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 …
In the collection of short flash fiction, Down in the Ground, author Bruce Meyer brings both wit and philosophical curiosity to his musings on death. These stories are brief and sometimes startling. In other hands, the subject might be given a maudlin treatment but here, the tone is surprisingly restrained, and at times, ironic.
In this collection of linked stories (part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery) magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations.
In Frances Boyle’s short story collection Seeking Shade, nuanced characters endure trauma, evolution and epiphany as they face challenges, make decisions, and suffer the inevitable consequences.
Welcome to Richard Gavin’s “grotesquerie,” where fear and faith converge in eerie and nightmarish tales of transcendent horror from a truly visionary writer.
Christopher Evans’s darkly humorous and speculatively tragic collection of stories is peopled by such strays — those struggling with the isolation of nostalgic consumption, the self-sabotage of trauma denial, and easy acquiescence to fragile masculinity
Jenn Ashton’s short stories are peopled with humble and forward-leaning characters, the collection aptly called People Like Frank. Like many avid readers, I enjoy a good and satisfying dive into dark waters. I regularly embrace contradictions, twists and moral ambiguity. So it was completely unexpected for me to find myself quite simply relieved by the …
For 2019, there were only two short fiction books in this particular category, so we declared it a tie. This year, we were blessed with some of the best and imaginative short fiction to choose from. It is difficult to narrow down the shortlist of five titles to three. GOLD: Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin (Astoria, …
The End of Me is an astonishing set of sudden stories about the experience of mortality.
Jerry Levy’s quirky narratives provide a high-spirited alternative perspective on the crushing emotional isolation and myriad pressures that often accompany modern urban life. The fourteen stories in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness, Levy’s follow-up to his 2013 collection Urban Legend, also frequently stretch the boundaries of narrative plausibility and occasionally veer into pure fantasy. …
This collection of short stories follows young adults who are navigating a world that doesn’t seem to have room for them … stories of people looking for meaning and more often than not, wandering. With the book’s self-describing blurb I felt akin to a trout – a venerable cold water rainbow, wary of hooks and …
In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation–one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age.
Family matters dominate Ryan Turner’s exceptional collection of short fiction, Half-Sisters & Other Stories. The characters in these dramatically subtle, psychologically probing stories are often coping with or reacting to tragic or unhappy events—separation, estrangement, sudden death—and are compelled by circumstance to re-connect in tentative or awkward fashion with family members with whom they may have had little contact and who are largely unknown to them.
Note: For the past three summers, Naomi of the Consumed by Ink book review blog and I have been swapping a book review. This year I reviewed The Afrikaner by Arianna Dagnino for her site, and she has written a review of the critically-acclaimed book by Jamaican-Canadian author Zalika Reid-Benta, Frying Plantain (2019, House of …
One thing is definite about Toronto’s Tightrope Books: they know a good short story when they see one. In 2016, they published Danila Botha’s excellent collection of short stories For All of the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known which met with great success. Now I have just finished reading two more fine …
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Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
