The Tokyo lad bicycling Canada had been warned in advance: Nature there would frighten a city boy. Wheeling around a shaggy tree-lined bend at dusk, he understood what they’d meant. But then the road straightened, and when McDonald’s golden arches dawned in the West, Quebec felt a lot like home.

James Gallant’s short story collection, “La Leona and Other Guitar Stories,” which won the 2019 Schaffner Press prize for music-in-literature, has just been published, and is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.