Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva Good Citizens Need Not Fear is, succinctly, a collection of connected short stories, but a fuller description is a bit more complicated. Set in a small, late Soviet-era Ukrainian town, the stories build upon the previous ones and often bleed into the stories that follow, creating an ongoing narrative that showcases the…
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Use Your Imagination!

by Kris Bertin Use Your Imagination! is a short story collection that very immediately put me in mind with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, both because the majority of the stories deal with misfits behaving badly––or just strangely––and because they’re built upon a solid foundation of exceptional writing. This is happily one of those cases where…
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Jesus’ Son

by Denis Johnson Here’s another one I’ve been putting off for a while. I shouldn’t have. I mean, it came highly recommended by someone whose opinion I trust, but it’s a short story collection, and for reasons I recently touched on, I’ve been a bit reluctant to do short stories lately. That said, it’s nice…
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Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady When I’m choosing books to read, I do my best to pick things I think I’ll enjoy. I like to think I’m getting better at having an understanding about this, going in, largely based on covers and brief readings and discussions about books ahead of time, but, obviously, I’m not perfect. That…
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Twenty Years on Snowshoes

edited by Rosalind Maki and Deborah de Bakker Coming from humble beginnings in 1997, The Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop has grown over the years to become the largest literary organization in the region––definitely cause to celebrate. Twenty Years on Snowshoes is a fitting celebration, a collection of winning entries from the short fiction and memoir…
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First Things First

by Diane Schoemperlen First Things First is a collection of early short stories by Schoemperlen, published from the mid-’70s––while studying English at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University––up to the early ’90s. This wide breadth of publication gives a reader a bird’s-eye-view of the evolution of an author. And this isn’t to suggest the writing’s poor early…
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Gravity Wells

by James Alan Gardner I didn’t actually know who James Gardner was until attending the 2015 Ad Astra science fiction and fantasy writers’ convention, where I had the pleasure of sitting in on several author panels in which he participated. Despite the clear knowledge he displayed within the intelligent discussions I witnessed, nothing really made…
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Spirals

by John Pringle Though it’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of reading one of Pringle’s short story collections, Spirals starts in a very familiar way, with his story, A Good Boy. Not only was this the only one in the collection that I’d read previously, it’s also a contest-winning story––the 2014 Northwestern…
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Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories

by Franz Kafka The inclusion of quite a few posthumously published works in Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories fills me with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, given that Kafka requested that his unpublished stories be destroyed after his death, I feel as though I have no right to look upon them. As a…
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Carry On, Jeeves

by P. G. Wodehouse Carry On, Jeeves was my first foray into the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, and, I must say, I had no idea it could be this wonderful. The book is made up of a series of vignettes in which Bertram Wooster and his butler, Jeeves, work to help Bertie’s friends get…
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