Marianne Ackerman's second collection of stories for Guernica, Mankind, puts the focus on women, their ascent to selfhood, the beauty and carnage en route. Picking up from the Gothic shadows of Albert Fine in Holy Fools (2014), she follows the lives of an Ontario farm family marked by a bloody incident they struggle to understand. Literary Montreal is the setting of two stories spun around an alpha poseur, George. Four interlocking stories unpeel the secrets of one man's sister, ex-wife, friend and mother. Sardonic and often funny, these tales follow the byways of aspiration and self-deception, casting a warm light on all.