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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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Pauline Johnson, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and, of course, Melville haunt I, Bartleby (Talonbooks), the new collection of stories from Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain.

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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.