A common fear among first-time authors is discovering a glaring typo after the book has gone to press. It’s one evidently shared by Pasha Malla, who handles my advance copy of The Withdrawal Method, his debut short-story collection (House of Anansi Press), with an odd kind of reverence. “I haven’t seen anything of mine bound like that,” he says, tentatively running his fingers along the book’s spine. “I’m terrified to open the cover, but just to look at it is nice.”

That mix of excitement and anxiety is understandable in Malla, 30, who’s on the verge of a number of firsts this year. In May, he launched the aforementioned debut, and he’s following that this fall with a book of poetry, All our grandfathers are ghosts, with Montreal’s Snare Books – two projects that have been in the works for more than five years. Malla is also in the early stages of writing a first novel, as well as a non-fiction book based on his family’s emigration from Kashmir. Clearly this isn’t a fallow period for the up-and-comer – he casually mentions several other potential projects, including a YA novel that uses his own private “racism journals” as a jumping-off point (he wrote an essay about racism for The Globe and Mail in March). Malla is also increasingly in demand as a journalist, having recently written pieces for Toronto Life and the CBC website, as well. And he isn’t stopping there: “As of last night, I’m suddenly interested in writing for TV,” he adds, without a trace of irony.

It’s an ambitious slate for an author who started writing seriously only a few years ago. Malla says he read voraciously growing up in London, Ontario, but had largely given it up by the time he entered high school. “Part of the problem was that I didn’t know what books to read,” he recalls. “I read some great books in school, but then I really didn’t know where to go from there.” It wasn’t until he enrolled in Concordia University’s creative writing MFA, where he was thrown into a ready-made literary community, that he began to discover writers such as George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, and Barbara Gowdy – authors who changed his perception of what a story could do.

A regular contributor to McSweeney’s, Malla has a rising profile south of the border as well – though Anansi, which holds North American rights to The Withdrawal Method, has yet to find a U.S. publisher for the book. Still, Anansi publisher Lynn Henry is optimistic about his viability there. “One of the attractive things about Pasha’s writing for me and for Anansi is that it seems to come out of an international [context],” she says. “I think he’s got that sophisticated, urban feel to his writing that tends to translate across borders.”

Or to put it another way, the stories in The Withdrawal Method aren’t the typical parochial kind tied to rural Canadian locales. And while Malla is hesitant to define his work in terms of an emerging zeitgeist, he does acknowledge that many young Canadians writing today have more in common with their American contemporaries than with the lumbering giants of CanLit. “No one’s writing books about people dying in the snow anymore,” notes Malla, who guest-edited a recent Canadian-focused edition of Hobart, the U.S. literary journal, which featured work by Lee Henderson, Sheila Heti, and David Bergen. Not one of those stories involved a survival narrative, nor did any include so much as a snowflake. “I think we’re really quick to slight our writers here [in Canada] that aren’t the big names. The writers here that are the huge writers have an aesthetic that maybe doesn’t trickle down that much,” Malla shrugs.

Regarding his own work, Malla is blunt: “I think these stories are similar to stories being written by American writers who are a lot better than me. Whereas I think they may be a little bit unique in Canada.”

Despite having so much on the go, Malla seems undaunted. Just a few weeks before the launch of The Withdrawal Method, he was preparing for a trip to Montreal, where he was joining visually impaired author Ryan Knighton in a car race for the blind. (Malla is writing about the experience for Esquire.) “He drives, and I tell him to turn left or right,” he says, visibly thrilled by the prospect. There’s undoubtedly a metaphor lurking in there about going forth courageously into the unknown, but Malla gives off the impression that, as with his career, all the twists and turns will be nothing short of exciting.