What Endures by Pauline Holdstock
What struck me at the end of reading the collection of short stories that every single one was true.
Short Fiction
Astrid, Aghast by Ian Roy
Astrid, Aghast is the sixth book by Ottawa-area writer Ian Roy, his third collection of short stories. It’s a substantial volume containing thirty stories, a beautiful edition from Gaspereau Press, made to feel all the more substantial by the Zephyr Antique Laid stock it is printed on. The book is given a classic feel, which …
Weird Babies by Jaclyn Desforges
The title of Jaclyn Desforges’s new book of short fiction, Weird Babies, is absolutely appropriate. These stories are about childhood and motherhood, and they are strange. Strange and delightful, that is: the characters and their experiences are situated to one side of what we might consider normal, ranging from speculative fiction to something close to …
Mind the Gap by Alice Zorn
As in the piece that provides the book’s title, when Barbara meets her Austrian cousin Freddy as an adult, much has changed in the interim.
Brown Girls, Grown Up: Stories by Sima Qadeer
Though focused on Muslim Pakistani Canadian women, there’s some DNA of Bushnell/Star in Sima Qadeer’s story collection, Brown Girls, Grown Up.
There’s Always More to Say by Natalie Southworth
With her debut collection There’s Always More to Say, Natalie Southworth demonstrates that she not only understands the skills necessary to write powerful short stories, she has no shortage of them.
Diving Board by Tomás Downey, Translated by Sarah Moses
In recent years there has been a wealth of Argentinian horror collections from writers such as Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Augustina Bazterrica, as well as the anthology Through the Night Like a Snake. Added to their ranks is Tomás Downey, author of the taut and frightening Diving Board, wonderfully translated by Sarah Moses.
Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive by Alison Gadsby
Gadsby has become a diviner of sorts, and her stories a clarion call.
Best Canadian Stories 2026 selected by Zsuzsi Gartner
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.
Honeydew by Ben Zalkind
In Honeydew, Ben Zalkind’s new novel, tech billionaire Moses Honeydew is intent on tunnelling into the core of the earth. I suspect readers will either be automatically sold on the book after hearing this, or put off.
Planet Earth by Nicholas Ruddock
Planet Earth is a wide-ranging collection of stories. Clocking in at 184 pages in total, this is small but mighty: there are pieces of flash fiction here, longer stories, ones that break your heart and ones that chill you to the bone.
A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway
Each of the five stories in this collection stretch the boundaries of contemporary literary fiction and in doing so establish Galway’s unique voice and style.
The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories by Lynda Williams
Life is wonderful and challenging, complicated and hard. That much you might easily take away from the title of Lynda Williams’s debut short story collection, The Beauty and the Hell of It.
Rag Pickers by Blaine Newton
Newton’s skill as a writer is in the subtlety of the twists in these stories, and I was continually astonished at how well he executed a story during my read. When I pulled out Blaine Newton’s short story collection Rag Pickers again, to prepare for this review, I went to look at some brief notes …
Welcome to the Neighbourhood by Clea Young
Young’s characters yearn for community, for untroubled friendships, for peace, love, and understanding (to quote Nick Lowe)—as though they too grew up with a notion of the Welcome Wagon and feel nostalgia for something they hold dear but cannot actually manifest in their everyday lives.
