Journey Prize amends its practices by declaring all contributors to anthology “winners,” awarding each $1,000 January 20, 2023 The journals in which the stories originally appeared will receive $200 per published story in the anthology.
With his new short story collection, Stuart Ross continues in the spirit of underground publishing December 8, 2022 Traces of writers as diverse as Daniil Kharms and Jorge Luis Borges are detectable in the collection.
Alan Moore stretches the generic definition of a story with a single volume that comprises eight short(er) pieces and one full-on novel December 7, 2022 Its generic inappropriateness notwithstanding, “What We Can Know About Thunderman” is worth the price of the current volume all on its own.
In her first collection of short stories, Newfoundland’s Bridget Canning performs acts of radical empathy November 15, 2022 Canning’s fiction is as intriguing for what it leaves out as for what gets included.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 31: “The Witness for the Prosecution” by Agatha Christie May 31, 2022 Chirstie’s story, which was later adapted by the author for the stage and by Billy Wilder for film, is exemplary of her patented twist endings.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 30: “The Alps” by Colin Barrett May 30, 2022 Canadian-Irish writer Colin Barrett is a wizard with language that sings with the rhythms and cadences of the working class.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 29: “Peach Cobbler” by Deesha Philyaw May 29, 2022 Philyaw’s story is set at the intersection of race and class, and focuses on a mother’s attempts to shield her daughter from pain by systematically denying her pleasure.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 28: “Hotel Tango” by Cora Siré May 28, 2022 In this story about a man’s assignation with a married woman, the chaos and culture of Buenos Aires serve as metaphors for the couple’s incompatibility.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 27: “Sin” by Cynthia Ozick May 27, 2022 The ninety-four-year-old author’s story, about art and failure, is charged with typically graceful and metaphorical language.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 26: “The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse” by Rawi Hage May 26, 2022 Hage’s story of a doomed, ineffectual man is a layered consideration of religion, history, and the nature of celebrity.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 25: “Ordinary Love Song” by Alex Pugsley May 25, 2022 Pugsley resurrects a seldom-used literary form – the epistolary story – and repurposes it for the internet age.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 24: “June Bugs” by Kim Fu May 24, 2022 Fu’s three-part story fuses realism with fabulist elements.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 23: “The Journal” by Stanislaw Lem; Antonia Lloyd-Jones, trans. May 23, 2022 A story that takes up philosophical questions about the nature of creation and the paradoxes inherent in a divine creator becomes a more straightforward SF tale in its final moments.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 22: “Raw Material” by A.S. Byatt May 22, 2022 Byatt’s story, about a creative writing teacher and a promising older student, contains a submerged lesson about how to write worthwhile literature.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 21: “Theft” by Katherine Anne Porter May 21, 2022 Porter’s suggestive and imagistic style lends her story an acute psychological insight.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 20: “Glory” by Janice Lynn Mather May 20, 2022 This story, about a teenage girl sent to live with her grandmother during the final months of her pregnancy, is about a struggle between conflicting notions contained in the title.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 19: “Happy Birthday” by Clarice Lispector; Katrina Dodson, trans. May 19, 2022 From the woman who many consider to be Brazil’s greatest writer, a story about the family party from hell.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 18: “A Man Becomes a Nazi” by Anna Seghers; Margo Bettauer Dembo, trans. May 18, 2022 Seghers’s story, about the conditions necessary for an unhappy man to become radicalized, holds pressing lessons for our current historical moment.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 17: “Once Removed” by Alexander MacLeod May 17, 2022 Like Alice Munro, MacLeod has the ability to build whole lives in a compressed space and to subtly shift a story’s focus and meaning without apparent effort.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 16: “A Cup of Cold Water” by Edith Wharton May 16, 2022 Wharton’s story is an examination of the vacuity that attaches to the wealthiest strata of society and one man’s unsuccessful attempt to climb the social ladder.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 15: “Little Miss Marker” by Damon Runyon May 15, 2022 Set in a mythical Depression-era New York City, the story centres on a bookie who becomes an unwitting father figure to a young girl who is offered as a marker on a bet.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 14: “Devotion” by Sharon English May 14, 2022 English’s story excavates the chasm that exists between two halves of a couple, a gulf that is exposed by the death of the pair’s dog.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 13: “Dread” by Clive Barker May 13, 2022 Barker’s psychologically tense story examines the price we pay for confronting our darkest fears.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 12: “The Stunt” by Michael LaPointe May 12, 2022 In this chilly story, three men do battle for the soul of a fifteen-year-old film star.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 11: “Come and Get Your Ice Cream, Motherfuckers” by Francine Cunningham May 11, 2022 An ice cream truck driver faces mental anguish resulting from his inability to escape the incessant jingle of his vehicle’s music.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 10: “A Distant Episode” by Paul Bowles May 10, 2022 In a prelude to his iconic novel, Bowles offers up a tale of a hubristic
