Quill and Quire

Fiction: Short

What Can You Do

By Cynthia Flood

Two new short-fiction collections – one by a first-time author, the other by a veteran – each examine the life experiences and inner worlds of a range of characters, but in radically different ways. In ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Things Not to Do

By Jessica Westhead

The anxieties and disillusionments of modern life seem to be at the core of most contemporary short-fiction collections. So it is little surprise that the similarly titled Things Not to Do, by Toronto writer Jessica ... Read More »

September 21, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Peninsula Sinking

By David Huebert

Peninsula Sinking opens with a literary punch to the gut. “Enigma,” the first story in the debut collection from Halifax writer David Huebert (who now lives in London, Ontario) was awarded the CBC Short Story ... Read More »

August 30, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Glass Beads

By Dawn Dumont

Although Glass Beads is billed as a collection of short stories, it works excellently as a panoramic, polyphonic Bildungsroman, following the lives of four Indigenous friends from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. The ... Read More »

June 12, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Two Man Tent

By Robert Chafe

As an accomplished theatre director and prolific playwright (his stage adaptation of Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams plays the National Arts Centre in 2017), Newfoundland’s Robert Chafe has always had a penchant for ... Read More »

November 21, 2016 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ The Two of Us

By Kathy Page

Toward the end of her fine new collection of deceptively expansive short stories, Kathy Page unfurls a little number called “Daddy,” told from the point of view of a child spelunking with his (her?) father ... Read More »

September 6, 2016 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Waiting for the Cyclone

By Leesa Dean

According to the publisher’s copy accompanying Leesa Dean’s debut story collection, “women [in fiction] are too often cast as inherently good.” It goes on to caution that the “perfectly imperfect” women within these pages “don’t ... Read More »

August 2, 2016 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

All That Man Is

By David Szalay

There’s a deftly submerged schematic quality to Montreal-born writer David Szalay’s All That Man Is, an anthology of short stories that are (almost entirely) unconnected on the level of dramaturgy, but very clearly in conversation ... Read More »

June 27, 2016 | Filed under: Fiction: Short