TNQers Recommend: Short Story Edition
To commemorate short story month, we asked our readers to share which short stories they’ve loved recently. Below is a list of short stories they recommended.
To read these stories, select either the cover image or story title.
It’s about family and secrets and the strangeness of childhood and its lens on the adult world. I can’t stop thinking about it.
– SM
Archer creates a new world where “anything you bury will grow.” I usually shy away from the magical, but “Burrowing Creatures” reads like a real place with suburban swimming pools, tidal flats, and “skinny trees and scorpions”. He seamlessly weaves the fantastical into the story, where a motherless young boy (the retrospective narrator tells us), was excited to see his new life with his Papi grow: “dug from our old lives and planted like potato halves, sliced down and warted with eyes.”
“Burrowing Creatures” asks the question how a family moves on after it’s blown apart.
Archer’s metaphors of planting and harvesting, burrowing and emerging, and use of colour blew my mind. I adored the story so much, I wrote to AGNI’s editors to express my admiration and gratitude.
– Louise Sidley
This story recreates the main character’s sad yet darkly funny experiences with a dating app; it is chronicle of failed and futile attempts to find an appropriate partner among an assortment of unpleasant, unsuitable, and in a final example, dangerous men. Bhat’s depiction of male behaviour, in this story and others, is all too unfortunately accurate.
-John Vardon
The opening line is, “Down here among the dead, our fairy tales begin at the end.” I’m a sucker for a great first line. The rest of the story lives up to its opening. It’s imaginative, witty and poignant. What more could you want?
– Stephen Price
It’s not always the “What” of a story but the “how.” The writing in this story is breathtaking. The ending is rather satisfying too.
– Jason Waddle
“The Fisher Cat” is, to me, a feat of narrative compression that is as poignant as it is technically impressive. It’s difficult to summarize effectively, since so much of what makes it moving is the narrative perspective it’s filtered through, but it centres on an unnamed narrator’s retelling of a miserable yet miraculous day in her father’s life long before she was born. It deftly brings together themes about the ambivalence of parent-child relationships, the divisions in America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the impossibility of truly understanding other people–even (perhaps especially) the ones closest to us. The prose is crisp and vivid, at times almost overwhelmingly visceral. It is, in some ways, a harsh story, but it’s also tender, a balance that makes ffitch’s work the most exciting I’ve come across in quite some time.
-Jack Williams
This story struck me for a number of reasons. The way it uses language for world building, the way reality loosens as the story progresses, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the characters, and the fact that, at the heart of the story, it’s about kindness, all contributed to my love of this fantastical story. Above all, however, I recommend it because I didn’t like it until I was about a third of the way in. The language just wasn’t what usually appeals to me, and the straightforward goals of the characters seemed too simple to be nuanced. It’s fun to be wrong and be won over.
– M.W. Irving
A surreal yet poignant experience with a household exterminator in a crawlspace filled with luggage. Amidst the subtle comedy and existential dread, every sentence is perfect.
– Glenn Willmott
This story, written in 1952, is set in a rambling house with multiple family members; it is hilarious but it also contains a puzzle; what happened to Baby’s blanket? Entirely different from the author’s usual stories of strange characters doing horrific things, this one takes the reader on a journey of delight, full of humour and wit.
– Mary Barnes
Brilliance of compressed language in telling a small story that says much about the relationships of the characters, and their culture.
– Maggie Dwyer
This short story not only combines genres and narrative elements in a dynamic and cohesive manner, skillfully setting the stage for the protagonist’s fantasy-inspired quest across modern-day New York City to find out what happened to the person that ghosted her on a dating app, but it also showcases the great talent and promising voice of a young writer who passed away much too early. After reading the story in the Summer 2024 issue of the Dragon Gems anthology, I was saddened to learn that its author, Zoe Kaplan, passed away last October at the age of 28 due to health issues. “So Familiar a Gleam” is one of her very last stories (if not THE very last one of her stories) and is required reading for anyone seeking to uncover the voice of an emerging writer who left this world much too soon.
– XM
It’s tender, about the things and people we love. I see it as how that love can both damage and restore. It’s funny and just a smidge absurd.
– A. Gautreau
For its mesmerizing artful sentences and powerful imagery!
-Ian LeTourneau
The unique voice, the deft handling of a contemporary feminine issue. The prose is so lovely, I had to stop and breathe. I didn’t want it to end.
-MJ Malleck
This is a sweet, beautiful story that showed that teen angst is a fluid monster. For some teens life is a piece of cake, for others it chews at their very inner being.
-Brenda Rech
The narrator’s voice captured my attention by placing me in the midst of her lesson and I felt as if I was learning along with the students. As a university instructor myself, I was drawn into how the students would come to understand the underlying meaning of the poem they were studying and the significance of the lesson to an otherwise disengaged student. Even though the title hints at the turn to come, the construction of the last paragraph is crafted so effectively, bringing in the poem’s meaning, in the repeated “I don’t know that…” to show how the unreal reality of U.S. school gun violence affects students and teachers every day.
– Tracey Ciccone Edelist
I love the protagonist, a fourteen-year-old girl with a passion for biology who is just going about her life when she comes face-to-face with patriarchy and has to defend herself against an attempted sexual assault. Characterization, dialogue, thematic development are impressive.
-Janet Pollock Millar
This is a story of how one ordinary day, and one trusted person, can upend your life as a mother forever, where your child survives but your goals cannot. What could be a melodrama is presently almost clinically in a way that makes the effect all the more compelling. Like other women in this collection, the narrator possesses a will that keeps her eyes on the prize, though what it is worth, and what it will cost, is assessed realistically without sentimentality.
– Kevin Irie
It’s a matter of a rediscovery as this story has viscerally remained in my memory. Love, betrayal, a Canadian prairie. Events of 2025 have meant a soul-searching of what it means to be Canadian. Identity shifts, but it helps to know what literature has resonated in Canada due to the physical landscape of the country. Given the harshest winter since the 1970s, this story from 1908 can still resonate for citizens of any background. Since the pandemic, there has been a significant movement of the population from urban to rural areas–and Sinclair Ross’ words still echo bleakly and interestingly about the fingerprints left behind from various relationships.
– Barbara Downey
An intimate look at the Caribbean immigrant mother, told with such mastery, compassion and control of language.
– EJ
It’s rare for fiction to make me tear up, but this story did. I identified with the protagonist of this story so deeply. It’s about a 34-year-old woman going through a mid-life crisis. She’s recently divorced from her husband with whom she shared a business together. Unemployed and directionless, she takes up pointless hobbies and engages in an affair with a former employee. Her sister, who is married and raising a daughter, is very critical of the way she’s currently living her life. It’s the feeling that many people feel who are in their thirties and not following the conventional path. It’s a painful experience to feel to isolated from the rest of the world.
– Hilary Smith
