Last year I read 11 of the longlisted titles for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and with the recent announcement of the 2024 longlist I was prompted to reflect on 2023’s selections. Three of the short story collections I’ve already written about—Talia Laksmni Kolluri’s What We Fed to
Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
“'Once there we are almost home. Pegnitz is a junction. Trains go through every few minutes, in all directions. In most directions,' he corrected." Herbert is careful to be exact when he's speaking to his young son, Little Bert, who believes every word his father says. Later when Herbert
The longer the books in the Love Medicine cycle, the harder it is to recall that Louise Erdrich began with short fiction, stories which linked, interconnected, taking their own time to draw in their circles before spiralling outward once more. Tracks and Four Souls were slim volumes, but readers
Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and, most recently, The Widow: girls make for good pageturners. But Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and Fiona Barton are looking to tell different kinds of stories about girls. In a BookPage interview, Gillian Flynn tries to explain why Gone Girl captured "the popular
