Fiction: Short

Something About the Animal

Cathy Stonehouse’s debut collection contains one heartbreaking situation after another: sexual abuse, mental illness, loneliness, and death pervade the book. However, Stonehouse’s spare prose reveals the hidden layers of her vulnerable characters with great precision, ... Read More »

May 27, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ Anticipated Results

By Dennis E. Bolen

Vancouver writer Dennis E. Bolen’s seventh work of fiction, a collection of linked stories, shows a writer at the top of his game. The stories are so closely linked they read like a novel, making ... Read More »

May 27, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ Pretty

By Greg Kearney

A fraudulent Celtic seer instructs a moody artist considering gender transition to act upon the desire by age 36 – or risk being decapitated. This is a fairly typical storyline in Greg Kearney’s second collection, ... Read More »

May 16, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Door to Lost Pages

By Claude Lalumière

In this collection of linked short stories, Montreal author Claude Lalumière imagines a used bookstore, Lost Pages, that exists somewhere in an alternate-reality version of his hometown. (It seems to have no fixed address, and ... Read More »

May 11, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened

By Hal Niedzviecki

Look Down is novelist, cultural commentator, and Broken Pencil magazine founder Hal Niedzviecki’s first collection of short stories since 1998. The stories here are raw, energetic, and, like the author’s 2001 novel Ditch, tend to ... Read More »

April 18, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

And Also Sharks

By Jessica Westhead

Even when things go well for the characters in Jessica Westhead’s new short story collection, they nevertheless feel certain something will go wrong soon. With her penchant for supremely neurotic protagonists and thematic complexity, and ... Read More »

April 11, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

By Zsuzsi Gartner

Zsuzsi Gartner’s 1999 debut story collection, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, effectively captured millennial jitters by presenting readers with a gallery of relatable heroines driven to extreme actions by the centrifugal force of the ... Read More »

April 6, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Divinity Gene

By Matthew J. Trafford

In these unique and wildly imaginative stories, Matthew J. Trafford pairs crisp diction with unpredictable plots: you think you’re going to arrive on the third floor, but the elevator takes you to another floor altogether, ... Read More »

April 6, 2011 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Jewels and Other Stories

By Dawn Promislow

As Canadians, we frequently pride ourselves on our social tolerance and inclusiveness. The cultural mosaic has become one of the country’s foundational myths, and our three most populous urban centres – Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal ... Read More »

April 6, 2011 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Short