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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
Devouring Tomorrow is an eclectic collection of imagined food futures, speculative and dystopian, by some established and creative Canadian writers, edited by Jeff Dupuis and A.G. Pasquella.
Remaindered People is the title story for this impressive collection. Brij is a young man who is currently unemployed and seemingly without direction, yet when he accepts a position as a caregiver to his friend’s father, he comes to genuinely care for the aging patriarch. This piece establishes a very fine standard for the rest …
In The Art of Forgiveness, Chris Benjamin presents readers with short fictions in grim tones about three friends — Gerry, Long, and Drew — in a collection that could have been called Men Without Women if Hemingway first, then Murakami, hadn’t used that title.
Tilting Towards Joy, a collection of short stories on the themes of making and finding community, is a refreshing exploration on the complexity of human behavior.
Her estate has recently emptied the cupboards with a release of Shields’s previously unpublished and/or uncollected stories and essays.
Hollay Ghadery is a writer who will not waste your time. By which I mean both that she says what she has to say succinctly, and that her observations are inevitably worthwhile.
In her latest short story collection A Way To Be Happy, Caroline Adderson pursues the question of happiness – the fleeting, highly-theorized, and hotly pursued topic.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
