31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 22: “Her Ex Writes a Novel” by Shashi Bhat
"Fiction is a more subtle and sophisticated revenge porn."
31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 20: “Half-Pipe” by Zoe Whittall
Whittall manages a delicate balancing act: she addresses an incident of sexual assault without turning her story into a simple trauma narrative.
31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 14: “The House on the Esplanade” by Anne Hébert; Norma Scott Stoddart, trans.
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."
31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 11: “Milk” by Anuja Varghese
The story focuses on Anju, an overweight racialized high school student who is relentlessly bullied by a group of popular white girls.
31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 9: “Burial Ground” by Carleigh Baker
The idea of progress, and what it displaces, takes on a surreal aspect in "Burial Ground."
31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 5: “Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?” by Elyse Gasco
Gasco has endowed her story with something that is terribly unfashionable in book club circles and social media feeds: an unlikable narrator.
31 Days of Stories, Day 4: “The Mummers Parade” by Bridget Canning
The shifting ground of motivation and relationship between the two characters is brought out metaphorically in the mummers' costumes.
31 Days of Stories, Day 3: “A Degree of Suffering Is Required” by Christine Estima
The speaker in the story is Azurée Ghiz, the descendent of Arab immigrants in Toronto.
Future (un)certain: An unconventional POV undercuts the emotional force in Jean-Phillippe Baril Guérard’s You Crushed It
Guérard's novel gives the impression that the author is impatient with traditional narrative forms.
“Mondays are bait days”: The harsh landscape of Chris Bailey’s rigorously unsentimental second collection
In Bailey's case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.