Brief Encounters

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.

Short story writers operate in a literary form that seems endlessly malleable, protean, and open to experimentation.

Each of these anthologies features a range of subjects and approaches, testifying to the richness of the landscape in Canada.

“I’m interested in that idea: when we transform ourselves, are we transforming our pain?”

“These stories ask the question What is a monster? and complicate the definition of ‘monster’ along the way.”

The journals in which the stories originally appeared will receive $200 per published story in the anthology.

Traces of writers as diverse as Daniil Kharms and Jorge Luis Borges are detectable in the collection.

Its generic inappropriateness notwithstanding, “What We Can Know About Thunderman” is worth the price of the current volume all on its own.

Canning’s fiction is as intriguing for what it leaves out as for what gets included.

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.