“The right story, at the right time, if you happen to be open to it … can perhaps move you so far outside of yourself that you will not consider going back.” “Like meeting a stranger, much of the pleasure of a story is its unknown power,” writes Best Canadian Stories 2020 guest editor Paige Cooper. “The right story, at the right time, if you happen to be open to it … can perhaps move you so far outside of yourself that you will not consider going back.” From Festival du Voyageur to the shores of Lake Erie, Tbilisi to Toronto, the Amisk River to a hotel-turned-hospital in the midst of a mysterious pandemic, this wide-ranging anthology brings together the real and the speculative,...

And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection. Or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet: ALDEN NOWLAN's "A Boy's Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988. The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison...

With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can't seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day. Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet...

Earnest, small-town Lawrence Campbell is fascinated by his poetry professor, the charismatic and uncompromising Jim Arsenault. Larry is determined to escape a life of thrifty drudgery and intellectual poverty working for his parents' motel and mini-golf business on Prince Edward Island. Jim appears to the young poet as a beacon of authenticity - mercurial, endlessly creative, fearless in his confrontations with the forces of conformity. And he drinks a lot. Jim's magnetic personality soon draws Larry's entire poetry composition class into his orbit. Among the other literary acolytes are Sherrie Mitten, with her ringletted blonde hair and guileless blue eyes, the turtlenecked, urbane...