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 …
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 …
We wandered throughout four seasons of magical short stories, in the landscapes of both Western and Eastern Canada.
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.
Though focused on Muslim Pakistani Canadian women, there’s some DNA of Bushnell/Star in Sima Qadeer’s story collection, Brown Girls, Grown Up.
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.
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.
Gadsby has become a diviner of sorts, and her stories a clarion call.
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.
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.
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