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Shortcuts: Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow and Dibidalen
“Was it fair to look for comparisons as the critics invariably did? He had always felt diminished when they did that to his own work — as though his originality had to be questioned.” — from “The...
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Shortcuts: The Pious Robber and The Modern World
The cover images on The Pious Robber (Thistledown Press, 160 pp; $18.95), Harriet Richards’ third book of fiction, and The Modern World (Oberon Press, 112 pp; $19.95), Cassie Beecham’s debut, are...
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Shortcuts: Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, and The Best Place on Earth
Debut story collections often feel like an authorial declaration, a manifesto or artist’s statement announcing a writer’s preoccupations and vocal register. Collections that tilt toward playfulness or...
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Shortcuts: Canary, and The Green and Purple Skin of the World
The generational divide looms large in Nancy Jo Cullen’s debut collection, Canary (Biblioasis, 192 pp; $18.95). Take, for instance, Judi, the disillusioned, embittered protagonist of the title story,...
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Shortcuts: You Haven’t Changed A Bit, and Travelling Light
One of the predominant motifs in CanLit is the plunge through the ice. Canadian writers have returned again and again to the idea of ice and snow as determinants and equalizers: “The Canadian author’s...
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Shortcuts: Hellgoing, and All We Want Is Everything
“I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts,” says one of the characters in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel We Were the Mulvaneys. “Particularly if it hurts.” This could be an instance of the novelist...
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Shortcuts: Life Without Death, and Keep It Beautiful
In his classic study of the short-fiction form, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor differentiates between novels and short stories by claiming that novelists engage in a “process of identification”...
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Shortcuts: Oh, My Darling, and Savage Love
Others before me have pointed out that short fiction is a writer’s genre. Notwithstanding the apparent (and somewhat baffling) lack of interest in stories on the part of readers, and the resultant lack...
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Shortcuts: The Other Side of Youth, and Auxiliary Skins
In a 1994 interview in The Paris Review, Alice Munro spoke about her affection for writers from the American South, and the influence they have had on her. “The thing about the Southern writers that...
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Shortcuts: Red Girl Rat Boy, and They Never Told Me
The term “writer’s writer” is frequently used to describe an author who privileges technique over story, whose artistic refinement is honed to a degree evident to other professionals, but not...
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Shortcuts: Things Withered, and Someone Somewhere
The new collection of stories from Winnipeg native Susie Moloney sports one of the best titles of the year. It’s the second word that sells it. Things Withered (ChiZine Publications, 280 pp; $18.95)...
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Shortcuts: The Secret Life of Fission, and What We Hold in Our Hands
Short fiction is an unforgiving genre. On the one hand, it offers writers apparently boundless opportunity to try out different things — voices, modes, techniques — without the lengthy commitment...
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Shortcuts: Boundary Problems, and How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the...
Theoretical physics and modern literature have many common attributes. Both strive to create narratives to explain the universe, but both are predicated upon notions of essential instability. Quantum...
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Shortcuts: Circus, and Paradise & Elsewhere
“I like to look,” says the narrator of one of Kathy Page’s strange, beguiling new stories. “In trains, buses, gardens, at films, even those in languages I don’t understand, on pavements and curbstones,...
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Shortcuts: All Saints, and Novelists
“In studying the short story,” writes critic Stephen Henighan, “academics, depending on their critical predilections, look at theme, character, the structures of individual stories, point of view,...
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Shortcuts: Juliet Was a Surprise, and David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide
When people consider the Canadian short story, the name that pops instantly to mind is Alice Munro, probably followed by Mavis Gallant and Alastair MacLeod. Only infrequently do people seem to mention...
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Shortcuts: Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, Eliza Robertson’s Wallflowers
Margaret Atwood’s extended excursion into genre territory with her recently completed MaddAddam trilogy of novels may have frustrated readers who prefer fiction that employs a more mimetic approach....
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Shortcuts: Gifts for the One Who Comes After, The Freedom in American Songs
You have to get almost to the end of Helen Marshall’s sophomore collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 272 pp., $18.99), before encountering a story that in any way...
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Shortcuts: ABCs and VLTs
Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions Molly Peacock, illustrated by Kara Kosaska McClelland & Stewart 160 pgs; $27.95 Hello, Sweetheart Elaine McCluskey Enfield & Wizenty 200 pgs; $19.95...
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