More ‘bests’: short fiction

Best Canadian Stories 2026
Selected by Zsuzsi Gartner

Windsor, Biblioasis, 2025
$24.94 / 9781771966788

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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Before words of praise for the all-round impressive anthology of short fiction, a couple of caveats.

Caveat 1) Personally, I’d vote for a change of title. Best Canadian Stories? Who’s to say, and according to what criteria that short story writers, literary journal editors, and literary profs have all agreed upon? Hand-Picked Canadian Stories, sure. Favourite Canadian Stories, okay. Curated Canadian Stories. Yup, alright. Canadian Stories That [Name of Guest Selecting Editor] Really Likes and Heartily Recommends. Wordy and clunky, absolutely, but the gist is there. 

Think about it: for the Big Three literary prizes in Canada this year with jurors tasked with choosing the best, 9 jury members selected 14 works of fiction as finalists. If 3 whole juries managed to whittle down a towering pile of novels to only 14 and then eventually chose a different winning title for each prize, any evaluative consensus is pure illusion.

Given that, it’s reasonable to believe that one editor reading what could be a hundred short stories with a goal of selecting the best would, at minimum, lean necessarily on quantification, a tried-and-true alchemical formula: with X + Y + Z = a run-of-the-mill story abracadabras into an exceptional one. 

The selecting editor for the current Best Canadian Stories, Zsuzsi Gartner (The Beguiling), hitches her wagon on a couple of American short story writer stars for an assist. There’s Lorrie Moore (“A short story is the intersection of the usual and ordinary with the sudden and extraordinary. Short stories are about how the world is not what is seems—the literary equivalent of biodiversity” and “Part puppet show, part mugging.”). But in those words, Moore aims to loosely define the genre, not determine the best of the genre. Replying to George’s Saunders’ definitional metaphor—“We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Always be escalating.”—Gartner writes that all of “the stories in this anthology have reserves of energy to spare, never flagging, never spinning their wheels.” But as a criterion, being energetic at an amphetamine level seems somewhat arbitrary. The best story is, categorically, a non-stop kinetic story… really?  

Personal taste and cognitive bias factor in, inevitably, so why not acknowledge that? 

Considering a little thought experiment—if last year’s selecting editor (Newfoundland-based Lisa Moore, whose volume featured Newfoundland authors in a surprising number) returned a year later for another round of picks—I’d bet the farm she would not choose all that many of the stories that Vancouver-based Zsuzsi Gartner eventually chose for the current volume, which highlights short stories by BC writers in a notable way. One woman’s best, then, is not another woman’s best, so why continue with the pretence of objective evaluation?

Caveat 2) A phrase in Gartner’s 7-page introduction set my teeth on edge. Initially, the selecting editor commits to a bit in the introduction, depicting herself as an intrepid literary hunter: “Once upon a time,” Gartner begins, “a short-story hunter tasked with seeking the most wonderful stories in the land….” 

That savvy hunter, the storyteller’s tale continues, wandered over vast literary geographies, such was the nature of her dedication.  

And then this: “Many of these marvels were not easy to find, hidden as they were amidst the forests of sameness and swamplands of meh.” 

I felt insulted by that insult. (Not personally insulted, I’ll add, as I haven’t published a short story in several years.) The dismissive tone, though, and the apparent mean-girl callousness that led one “hunter” to repudiate the work of every other Canadian writer except for the fourteen she chose, that stuck with me.

Selected: the best (so judges “the hunter”). The rest: brushed aside, categorized as literary detritus— as banal “sameness” and the forgettably “meh.”

It’s all hurtful and antagonistic, and curiously pointless: the middle finger given to scores of dedicated writers—and to the several handfuls of editors who choose to edit and then publish the stories Gartner’s poor hunter had to suffer through during her quest for the best—but to what end?

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Originally published in literary journals like The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Granta, Room, Plenitude, and sub/Terrain, the stories of the anthology illustrate the definition by Moore that Gartner mentions in her introduction: “A short story is the intersection of the usual and ordinary with the sudden and extraordinary.”

For instance, North Vancouver writer Erin MacNair’s “Sand Penis,” which, incidentally, pairs nicely with the domesticity-gone-sour stories of Squamish-based author Clea Young’s story collection, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, starts and finishes in setting that’s usual and ordinary: parents and their children at a west coast beach. Yet, it quickly goes all Lord of the Flies when the kids build an immense phallus out of sand. Soon, being “immobilized with unease” is the least of the parents’ worries. 

