Brief Encounters

Iossel’s chosen technique has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously speeding the prose up and slowing it down.

Alexander MacLeod, Alistair’s son and a fellow M&S author, said he had “no knowledge of this change.”

Better not to include it in this series at all than to include it in even a mildly bowdlerized form.

Sutherland says the structure of the story was “a risk” that arose out of her belief that “every enslaved person deserves to have their story told with dignity.”

Ferrante’s tale shows the ongoing potential for the short form to continue to evolve outside a strictly mimetic mode.

Belcourt’s tactic in “lived experience” is to trouble this unquestioned notion of progress and urban gentrification.

The presentation of the technology in the story firmly situates it in the tech skeptic realm.

Throughout the story, relationships between and among the characters are drawn in different shades.

Lazarus, raised from the dead, is a potent biblical allusion for the marionette that comes to life as a woman.

“Pending Licensor Approval” is structured largely as a conversation between a writer and a bartender.

The passage into manhood for Chibuike involves the shedding of innocent blood.

“Fiction is a more subtle and sophisticated revenge porn.”

“But that is exactly how we live: lost in time and space.”

Whittall manages a delicate balancing act: she addresses an incident of sexual assault without turning her story into a simple trauma narrative.

“Glimmer” is a lean story, right from its declarative opening sentence.

“Dead Set” is a story that takes direct aim at the punishments that accrue to women in an unfair society.

“Tomorrow” is a voice story and its narrative approach is, typical of Faulkner, complex.

In the Soviet Union, Sorokin implies, the government is able to act in a most atrocious manner, while the minor functionaries who work the factories and offices have to carry shit.

The critic Delbert Russell referred to the story as “a mordant criticism of the artificiality and emptiness of the life of the haute bourgeoisie of Quebec.”

King’s accomplishment here is in combining his three levels of fear – terror, horror, and disgust – in a surprising and highly literary manner.

The notion of redemption is an element of hardboiled crime fiction Ardai plays with in this story.

The story focuses on Anju, an overweight racialized high school student who is relentlessly bullied by a group of popular white girls.

“Peacock killing was not a rupture but the sensual intertwining of beauty and destruction.”

The idea of progress, and what it displaces, takes on a surreal aspect in “Burial Ground.”

In the world of Dick’s story, efficiency and rationality are paramount.

“Hairs on Me” is a complicated reckoning with female desire and the kind of bodily insecurity a media-saturated world imposes on women.

Like his contemporary, the Irish monk and writer Laurence Sterne, Diderot proved well ahead of his time.

Gasco has endowed her story with something that is terribly unfashionable in book club circles and social media feeds: an unlikable narrator.

The shifting ground of motivation and relationship between the two characters is brought out metaphorically in the mummers’ costumes.

The speaker in the story is Azurée Ghiz, the descendent of Arab immigrants in Toronto.

The story is on one level a comedy of manners; on another, it is a careful and cutting critique of capitalism.

The bare bones of Gardam’s story appear minor and parochial; this belies the depth and complexity the author infuses into her tale.

Galway’s rich feel for language and her ability to inhabit a wide range of characters and milieus is impressive.

Each entry in the book contains, perhaps unsurprisingly, references to at least one dead writer.

Oates’s pervading theme across her entire career involves an investigation into the nature of consciousness and the mysteries of personality.

“The problem in this country is that people seem to feel that if it’s funny it’s not serious.”

The twelve stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People, ably translated by veteran collaborator Megan McDowell, hold their social subtexts more or less on their metaphorical sleeve.

The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth.”

The books in these stories are dangerous not just for the ideas they contain, but the wounds that they inflict.

The writers are for the most part clear-eyed about the realities of the world and adept at placing them in the context of speculative fiction.

The Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.

O’Brien, who died on July 27 at the age of ninety-three, caused much uproar among conservative Irish Catholics for her frank and unsparing examinations of female sexuality.

Tremblay’s entire fiction is built on contingency and ambiguity.

The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades establish many of the characteristics that would come to be associated with Munro’s oeuvre.

The irony in the volume stretches across stories, a number of which are linked.

“I’ve always been interested in why people make the choices they make,” Botha says.

Canadian judge Shashi Bhat called Bouchard’s story “a profoundly intelligent, fiercely original piece.”

