For the first time, Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's dazzling stories are gathered in one volume. Bound together with his critically acclaimed collection, The Fat Man in History, are seventeen fantastic and disturbing tales previously unpublished in Canada. In each one Carey reveals the surreal within the ordinary. A man begins peeling off his girlfriend's clothes and then layers of her skin to discover another person underneath. A lone soldier who is guarding a fence that runs across the desert forgets which side is which. A mild-mannered architect, fearing that his lover will leave him because he is too ordinary, plots to steal a drug-dealer's secret cache. Collected Stories is a testament to Carey's remarkable imagination and his exceptional achievements in the short-story form.