BRIEFLY CONSIDERED
Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award for her previous book, Dancing Lessons, Olive Senior returns with The Pain Tree (Cormorant Books), a collection of stories that draws on African legend, the Cinderella myth, and magic realism.
Avant-garde poet and multimedia artist Gary Barwin has a collection of stories on the way that features a couple who share a pair of legs and a billionaire who becomes enamoured with a kitchen appliance. I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist (Anvil Press) combines traditional short stories and pieces of microfiction.
Novelist, playwright, and non-fiction writer Rachel Wyatt returns with a new collection of stories, Street Symphony (Coteau Books), that addresses the question, “Are you content to be nothing?”
Steven Hayward follows up his 2012 novel, Don’t Be Afraid, with To Dance the Beginning of the World (Exile Editions), a collection of stories about Bat Day at Yankee Stadium and misspellings on recipe cards.
Pauline Johnson, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and, of course, Melville haunt I, Bartleby (Talonbooks), the new collection of stories from Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain.
Literary jealousy, early death, and Parliament Hill interns feature in Famous Last Meals (Great Plains Publishing), a trio of novellas from Richard Cumyn. The Kingston, Ontario, author examines the nature of authenticity in a time when everyone is constantly donning different personae to present to the world.