Different Beasts

One of the most beguiling attributes of the short-story genre is its malleability. Stories are shape-shifters, tugging and testing the elasticity of the form in ways that often subvert readerly expectations. The title story in ... Read More »

September 16, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

How to Tell If Your Frog Is Dead

By Julie Roorda

September 16, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Just Pervs

By Jess Taylor

Jess Taylor’s second short-story collection is a bold examination of the contemporary underbelly of women’s desires. The stories centre on nuances of longing that are much more interesting than those found in many mainstream narratives: ... Read More »

September 9, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

★ Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth

By Anosh Irani

Part short fiction and, seemingly, part autofiction, Anosh Irani’s latest book takes readers into and around the experiences of living between countries – Canada and India – between identities, and between stories. In these works, ... Read More »

August 15, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

I Become a Delight to My Enemies

By Sara Peters

The ambitious genre mashup of Sara Peters’s I Become a Delight to My Enemies is described by its publisher as “experimental fiction.” This is a somewhat catch-all term; in the current case, Peters combines poetry ... Read More »

June 6, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Fiction: Short, Poetry, Reviews

This One Because of the Dead

By Laure Baudot

Toronto authors Zalika Reid-Benta and Laure Baudot take markedly different approaches to their debut collections of short fiction. Reid-Benta’s book, Frying Plantain, is a coming-of-age sequence that takes an honest and penetrating look at the ... Read More »

May 13, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

Frying Plantain

By Zalika Reid-Benta

May 13, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

Meteorites

By Julie Paul

Absences recur throughout the 14 stories in Victoria author Julie Paul’s third collection. From the opening piece, about a man on vacation in Hawaii being haunted by the ghost of his dead father, to the ... Read More »

May 9, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

★ This Wicked Tongue

By Elise Levine

When examining two new collections of short fiction as disparate and distinct as Elise Levine’s This Wicked Tongue and Kris Bertin’s Use Your Imagination!, it might seem appropriate, if not natural, to set the books ... Read More »

May 6, 2019 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews