Best Canadian Stories 2026 selected by Zsuzsi Gartner

You’re a busy person, I know. That’s why you come here to The Miramichi Reader to get your book reviews. You don’t want to waste time on books that you won’t like, and really, we appreciate your discerning eye on our reviews. But if there was something that I recommend you read, it’s the Best Canadian series by Biblioasis, which gathers the “best of” a year in a volume dedicated to essays, poetry, or short stories. I haven’t read the other volumes for 2026 yet, but I’m here to review the 2026 short story volume, and I’m confident that you’ll agree I’m right, this is the thing to read if you want to do a quick dive into the best short Canadian literature of the year. It’s obviously somewhat subjective – chosen each year by a guest editor – but if you feel like you missed out on a lot of good short fiction in the last twelve months, or want to take your first step into short fiction (join us! Short fiction is great!), then I highly recommend picking up Best Canadian Stories 2026, and diving in.

This latest edition was selected by Zsuzsi Gartner, a formidable writer in her own right, based in Vancouver. She consulted multiple different journals and venues where Canadian short fiction is published (as detailed in notes at the end of the volume). She opens the collection with:

“Once upon a time, a short-story hunter tasked with seeking out the most wonderful stories in the land from the previous year found herself in a burning boreal forest; in Ceylon before Sri Lanka was Sri Lanka; inside a computer game in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twenty-first century Quebec; on a freezing mountaintop in Tasmania; in a sweltering monastery in Mexico; and on a barren unnamed moon.”

I knew I was in for a treat with this year’s volume of short stories. And indeed, Gartner’s whimsical introduction to the works she selected was a perfect one, luring me into a world of strangeness and fantasy and sadness and joy and fear – all before I’d even gotten to the meat of the collection. Each of these stories is doing something interesting, and doing it well.

Of particular note to me was “Jack’s Christmas Dinner,” by Bill Gaston, about a lonely man who allows another unhoused man to stay in a shack on his property and finds himself drawn in by his tenant’s plans for a wild turkey the tenant hit with his truck. IT broke my heart in the best way, and also filled it with warmth. Perhaps I was still awash in the glow of Christmas while reading it, but Gaston’s little world, with so many character details, came to life for me.

Another standout was Shashi Bhat’s “Keeping Things Fresh,” about a brilliant woman spending decades of her life making herself small for a man who purports to love her but only asks her to be anything but what she is. Bhat is deft, cutting right to what I fear is common experience for women – being told we are too much, and have to change to be more palatable. Bhat avoids assigning names to the main characters, and they become easy stand-ins for any of us who have felt that peculiar pain of changing ourselves and it still not being enough.

Best Canadian Stories 2026 is full of these kinds of gems: smart, painful, brilliant short stories. I’ve read other volumes in this series in years past, and while I’ve enjoyed them, this was a particularly good year. These stories span so much, and have so much depth to them – you should start reading them now, and treat yourself to a masterclass in new short fiction.

These stories span so much, and have so much depth to them – you should start reading them now, and treat yourself to a masterclass in new short fiction.

Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the Giller Prize finalist Better Living through Plastic Explosives and of the widely acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Her first novel, The Beguiling, was a finalist for the 2020 Writers Trust Fiction Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her fiction has been widely anthologized, read on the CBC and NPR and won National Magazine Awards. She was the inaugural Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow for Cork, Ireland in 2016. She edited the award-winning fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow and was the founder and director of Writers Adventure Camp in Whistler, BC. She is currently completing her third short fiction collection. She lives in Vancouver.

Publisher: Biblioasis (November 18, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 224 pages
ISBN: 9781771966788

Alison Manley

Website

Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.