Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada’s preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can’t really tell for sure.
Influenced by the dark edginess of Southern Gothic literature but set in 1984 to the music of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Stevie Nicks, After We Drowned ties together themes of environmental crisis and poverty, noting that it is poor people who often bear the brunt of ecological disaster. This is a coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.
The stories in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat’s characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate.
As If is a collection of stories that reminds us that all literature—indeed awareness itself—is at first speculative. These stories confront the false certainties of the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon their characters to turn possibilities into action.
By Grant Buday
Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to shut Rosenberg up once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
By Ed Macdonald
Atomic Storybook is a new novel from the author of Spat the Dummy. It’s about the early years of Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who feel like they are living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui and physics, Atomic Storybook is also about living and dying in what is, undeniably, an illusion.
In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they’re attached to even lonelier bodies.
Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn’t always tragic, but it’s often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.
Black Rabbit & Other Stories is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility.
