Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from the Université de Montreal and is fluently trilingual.   Her essays and short stories, in English and Italian, have been published in Italy, the US and Canada. Her latest book is Almond Wine and Fertility, a collection of short stories, published by Longbridge Books, and launched at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in May 2008. She has also published as a co-editor The Dynamics of Cultural Exchange (2002), Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada (2004) , and Writing Beyond History (2006). She is the co-editor of the Canadian Literature page of the Italian language website Bibliosofia. Forthcoming is Antonio D'Alfonso: Essays on His Works . She is on the board of directors of the Quebec Writers' Federation and a member of the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois. She lives in Montreal with her husband and three children.