Brief Encounters

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.

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.