American academic who has the tables turned on him during a trip to North Africa.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 9: “An Orchid, Blooming” by Kathy Friedman May 9, 2022 In Friedman’s story, family secrets, like orchids, flourish in darkness.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 8: “A Survey of Recent American Happenings Told Through Six Commercials for the Tennyson Clearjet Premium Touchless Bidet” by Omar El Akkad May 8, 2022 In a brief and barbed satire, Giller winner Omar El Akkad links our current geopolitical malaise with the capitalist impulse to sell stuff.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 7: “Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott May 7, 2022 The author of Little Women was also an aficionado of “blood and thunder,” a mode represented in this story about grave robbing and its attendant consequences.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 6: “The Trap” by Luigi Pirandello; Giovanni R. Bussino, trans. May 6, 2022 Pirandello’s story takes up the writer and dramatist’s great theme: the instability of identity and the untrustworthy nature of physical reality.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 5: “Sexy” by Jhumpa Lahiri May 5, 2022 Lahiri’s story excavates the emotional toll on a woman who is carrying on an affair with a married man.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 4: “The Kitchen Boy” by Alaa Al Aswany; Humphrey Davies, trans. May 4, 2022 This story from the noted Egyptian author interrogates toxic power dynamics within institutions.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 3: “The People Across the Canyon” by Margaret Millar May 3, 2022 Millar’s story, ostensibly a psychological drama, is in fact a trenchant satire on the pernicious attractions of a particular kind of American dream.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 2: “Little Green Men” by Elaine McCluskey May 2, 2022 Set in a tiny fishing village on Canada’s east coast, the story limns the distance between fact and supposition.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 1: “The Dead Are More Visible” by Steven Heighton May 1, 2022 One of the author’s best, this story interrogates the notion of societal visibility through the prism of a middle-aged-woman working as a labourer flooding ice rinks in the middle of the night.
31 Days of Stories 2022: Introduction April 30, 2022 If the novel is a regal lion king, the short story is a cackling hyena.
“You have to sign the same deal if you want to be good” March 16, 2022 Alexander MacLeod’s new collection is out in April.
June bugs and haunted dolls: the strange and fantastical world of Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century February 10, 2022 These twelve stories interrogate individual human consciousness and the dangers of technology in our postmodern world.
“I think everyone in some way is an outsider”: Kate Cayley on short stories, literary tradition, and why she would be hesitant to read a novel she had written December 1, 2021 “Art is a way of remembering what it is like to be alive when you may have forgotten,” says Cayley.
The annual anthology series Best Canadian Stories celebrates fifty years of showcasing Canada’s proficiency and variety in the literary form November 1, 2021 “The function of it was the pleasure of the work for readers, and the value to writers was to show them how good they had to get,” says longtime series editor John Metcalf.
Labyrinthine nightmares: “Treading the Maze” by Lisa Tuttle October 5, 2021 Tuttle’s brand of quiet horror is at once a rejoinder to a genre that leans heavily on masculine aggression and a means to achieve effects more unsettling than an explicit presentation could ever be.
Stalking the self: “Consequences” by Willa Cather October 4, 2021 Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.
The most wild, homely narrative: “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe October 2, 2021 Poe’s 1843 tale is not only one of the greatest horror stories ever written; it is also a pristine example of internal integrity in the short form.
Shashi Bhat blurs the line between novels and short fiction in her new book, The Most Precious Substance on Earth September 15, 2021 Though Bhat’s new book is described as her second novel, the individual pieces comprise all the attributes of linked stories.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 31: “Precious Bane” by Gerald Murnane May 31, 2021 A Borgesian story about literary posterity and the fickleness of memory, from an Australian master.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 30: “Gazebo” by Raymond Carver May 30, 2021 A powerful monument to what the short form is capable of from “the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century.”
