Canadian women sure can write short stories!

Lynn Coady has just won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her book Hellgoing, a book of short stories – only the fourth book of short stories to win this award since its inception in 1994.

Publisher House of Anansi writes the following of Hellgoing:

Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.

Sounds like a winner, indeed! (Makes us want to get the book…)

Speaking of winners, Alice Munro, “master of the contemporary short story,” was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, and her works have certainly graven themselves in the minds and memories of Canadian readers: Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman (which won the Giller in 1998), and Runaway (winner of the Giller in 2004), among many other short story collections. What is her winning style? Hard to pin down, of course, but it has oft been said that her short stories carry the emotional and literary weight of novels.

And there are so many others. Just pick up a copy of The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women, or The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Women’s Stories, or any volume of Dropped Threads for instant access to an excellent selection of these works.

For a place among the greats of Canadian women writers of short stories, we think M.A.C. Farrant should be seriously considered.

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of ten collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered in Vancouver in 2013. Talon is proud to have published four of her books: The Strange Truth About Us, Down the Road to Eternity, The Breakdown So Far, and Darwin Alone in the Universe.

A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, British Columbia, Farrant’s work as been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the Gemini Award (for the Bravo short-film adaptation of her story “Rob’s Guns & Ammo”), the Victoria Book Prize, and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years, among others. She is a regular book reviewer for the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post.

Though not a book of short stories in the same way her other works are, The Strange Truth About Us takes the form of a series of very short chapters, more like vignettes, shining a light into the arguably dark or perhaps mundane experiences of one middle-aged couple.

The Globe and Mail, in fact, named The Strange Truth About Us one of the Top Twenty-Three Canadian Fiction Books of 2012 and described it as

… impossible to summarize, save to say that it is both an acknowledgment of and an antidote to all the uncertainty we must shoulder in this, our age of anxiety and absence. Delightful and disturbing in all the best ways, this book addresses that which mostly remains unspoken in ways that have seldom been spoken before.”

Author Garry Thomas Morse has good things to say about her work; his Text in the City column “Novel Novel” has a section on Farrant’s work and style (find this section about three quarters of the way through the essay).

Readers of fiction who wish to step outside of their comfort zones may wish to try Farrant, whose stories are little gems – shiny and pretty but hard to crack – and this is a good thing. Readers who have already delved into the off-kilter or uncomfortably exposed or prettily framed world written by Farrant will look forward to her forthcoming book of short stories, The World Afloat (Spring 2014).