The New Quarterly

Forty years of Canadian writers and writing — now becoming available digitally for the first time. Get access to our growing back catalogue from all your devices. Free of charge.

Subscribe Now For Free

#Featured Reads3

Issue 164

Hulking in the Dream Forest

Sleeping in a rest area at the top of the pass
when the call came, not much time left,
staring at sparse pines, semis chugging uphill;
a brief plateau before the jake-break-descent. Read more.

Bren Simmers in
Issue 164

Sofiya’s Choice

And what if, Sofiya thought, a person was headed in neither direction but was mired in the churning currents in between? That person, wanting to believe she could stay afloat or thread water, would eventually drown. Sofiya, though indeed mired and tired, refused to drown. Read more.

Tristan Marajh in
Issue 164

White Sneakers

My sister cooked up the idea. She’d found this Scandinavian Students’ Association trip that went across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by train, stopping in different cities along the way. In those days you couldn’t really go to the USSR except on some sort of official tour like that.  Read more.

Tim McCaskell in

#Online Exclusives3

The Writer’s Corner

February 3, 2023

A Conversation with Grace Vermeer

Kim Jernigan: I’m curious about the timeline implied by your poem—how long an interval was there between hearing the stories and the wise healer’s “It is finished”? The last verse takes us back to the old story…Are we to see that as the ache from the old wounds?  Grace Vermeer: I heard the stories as a […]

Kim Jernigan and Grace Vermeer in
January 31, 2023

Finding the Form with Tristan Marajh

  Like my protagonist Sofiya Shirazi stifled and suppressed herself before finding her true form in Sofiya’s Choice, so too did I stifle and suppress my tale before The New Quarterly let its full form be expressed. Short fiction writers will attest that they often omit and edit in order to have their work fit […]

Tristan Marajh in
January 26, 2023

Hollay Ghadery’s Writing Space

Where do I write? You name it! The kitchen table, the bed, the bath, on walks or runs, riding shotgun in the car on the way to swimming or piano or drama lessons, or in my actual office: there’s no place I don’t write, which isn’t to say I don’t have favourite places to write […]

Hollay Ghadery in