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 29: “Abortion, A Love Story” by Nicole Flattery May 29, 2021 Irish author Flattery’s novella-length story is an enthusiastic evisceration of the patriarchy and institutional pomposity.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 28: “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad May 28, 2021 Conrad’s story is at once a version of a doppelgänger story and an examination of repressed psychology and moral ambiguity.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 27: “The Book About the Bear” by John O’Neill May 27, 2021 In Atwoodian terms, O’Neill’s story represents a conflation of doomed animals and survival.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 26: “Safeword” by R.O. Kwon and “Scissors” by Kim Fu May 26, 2021 Two stories about pleasure and pain interrogate the nature of trust and what we risk when we relinquish control.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 25: “Violations” by Catherine Lacey May 25, 2021 “Violations” is a story that instructs its reader how to read it even as it is unfolding on the page.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 24: “The Americans” by Viet Thanh Nguyen May 24, 2021 The interplay among the characters in Nguyen’s story dramatizes the prickly concerns that crop up in the face of cultural conflicts and commingled histories.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 23: “How Myrna Survives” by Diane Schoemperlen May 23, 2021 Diane Schoemperlen’s plaintive tale is about what happens when youthful promise gives way to the creeping disillusion of adulthood.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 22: “Furry Night” by Joan Aiken May 22, 2021 A fantastical story with origins in myth and fairy tale, Aiken’s narrative imagines the world’s greatest Shakespearean actor as a werewolf.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 21: “A Bear Hunt” by William Faulkner May 21, 2021 One of Faulkner’s most exuberant tales, this story of poetic revenge is also uproariously funny.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 20: “Serving” by Eva Crocker May 20, 2021 Eva Crocker’s dual father-and-son narration draws parallels between two characters trapped in their own lives.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 19: “Radium Girl” by Sofi Papamarko May 19, 2021 Sofi Papamarko’s superhero origin story takes a little-known historical tragedy and imagines a different outcome.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 18: “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” by David J. Schow May 18, 2021 The term “splatterpunk” refers to a highly disreputable, extreme subgenre of graphic horror, but its best practitioners do much more with the form.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 17: “Julia and the Bazooka” by Anna Kavan May 17, 2021 Kavan’s story is typical of her technical approach, which telescopes time and proceeds in a kind of modified stream-of-consciousness narration.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 16: “The Unfinished Novel” by Valerie Martin May 16, 2021 Valerie Martin’s long story is about a poisonous artistic rivalry.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 15: “How to Live Longer” by M.G. Vassanji May 15, 2021 Two time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vassanji’s story is about missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 14: “Tits for Cigs” by Téa Mutonji May 14, 2021 Mutonji’s story is an empathetic look at burgeoning female sexuality and the roles women are expected to perform in our capitalist system.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 13: “Firebugs” by Craig Davidson May 13, 2021 The language of the story is tightly calibrated and walks a tightrope between lyricism and incipient violence.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 12: “Arsonists” by Chris Benjamin May 12, 2021 A story about a granddaughter on the day she euthanizes her grandmother is also a veiled critique of the residential school system.
31 Days of Stories, Day 11: “Solitary” by John Edgar Wideman May 11, 2021 The story is about the mother of an imprisoned son before, during, and after her bus trip to visit him.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 10: “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston May 10, 2021 Hurston’s story contains the folk idiom for which she is known, as well as being a signal example of her concern with women overcoming abuse at the hands of men.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 9: “The Cloak” by Robert Bloch May 9, 2021 Not a retread or homage, Bloch’s vampire story displays a momentum and technique typical of the author’s best work.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 8: “Toward Happy Civilization” by Samanta Schweblin; Megan McDowell, trans. May 8, 2021 Samanta Schweblin’s story about paralysis and paranoia shares elements in common with Beckett and Kafka.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 7: “Fan Mail” by Peter Robinson May 7, 2021 In this short, ironic work of feminist noir, the femme fatale turns the tables on the hapless men and their murderous scheme.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 6: “Still Life No. 41” by Teresa Solana; Peter Bush, trans. May 6, 2021 Catalan writer Soldana offers an outrageous premise for a story that serves as an acerbic satire of entitlement and power.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 5: “Renaissance Man” by Maxim Osipov; Boris Dralyuk, trans. May 5, 2021 A Moscow oligarch becomes involved with a redheaded soprano and an eleven-year-old boy in a tragedy from the contemporary Russian realist.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 4: “The Ice Queen” by Madeline Sonik May 4, 2021 Three female figures, and their carefully interwoven relationships, provide the backbone for this creepily fractured fairy tale.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 3: “Boys Go to Jupiter” by Danielle Evans May 3, 2021 Evans’s story deals with the fallout from a viral photo of a white woman in a Confederate flag bikini.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 2: “Adoro Te Devote” by Kristyn Dunnion May 2, 2021 Dunnion’s story, about a gay teenager navigating the shoals of religious and sexual attraction, finds its momentum in the juxtaposition of the sacred and profane.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 1: “Helping” by Robert Stone May 1, 2021 In this ironically titled story, the author examines subjects of addiction, masculine violence, and PTSD without ever resorting to easy didacticism.
