Status Updates From Best Canadian Stories 2024

16. Bro *** by Ian Williams. Somewhat silly story about a white man going out of his way to try to make a black friend in a town where there are few if any black people. Cringey story parodying white liberalism and white saviour complex. By the author of the Giller Prize winning Reproduction (2019). Final story, the rest is author bios. GR has the wrong page count, s/b 232.

15. Ghosts ***** by Ryan Turner. A divorced man meets an old acquaintance (the sister of his best friend growing up) at the airport while headed out to Vancouver to visit his widowed mother and her new live in partner. Mark fantasizes about a possible future life with Jana, and then she messages him about meeting up again on his way back east. Probably the longest story in this collection.

14. The Circular Motion of a Professional Spit-Shiner **** by Sara Power. Female cadet at Canada's Royal Military College. Stories of hazing & assault but also bonding. Joyce copes through bulimia but also through joining an amateur mime group.

13. Luck is a Lady ***** by Michelle Porter. A family is down on their luck with a husband out of work and the wife delivering food parcels to other needy families, from which she occasionally snags a few items for herself. But then a chance discovery may be their salvation. Story goes down a very noirish path, but I enjoyed it. By the author of A Grandmother Begins the Story.

12. Wata Tika Dan Blood ** by Lue Palmer (not listed on GR). Written with occasional Jamaican patois, so perhaps difficult to understand and I may be missing something. For example the title means “Water Thicker Than Blood”, so a reverse of the standard saying. Three women (the 3 Fates, the 3 witches?) are pulling "soul cloths" out of river waters and telling futures/fortunes based on reading them.

11. Long Haul ** by Sourayan Mookerjea. I didn’t really understand what is going on here most of the time. It seemed to be set in a post-apocalyptic future with 2 firemen inspecting a burnt out house at the beginning then called in with all hands to deal with some sort of Chernobyl-like disaster in Fort Jasper, Alberta?

10. Cooler *** by Elise Levine. A lot of this is very “inside baseball” about gambling, but the sense of it appears to be that the main character is a casino employee sent in to winning tables to cool down the action, because they themselves are such a depressing and poor player. Lots of stuff about wardrobe choices which emphasize the role. What the heck is a “lit tip” when given to a dealer?

9. Nothing But a Legacy *** by Joel Thomas Hynes. A father calls his wastrel sons "nothing but a legacy." A family of n'er-do-wells watch winter approach. There is a slight turn off in the trapping of a cat in a box trap, although no harm comes to it.

8. Ceiling Like the Sky *** by Allison Graves. A group of people are trapped in their St. John’s, Newfoundland house during the so-called Snowmageddon in January 2020. Various antics ensue. This story is also collected in the author’s first book Soft Serve (2023).

7. The Bee Garden **** by Beth Downey (not listed on GR). Starts off very caring with a husband building a garden to comfort his wife after a their loss (which is not explicitly stated, but the reader can read between the lines). But takes a darker turn and then has a real gut punch finale.

6. Love Cream Heat **** by Corinna Chong. A family reunites for a father's funeral. The son and daughter are concerned that the mother's skin appears to be turning blue. The daughter decides to look up an old lover from her youth, while the brother frets about becoming a father himself. Overall very entertaining story about why you can't always go back, but with humour & twists.

5. Pitfalls of Unsolicited Shoulding ** by Xaiver Michael Campbell. Repetitive story of cruising in a gym and looking for mr. right, and being ghosted afterwards. The "should" of the title referring to unsolicited gym advice e.g. "you should do this..." The character turns to their massage therapist for succor between the heartbreaks. Basically romance fiction, not my thing.

4. One Woman's Memories *** by Billy-Ray Belcourt. A widow woman on a northern Alberta reserve has memories of her father and her late husband and wants to share them with her grown son who now lives far away and works at the University of Edmonton.

3. Golemson *** by Gary Barwin. Surreal fantasy about a man who builds a golem and is then cuckolded by it. The building instructions sound quite accurate, including the use of a piece of paper with אמת (emét, 'truth') written on it.

2. Interloper **** by Sharon Bala. Historical fiction set in 1908 with Virginia Woolf visiting with her sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell while they are raising their infant son.

1. Insects Eat Birds *** by Madhur Anand. Snapshot anecdoes from the life of a Ornithology Museum Specialist. "When she explains her job, Ornithology Museum Specialist, to those outside the museum world, she says it is like being a librarian, but for birds, and then always has to remember to add that vital technicality, dead birds."

0. Introduction ***** by Lisa Moore. An entertaining and enthusiastic introduction by the editor and novelist to kick things off.