An age-old coming of age trope—the father-and-son hunting trip—is upended in Evan J’s “Camouflage and Fame.” The piece by Evan J (Ripping down half the trees), a writer who “lives in Manitoba and so-called British Columbia,” offers a pleasing mix of biting humour and rage. In it, the first-person narrator—who is “not a good hunter”—exclaims, “I want to be the first enby hunter.” Though enby (= NB = nonbinary) and ambitious, the youth has some obstacles to outsmart on the last day of hunting season (mostly in the form of tradition-minded dad). Hoping for internet fame—“how hard can it be to demand space for queer-hunter identity,” the narrator asks rhetorically—the novice hunter has not quite fully comprehended the old saying about the best laid plans of mice and men often going awry. 

Likewise, Bill Gaston’s “Jack’s Christmas Dinner,” set on an island similar in nature to Gabriola, which Gaston (Tunnel Island) calls home, takes a not unusual occurrence—an orphan’s Christmas—and throws in alcohol, psilocybin mushrooms, and a carrion bird. A warm holiday tale that ends uproariously with “vomiting loudly and thoroughly”: what’s not to enjoy? 

Right after, Mayne Islander Grant Buday (Orphans of Empire) opens “The Light Never Shuts Up” with “Miroslav spent the first day aboard the Abyssinia vomiting.” In line with irreverent historical fiction-writing evident in his recent novel, In the Belly of the Sphinx, the (comical, if grisly) tale of an epic quest in the early twentieth century is more Don Quixote than The Odyssey. 

Relationships could not be more ordinary as subjects for short fiction and, true to Moore, Gartner picks  extraordinary ones for Best Canadian Stories 2026.

In Alex Leslie’s “The Formula,” for example, the Vancouver-based author (Vancouver for Beginners) celebrates queer friendship: “Friendship was the only religion that made sense to me after I left home, left is a euphemism, my mom sat on the taped-up leather couch in her sunroom cluttered with laundry detergent boxes and wilted rubber trees draped in Christmas lights and said I’ll never accept you I’m proud of my traditional upbringing….” It’s a lovely, albeit sad, voice-driven story that does not shy away from the dark aspects of close friendships, especially as they evolve over the years. 

Bright and yet satirically-barbed, New Westminster-based Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts) puts in an appearance with “Keeping Things Fresh,” which the author describes as “a story about what could have been.” Covering decades, it captures the years of a long romance where a woman changes and changes and changes again to hold the affections of a colossally thankless boyfriend-turned fiancé-turned-new-husband. (Does she get the last laugh? Oh, yes.)

If domestic realism is CanLit’s most ordinary genre in fiction, Gartner is sure to features several stories that colour far, far outside the lines. Sophie Crocker (brat), who “lives in Vancouver on stolen Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land,” describes her story “Castor & Pollux” as playing “with dualities: romance/brutality, dread/hope, tragedy/comedy, and loving/hating Geminis.”

It’s also set in a timeline when Geminis are being conscripted to fight in a war on one of Saturn’s moons.

“Containment,” by Petra Chambers, a west coaster who “lives in the traditional territory of the PE’ntlatc and K’ómoks Nation,” defies any reviewer’s attempt at a two-sentence summary. In part, Chambers writes, at the piece’s centre “are memoir fragments which double as an assignment completed by an alien student studying twentieth-century humans in a galactic university.” The SF setting provides the author with ample opportunity to peer into humanity’s not-to-distant past. 

Other pieces range from a doomed utopian expedition (Aaron Kreuter’s “Tasmanian Shores”) and a doomed romance (“Sounding a Name,” by Winnipeg author Margaret Sweatman) to, well, “Wo.” In the latter, Randy Boyagoda was inspired by the life of his Sri Lanka-born father (who lives with dementia). More generally, Boyagoda writes, he was interested “in exploring the ways in which an older person tries to make sense of how their life has turned out as it has, and how they try to make connections across wide and very different experiences, in spite of the fragmentary memories that bring these alive.” 

The year’s best? You’ll accept that claim at face value or with a grain or two of salt. Me, I was happy to read the stories, enjoyed their authors’ multifarious understanding of the malleable genre, and intrigued by what stories they chose to tell and how. My earlier caveats aside, Best Canadian Stories 2026 is a keeper. 

Brett Josef Grubisic assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s written about recent books by Jennifer Cooper, Caroline Adderson, Sunny Dhillon, Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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