Shag Carpet Action

Matthew Firth excels at writing arresting opening sentences. “Action,” the first story in the Ottawa writer’s fourth collection, begins with a description of Tatiana, a suburban housewife who “masturbates with an action figure – a ... Read More »

January 9, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Reverse Cowgirl

By David Whitton

A collection’s titular story is almost never the best piece in it. There could be any number of reasons to explain this tendency: authors are not always the best judges of their work, or certain ... Read More »

January 4, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Once You Break a Knuckle

By D.W. Wilson; D.W. Wilson

The challenge of giving literary voice to working-class characters too inarticulate, unselfconscious, and just plain beaten down to do so for themselves has been taken up by authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, ... Read More »

November 15, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

By Johanna Skibsrud

Johanna Skibsrud blasted onto the literary stage with The Sentimentalists, which won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her follow-up, a collection of short stories, is likely to provide ammunition to those who questioned the merits ... Read More »

November 15, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Big Dream

By Rebecca Rosenblum

The persistence of hope and humanity within the sometimes demoralizing grind of a corporate environment propels Rebecca Rosenblum’s new collection of linked short stories. Rosenblum followed her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning 2008 debut collection, Once, with Road ... Read More »

November 15, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People

By Douglas Coupland; Graham Roumieu, illus.

Read the title carefully: it is not an exaggeration. Without question, this book is highly inappropriate for young people. For adults who like their reading material on the weird and twisted side, however, it should ... Read More »

November 14, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Dirt Chronicles

By Kristyn Dunnion

The Dirt Chronicles follows a group of Toronto-area teens and young adults making their way in a world that has given them nothing and kicked them on the way down. Kristyn Dunnion (also known as ... Read More »

August 29, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Distillery Songs

By Mike Spry

Readers who like to be shocked may take to Distillery Songs. I am not among them. I found the collection largely immature, and felt that it read as though the author’s ultimate aim was to ... Read More »

July 26, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Meagre Tarmac

By Clark Blaise

Like many authors largely focused on the short story form, Clark Blaise is known more by reputation than for his accomplished and eclectic body of work. Though his fiction explores questions of identity, ethnicity, and ... Read More »

July 26, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ By Love Possessed

By Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison’s first book of short stories provides a fine example of the poet and memoirist’s brand of simple storytelling mixed with Jamaican patois. The stories feature characters possessed as much by the spectre of ... Read More »

May 27, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Prev 22 232425 26....56 57 Next