In her sure-handed debut volume of short fiction, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, Maria Reva writes with an insider’s familiarity about the last days of the Soviet Union and what followed in the months and years after the Communist regime’s ignominious collapse.
John O’Neill’s gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic.
Dear Hearts is a collection of character-driven stories that are whimsical, sometimes magical, unsentimental yet poignant, and focus on the ways in which girls and women who were teenagers in the 1960s experienced the changing cultural values shaped by feminism.
Walking Leonard and Other Stories, is a short story collection of roughly 30,000 words in the literary fiction genre. The stories depict unspoken pivot points in the lives of ordinary people.
In the writing of P.W. Bridgman—whether it be his fiction or his poetry—things are not always as they seem. The story that gives its title to this latest volume features a village clock that cannot not tell the truth. Its four faces never quite agree on the time.
Full of humour and compassion, Night Watch collects three novellas that explore the lives of rural veterinarians.
Traci Skuce’s Hunger Moon is a collection of stories that echo with the yearning to be replenished, to be made full.
The stories in Erase and Rewind probe the complexities of living as a woman in a skewed society. Told from the perspective of female protagonists, the pick at at rape culture, sexism in the workplace, uneven romantic and platonic relationships, and the impact of trauma under late-stage capitalism. Quirky, intelligent, and darkly comic, Meghan Bell’s debut collection is a highwire balance of levity and gravity, finding the surreal in everyday life.
In Urban Disturbances, his second collection of short fiction, Bruce McDougall writes unaffectedly and persuasively about unexceptional people doing unremarkable things.
The Butcher of Park Ex is a humorous collection of personal stories inspired by the author’s life growing up in Montreal’s Park Extension neighbourhood, with Greek immigrant parents who never quite adapted to life in their new country.
If I had to pick one book that managed to capture the essence of 2020 without trying to speak about 2020 – a year we’ll be processing for decades to come – Hour of the Crab by Patricia Robertson would be up there.
Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics.
If you like your stories to follow a straight line, this quintuplet may give you whiplash. Each one invites you into an introspective world of intense emotions, whether for a woman, 4-track cassette, California in the 90s, or disdain for accordions and addiction aftermath. Plenty of play on wordplay suggest that these stories are best …
Jonathan Ball’s short fiction collection, The Lightning of Possible Storms, is a volume that exults in the many ways in which it confounds expectations and keeps the reader off-balance. Ball’s stories are brashly eccentric, cynical, surreal and delightfully subversive metafictions.
How does a teenager deal with grief? Where do you turn in the aftermath of tragedy? What can ease the shame of a dark secret? Who can help when things feel helpless? In sparse but emotive prose, Chris Benjamin’s collection of short stories, Boy With a Problem, explores these different kinds of difficult. In a …
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