31 Days of Stories 2021: Why read short stories? April 30, 2021 Stories require attention and concentration and often yield their meanings only over time, or in retrospect. But the best stories reward vigilance and repeated reading.
No future, or, the submerged punk ethos of Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake It So Real April 27, 2021 In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
“Not a likeable man”: “Four Stations in His Circle” by Austin Clarke March 7, 2021 Clarke’s story – nominally a comic work – is a piercing examination of the way Canadian capitalism disfavours those who are not white.
Brief Encounters: “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” by Patricia Highsmith January 25, 2021 The American author’s fiction is too frequently placed in a generic box; her output was much more wide ranging, including pieces like this atypical story.
Psychology of the uncanny: “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell October 24, 2020 This story of a man and his malevolent doppelgänger recalls Poe and includes a critique of apparent social respectability.
The law of unintended consequences: “The Fly” by George Langelaan October 20, 2020 The story, which originally appeared in 1957, includes a framing structure that distances the reader from the main action.
Terror takes flight: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson October 17, 2020 Of all the genre master’s classic novels and stories, none comes close to the sheer paranoid terror of this ruthless chiller.
“The actual worth of the things you make”: “Wolverton Station” by Joe Hill October 15, 2020 Hill’s Gothic tale is an exuberant mashup of Warren Zevon, Little Red Riding Hood, and “An American Werewolf in London.”
“I am a singularity”: “Event Horizon” by Sunny Moraine October 13, 2020 The house in the story – a living thing that demands to be fed – is a metaphor for difference and the other.
“What did he have to report?”: “Paranoia” by Shirley Jackson October 4, 2020 Jackson’s story of the commute from hell is one of her most nerve-shattering, Kafkaesque tales.
The automaton cometh: “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann; Ritchie Robertson, trans. October 2, 2020 The Prussian author’s 1816 tale is an early 19th century progenitor of the modern horror story.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 31: “Home” by Langston Hughes May 31, 2020 First published in 1934, Langston Hughes’s story throws a spotlight on racial violence that continues in America today.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 30: “Now More than Ever” by Zadie Smith May 30, 2020 Zadie Smith’s controversial story is a dystopian satire about call-out culture.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 29: “Book Review” by Nancy Hale May 29, 2020 Nancy Hale’s story about the dangers of poisonous political ideologies is surprisingly relevant to our current moment.
31 Days of Stories 2020: Day 28: “South Congress” by Bryan Washington May 28, 2020 Bryan Washington’s story is about a veteran drug dealer who becomes a kind of surrogate father to an undocumented Guatemalan teen.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 27: “Baby Jesus and the Intruder” by Elise Levine May 27, 2020 Elise Levine, sui generis.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 26: “Ships in High Transit” by Binyavanga Wainaina May 26, 2020 Binyavanga Wainaina’s story is about the performative cultural roles people are expected to play.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 25: “Petty Theft” by Adrian Michael Kelly May 25, 2020 Adrian Michael Kelly uses a train ride as a means to examine a character who is much less upright than he at first appears.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 24: “Sardonicus” by Ray Russell May 24, 2020 Ray Russell’s 1961 modern Gothic tale has lost none of its power to shock its reader.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 23: “The Art of Shipbuilding” by Tyler Keevil May 23, 2020 Tyler Keevil’s brief two-hander is a parable about what it takes to be an artist.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 22: “Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country” by Chavisa Woods May 22, 2020 Chavisa Woods’s expressionistic story is about feeling like an outcast in the place you were born.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 21: “For Smokers Only” by Julio Ramón Ribeyro; Katherine Silver, trans. May 21, 2020 Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s semi-autobiographical story investigates the metaphysical pleasures a smoker finds in cigarettes.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 20: “Mani Pedi” by Souvankham Thammavongsa May 20, 2020 Souvankham Thammavongsa’s story is a multi-layered tale of a former boxer who takes a job at his sister’s nail salon.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 19: “Long Term Care” by Kate Cayley May 19, 2020 Kate Cayley’s emotionally shattering story is about the struggles of adult children managing a parent’s end-of-life care.
31 Days of Stories 2020, Day 18: “Brutto” by Helen DeWitt May 18, 2020 Helen DeWitt’s story is about the fraught tension between artistic integrity and fame.