FictionTag

5 Authors Nominated for the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

This morning the Writers’ Trust of Canada announced the five finalists for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The $60,000 award is one of my country's most prestigious, annually ...

Read an Excerpt from Lump, the New Novel from One of CanLit's Best Wordsmiths, Nathan Whitlock

A lump can have anything inside it, or nothing at all. This idea of what is contained, concealed, and hidden is central to Nathan Whitlock's searing, smart, satirical new novel, Lump (Rare Machines/Dundurn ...

On Writing in Longhand

I have bad handwriting. I always have. I remember as a child being put through the terrible paces of the Canadian Penmanship books at school, which were intended to teach us to write in cursive (one of ...

Dessert

Outside my window are two strands of spidersilk, about five inches apart, both slanting downwards from left to right at a sharp angle. They move semi-independently in the slight morning breeze, almost ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 5: The Speak o the Mearns

My parents are renters, so we moved houses a lot growing up. How can you expect continuity under those conditions, the steady passage of an uncomplicatedly teleological time? We can’t point to the place ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni

I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"

So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?

Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1

It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...

Read an Excerpt from Booker Winning Translator Anna Moschovakis' Brilliant Near-Future Novel, Participation

Living and connecting online has become a norm for most people, particularly after pandemic restrictions forced much of our work and social lives into the digital realm. In Booker Award-winning translator ...