Fiction: Short

I Never Talk About It

By Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon; Peter McCambridge et al. (trans.)

Spare a thought for the country’s translators. In a nation that is nominally multicultural and officially bilingual, the diligent wordsmiths who devote themselves to rendering foreign-language texts into the dominant English are rarely afforded the ... Read More »

August 29, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Memoir & Biography

A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream

By Lesley Trites

There’s a claustrophobic and secretive quality to Montreal writer Lesley Trites’s debut, a book of short stories that illuminates the lives of girls and women. In the first story, “Pepto-Bismol Pink,” a woman sleeps with ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Everything Is Awful And You’re A Terrible Person

By Daniel Zomparelli

The debut collection of fiction from poet and editor Daniel Zomparelli isn’t a daring adventure into a new genre for the author. Rather, it’s a natural complement to the niche he has created with his ... Read More »

July 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage

By Bill Gaston

The characters in Bill Gaston’s new story collection are almost all haunted by thoughts of what might have been, or else perched on the verge of making mistakes they’ll rue for years to come. But ... Read More »

July 4, 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

Life on Mars

By Lori McNulty

None of the stories in Lori McNulty’s debut collection is set on the planet Mars, but nevertheless that destination is invoked in nearly all of them, most often as a way of alluding to feelings ... Read More »

May 18, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

A Plea for Constant Motion

By Paul Carlucci

“I found this photograph / underneath the broken picture glass.” So begins “Photograph,” a 1993 song written and performed by R.E.M. and Natalie Merchant that describes the sensation of coming across an old portrait and ... Read More »

April 6, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Old World and Other Stories

By Cary Fagan

April 6, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Dark and Other Love Stories

By Deborah Willis

Provocative commentary decrying the death of certain literary forms has become so common that it practically constitutes its own genre. Poetry dies several times a year, and short fiction often seems to be on life ... Read More »

March 9, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short