Universal Recipients: Fictions

In Japan, a person’s blood type is as important as their horoscope. My type, like my grandmother’s, is AB. This makes us universal recipients, able to receive blood from anyone, but to give only to each other. A person with AB blood has no immunity to other types. No matter what blood they’re given, it becomes a part of them, and they never resist. –from Universal Recipients

Universal Recipients is a beautifully constructed series of fictions about the connective tissue between ourselves and the world around us–the at-times debilitating, yet ultimately liberating life-forces we can niether contain nor deny. Travelling through different worlds and cultures–Newfoundland, Quebec, Vancouver, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore–the characters in Universal Recipients are often haunted by grief, wearing their tragedies like second skins; yet they move on, seeking and finding solace in small, luminous moments of understanding. Teachers and students, parents and children, men and women breaking down the distance between strangers: their stories are inevitable and necessary, like the blood racing through their veins.

Dana Bath’s tales, like quiet, meditative gestures, speak to the universal human truths that exist in all of us, confirming her as a new literary talent.

Dana Bath is from Corner Brook, Newfoundland, but lives in Montreal, where she teaches English and writes. She’s won Grain Magazine ‘s Short Grain Contest, has an honorable mention in This Magazine ’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and has twice been a runner-up the Inter-national Three-Day Novel Contest. Dana has previously published What Might Have Been Rain, a collection of stories, and Plenty of Harm in God, a novel.