Segriff’s preferred mode is realism.

The biggest disappointment in this book is its relative lack of creepiness.

The real, physical world is ever-present in these stories, most particularly in a recurring theme focusing on women’s bodies.

One need only read a few sentences of Munro’s writing to understand that one is in the presence of literary genius.

The best stories in the book are less assiduous in cuing their reader as to how to react in any given moment.

Characters in Blaise’s fiction are constantly on the move.

A number of these stories focus on military families. But the broader theme is the status of women and their struggle for independence and autonomy.

Blue Runaways is the first fiction publication from Stonehewer Books, a new independent press out of Victoria, B.C.

The stories in Last Woman have their finger on the pulse of the current zeitgeist.

These are stories that are honest enough to meet their characters on their own terms.

The stories here are entertaining enough, provocative enough, and spicy enough that their ultimate provenance doesn’t really make any difference.

The individual entries are linked by characters that drift in and out among them.

Regardless of the narrative mode Verghese chooses, her thematic focus remains relatively constant.

As with any anthology of this kind, not all entries work equally well.

Estima infuses her writing with sensitivity for the barbed points of human interaction.

Body horror is by nature a visceral mode, and many of the writers here take full advantage of the gooier elements in their tales.

Bringing these stories together in one place highlights the genre contributions of Black writers.

The stories display a surface placidity that belies their deeper structure.

It’s hard to fault the contributors to the volume, or the ambition of the editors.

LeBlanc’s short fiction is refreshingly resistant to closure.

This latest volume offers an energetic point of entry as well as a strong argument for Oates’s continued relevance.

There are pleasures aplenty to be found in Bazterrica’s bitter and poisoned bouquet.

Le Guin had her pulse on the present and was able to anticipate where the human species was likely headed given its current trajectory.

The narrative highlights the danger ordinary citizens faced while attempting even routine business during wartime.

If Welty begins her tale as a moody Gothic throwback, by the conclusion she has injected a large dollop of ridiculousness.

Level was closely associated with Paris’s notorious Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

Throughout the story, lies and deception are common factors uniting the various characters.

Plett is not content to let her story act as a didactic tale about cis intolerance.

The true effects of grief cannot be diminished with platitudes, they must be respected and honoured.

Braithwaite’s plot is tightly calibrated and it’s not until the final third of the story that the crime even materializes.

One of the pervasive themes running through the story is the conflict between order and chaos.

Porter’s story is as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

Gordimer refuses to level judgment herself in the story.

Imagery involving implicit threat is threaded throughout the story.

How much of “The Harvest” is true to the facts of Hempel’s experience is unclear, and also unimportant.

Gaiman is commenting on our various prejudices regarding where genre work falls in the realm of literary respectability.

“Doi Moi Beans” is a story about exploitation; not the obvious kind, but the subtle version.

Bennett’s story, though relatively brief, is a subtle excavation of racial, class, and gendered power dynamics.

The story operates in the subgenre that has typically become known as folk horror.

Camille Hernández-Ramdwar’s story addresses the nuances involved in the anti-vax movement via the eponymous character.

Barth, like Ross, writes in a highly ironic mode.

The key symbol for reclaiming something of youth’s vigour and potential is the rhubarb that serves as the story’s title.

Bruneau’s story is about human suffering and the willingness of people who witness it to intervene

As much as it is a story about sex, “A North American Education” is also a story about fathers and sons.

If “Striding Folly” does not represent Sayers at the height of her powers, it is nevertheless an intriguing oddity.

Bátiz’s story examines the class divides that permeate the city through the prism of a Mexican immigrant.

The story may not work as fiction, but it does illuminate some of the philosophical and ontological dilemmas swirling around the notion of sentient robots.

Faith is, to those who don’t subscribe, a kind of pandering to scared people.

The author’s trick in “The Earring” is to convince his reader to sympathize with sad-sack Amund.

Ditlevsen is merciless in denying her protagonist catharsis.

Hill’s short story was first published in the Walrus in 2011.

The story has numerous commonalities with Everil Worrell’s pulp horror tale “Leonora.”

Worrell foregrounds the degree to which male members of the medical establishment dismiss or ignore women’s complaints.