The Colophon

Only one writer on this year’s list, Emma Donoghue, has won the prize previously.

Indigo can’t fail, but it also appears less and less interested in operating primarily as a bookseller.

Twelve titles in total made the 2023 longlist, which was culled from a record-setting 145 submissions.

City in Flames and Camp Zero address societal discord via imaginative scenarios that only slightly exaggerated from the evening news.

The Marigold is a quintessential urban horror tale; The Handyman Method relocates the terror to the suburbs.

The stories display a surface placidity that belies their deeper structure.

LeBlanc’s short fiction is refreshingly resistant to closure.

The Canadian situation is in stark contrast to other Western countries that have more robust copyright protections.

“He was profoundly intelligent, but quite quiet. It was sometimes hard to know what he was thinking.”

“It’s very important to me that we look forward and thrive and that we signal stability to the market,” says Anansi president Semareh Al-Hillal.

“I look forward to putting my own stamp on a storied house,” says Brochu.

Troll is not a book liable to find a wide mainstream audience.

The core of the novel has a propulsion and a dramatic weight that works in its favour.

If there is a God hovering over Harmer’s narrative, it is of the Old Testament variety.

As a poet, Cayley is particularly good at juxtaposition often manifested as subtle or not-so-subtle shifts in tone and tenor.

Plett is not content to let her story act as a didactic tale about cis intolerance.

In describing fire – its properties and its behaviour – Vaillant is at his most enthralling.

Porter’s story is as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

Imagery involving implicit threat is threaded throughout the story.

“Doi Moi Beans” is a story about exploitation; not the obvious kind, but the subtle version.

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.

Bátiz’s story examines the class divides that permeate the city through the prism of a Mexican immigrant.

Faith is, to those who don’t subscribe, a kind of pandering to scared people.

Hill’s short story was first published in the Walrus in 2011.

A detailed and propulsive true crime story, Clara at the Door with a Revolver is also a work of social history.

The brief novel’s overall structure is frequently at odds with the specificity of the narrative that is unfolding.

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

“I think Quebec is Newfoundland writ large because we do have our own culture and that is so tied up in the language.”

Very much in the spirit of a good grift, the novel lures us in willingly before snatching all our assurances away from us.

The notion of making oneself “legible” to oneself and others is at the centre of Halen’s project.

“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.”

This Is the House That Luke Built is a strong first novel, clearly adept at marrying its form and content.

Failure is inevitable because perfection is unattainable.

“That kind of direct connection with readers and creators is probably the majority of why I make art in the first place.”

Perović’s ideal of Canadian nationalism based in universality and Enlightenment freedoms has always been chimerical.

Lee does not make value judgments about high or low culture: she is equally at home watching Wong-Kar Wai films without subtitles and watching twenty seasons’ worth of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

What is apparent throughout Bad Cree is Johns’s facility for dealing with the rocky and tumultuous terrain of familial memory.

“I wanted to approach magic as a sort of organic, biological thing.”

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

By melding elements of Greek mythology, nature, and body horror, Desjardins has created something unique and enticing.

Metafiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy are among the genres represented in these brief and intriguing works.

Paced like a thriller and cast as a chase novel, The Rooftop Garden is a compulsive yet somewhat vexatious read.

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

“The more conscious you are, the more intentional you are about writing, the better you understand why your own stories work or don’t,” Teebi says.

Godfrey, who succumbed to complications from lung cancer, was “an extraordinary … writer whose voice was clean, crisp, and daring on every page.”

Taken together, Dream States and Sideways comprise a particularly incisive look at the theory and practice of smart cities.

White Resin restores a vision of the Canadian wilderness more in line with Indigenous ideas of a mutually dependent relationship between humanity and the natural environment.

One of the innovations made by the publisher during the Covid-19 pandemic is the establishment of an editorial committee to seek out new work.

The two Indigenous authors offer different ways of thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and providing suggestions for how to rewrite those stories to our benefit.

The twin poles of scientific reason and religious faith animate this vibrant and surprisingly funny memoir.

When Khaw is at their best, their writing has teeth – blackened, razor sharp, and ready to rend flesh.

Small presses and debut authors account for the bulk of the fifteen titles that appear on this year’s shortlists.

The multiple award winning author was best known for his novels featuring English detective Alan Banks.

Ducks deserves a place alongside Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus as one of the finest examples of its genre.

As a primer to the ways cinematic horror works on audiences’ psyches and the specific neurological responses these techniques can elicit, Nightmare Fuel is a breezy and fluent read.

It would be salutary to see critics inside and outside of the academy pick up this book and engage with it thoroughly and thoughtfully.

Two collections of short fiction and two works in translation are represented on a list that spans the country from PEI to Alberta.

The single book review was of a book by technology columnist Josh O’Kane.

The Talosite exists at the confluence of sci-fi and body horror, with the actual horrors of the First World War a constant shadow in the background.

“If I could go back, I might tell younger me, ‘Don’t do this.’ “

Lambert uses the structure of a classical Greek tragedy to tell the story of a strike at a sawmill and the amoral, charismatic figure caught up in it.

Rather than farm teams, it’s preferable to think of smaller publishers as craft breweries or artisinal vineyards.

Plett’s own debut collection of short fiction, A Safe Girl to Love, is being reissued by her current publisher, Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press.

One need not agree with everything the author writes or believes in order to recognize the importance of his memoir as a document of the LGBTQ+ community’s development in Canada.

Despite some missteps and shots at easy targets, Parker’s novels combine to form a provocative riposte to a culture that valorizes a certain kind of profane masculinity.

Like Animals has a modernist sheen, providing a chaotic surface reflective of its protagonist’s conflicted and disaffected psychology.

“Even though I’ve been living in this country for twenty-two years and this is for all intents and purposes my home – it’s where I intend to live the rest of my life – elsewhere is this notion that one or two pieces are missing,” says Abdelmahmoud.

In her imaginative sequel to Sputnik’s Children, Favro comments on the nature and responsibility of storytelling.

Ruthnum’s brief work of fin-de-siècle body horror reads like a mash-up of David Cronenberg and Henry James.

The novel, which is structured to resemble a double album of interconnected tracks, follows a cast of characters searching for a sense of belonging.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The new members-only social-media site aims to replicate the café or salon in a virtual environment.

Stintzi’s novel traverses space, time, and a sprawling cast of characters in its attempt to allegorize our most profound challenges in the present.

The author says in a statement that she has “full confidence” in the work that went into the book.

The move comes after criticism of the cold-case team’s methods and assumptions by experts on the Holocaust and the Franks.

Alexander MacLeod’s new collection is out in April.

Edgar Smith, the convicted murderer of a fifteen-year-old girl, found some powerful advocates in conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and Alfred A. Knopf editor Sophie Wilkins.

Glickman’s focus on technique on a granular level reveals her to be a deeply knowledgeable and highly erudite reader of a wide range of poets.

The novel, about a sentient AI that develops a relationship with a university therapist, examines ontological questions about what it is that makes us human.