Brief Encounters

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.

Canadian-Irish writer Colin Barrett is a wizard with language that sings with the rhythms and cadences of the working class.

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.

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.

The ninety-four-year-old author’s story, about art and failure, is charged with typically graceful and metaphorical language.

Hage’s story of a doomed, ineffectual man is a layered consideration of religion, history, and the nature of celebrity.

Pugsley resurrects a seldom-used literary form – the epistolary story – and repurposes it for the internet age.

Fu’s three-part story fuses realism with fabulist elements.

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.

Byatt’s story, about a creative writing teacher and a promising older student, contains a submerged lesson about how to write worthwhile literature.

Porter’s suggestive and imagistic style lends her story an acute psychological insight.

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.

From the woman who many consider to be Brazil’s greatest writer, a story about the family party from hell.

Seghers’s story, about the conditions necessary for an unhappy man to become radicalized, holds pressing lessons for our current historical moment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barker’s psychologically tense story examines the price we pay for confronting our darkest fears.

In this chilly story, three men do battle for the soul of a fifteen-year-old film star.

An ice cream truck driver faces mental anguish resulting from his inability to escape the incessant jingle of his vehicle’s music.

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.

In Friedman’s story, family secrets, like orchids, flourish in darkness.

In a brief and barbed satire, Giller winner Omar El Akkad links our current geopolitical malaise with the capitalist impulse to sell stuff.

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.

Pirandello’s story takes up the writer and dramatist’s great theme: the instability of identity and the untrustworthy nature of physical reality.

Lahiri’s story excavates the emotional toll on a woman who is carrying on an affair with a married man.

This story from the noted Egyptian author interrogates toxic power dynamics within institutions.

Millar’s story, ostensibly a psychological drama, is in fact a trenchant satire on the pernicious attractions of a particular kind of American dream.

Set in a tiny fishing village on Canada’s east coast, the story limns the distance between fact and supposition.

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.

If the novel is a regal lion king, the short story is a cackling hyena.

Alexander MacLeod’s new collection is out in April.

These twelve stories interrogate individual human consciousness and the dangers of technology in our postmodern world.

“Art is a way of remembering what it is like to be alive when you may have forgotten,” says Cayley.

“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.

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.

Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.

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.

Though Bhat’s new book is described as her second novel, the individual pieces comprise all the attributes of linked stories.

A Borgesian story about literary posterity and the fickleness of memory, from an Australian master.

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.”

Irish author Flattery’s novella-length story is an enthusiastic evisceration of the patriarchy and institutional pomposity.

Conrad’s story is at once a version of a doppelgänger story and an examination of repressed psychology and moral ambiguity.

In Atwoodian terms, O’Neill’s story represents a conflation of doomed animals and survival.

Two stories about pleasure and pain interrogate the nature of trust and what we risk when we relinquish control.

“Violations” is a story that instructs its reader how to read it even as it is unfolding on the page.

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.

Diane Schoemperlen’s plaintive tale is about what happens when youthful promise gives way to the creeping disillusion of adulthood.

A fantastical story with origins in myth and fairy tale, Aiken’s narrative imagines the world’s greatest Shakespearean actor as a werewolf.

One of Faulkner’s most exuberant tales, this story of poetic revenge is also uproariously funny.

Eva Crocker’s dual father-and-son narration draws parallels between two characters trapped in their own lives.

Sofi Papamarko’s superhero origin story takes a little-known historical tragedy and imagines a different outcome.

The term “splatterpunk” refers to a highly disreputable, extreme subgenre of graphic horror, but its best practitioners do much more with the form.

Kavan’s story is typical of her technical approach, which telescopes time and proceeds in a kind of modified stream-of-consciousness narration.

Valerie Martin’s long story is about a poisonous artistic rivalry.

Two time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vassanji’s story is about missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams.

Mutonji’s story is an empathetic look at burgeoning female sexuality and the roles women are expected to perform in our capitalist system.

The language of the story is tightly calibrated and walks a tightrope between lyricism and incipient violence.

A story about a granddaughter on the day she euthanizes her grandmother is also a veiled critique of the residential school system.

The story is about the mother of an imprisoned son before, during, and after her bus trip to visit him.

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.

Not a retread or homage, Bloch’s vampire story displays a momentum and technique typical of the author’s best work.

Samanta Schweblin’s story about paralysis and paranoia shares elements in common with Beckett and Kafka.

In this short, ironic work of feminist noir, the femme fatale turns the tables on the hapless men and their murderous scheme.

Catalan writer Soldana offers an outrageous premise for a story that serves as an acerbic satire of entitlement and power.

A Moscow oligarch becomes involved with a redheaded soprano and an eleven-year-old boy in a tragedy from the contemporary Russian realist.

Three female figures, and their carefully interwoven relationships, provide the backbone for this creepily fractured fairy tale.

Evans’s story deals with the fallout from a viral photo of a white woman in a Confederate flag bikini.

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.

In this ironically titled story, the author examines subjects of addiction, masculine violence, and PTSD without ever resorting to easy didacticism.

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.

In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.

Clarke’s story – nominally a comic work – is a piercing examination of the way Canadian capitalism disfavours those who are not white.

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.

This story of a man and his malevolent doppelgänger recalls Poe and includes a critique of apparent social respectability.

The story, which originally appeared in 1957, includes a framing structure that distances the reader from the main action.

Of all the genre master’s classic novels and stories, none comes close to the sheer paranoid terror of this ruthless chiller.

Hill’s Gothic tale is an exuberant mashup of Warren Zevon, Little Red Riding Hood, and “An American Werewolf in London.”

The house in the story – a living thing that demands to be fed – is a metaphor for difference and the other.

Jackson’s story of the commute from hell is one of her most nerve-shattering, Kafkaesque tales.

The Prussian author’s 1816 tale is an early 19th century progenitor of the modern horror story.

First published in 1934, Langston Hughes’s story throws a spotlight on racial violence that continues in America today.

Zadie Smith’s controversial story is a dystopian satire about call-out culture.

Nancy Hale’s story about the dangers of poisonous political ideologies is surprisingly relevant to our current moment.

Bryan Washington’s story is about a veteran drug dealer who becomes a kind of surrogate father to an undocumented Guatemalan teen.

Elise Levine, sui generis.

Binyavanga Wainaina’s story is about the performative cultural roles people are expected to play.

Adrian Michael Kelly uses a train ride as a means to examine a character who is much less upright than he at first appears.

Ray Russell’s 1961 modern Gothic tale has lost none of its power to shock its reader.

Tyler Keevil’s brief two-hander is a parable about what it takes to be an artist.

Chavisa Woods’s expressionistic story is about feeling like an outcast in the place you were born.

Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s semi-autobiographical story investigates the metaphysical pleasures a smoker finds in cigarettes.

Souvankham Thammavongsa’s story is a multi-layered tale of a former boxer who takes a job at his sister’s nail salon.

Kate Cayley’s emotionally shattering story is about the struggles of adult children managing a parent’s end-of-life care.

Helen DeWitt’s story is about the fraught tension between artistic integrity and fame.

Herman Melville’s tale is a story of disillusionment and thwarted idealism.

The Canadian novelist and short story writer has put together a list that provides a robust cross-section of Canadian short fiction in the 21st century.

In “The Swan Suit,” Katherine Fawcett updates the tropes of classical folk tales, lending them a feminist spin.

Anosh Irani’s story is about a grieving mother who is convinced her dead son has been reincarnated as a penguin at the local zoo.