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The Canadian Short Story
No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be far less without his efforts. Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, Metcalf’s magisterial The Canadian Short Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List, Metcalf’s critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its author’s most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us all.
577 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 25, 2018
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September 27, 2022
"I cannot believe after many years of writing, editing, and collecting experience that there will ever be a Canadian Literature" - Michael Harris
Metcalf provides a history of what has gone into the development of imagism, progressive literature and its criticism, and finally the Canadian cannon (or lack thereof). The back third of the book is filled with samples and analysis of what he considers to be the leading lights of the "Canadian" short story - which he deems to our best best contribution to literature.
Metcalf writes that our best are generally not Canadian in any particular way, and that those that are put on pedestals for reflecting Canadian themes (for the wrong reasons) are often poorer examples of the form, or (regarding the mostly invisible quality scribes) influenced by writers, methods and landscapes from elsewhere. He further comments that the literary community in Canada rarely seriously reads and competes with itself, which compounds to the absence of a cohesive Canadian form. If that seems bleak, despite this commentary, Metcalf can point you to a great number of Canadian writers (and foreign) that are worthy of any well worn bookmark - an ability hard earned from decades of editing and not compromising.
While the essays up front will educate anyone interested in Western literature, I had a love/hate relationship with his listing of Canadian short story writers - the update to his "Century List." On the one hand he parades a long line of superior writers, on the other you're given a somewhat awkward and exhausting format of long excerpts with commentary writer by writer. I was bogged down to a near crawl through this, sacrificing the time I might have spent actually reading a handful or two of the featured authors to instead slowly inching through literary quicksand about them.
On the whole this is an excellent guide to the Canadian short story and literary criticism. Its just not a quick lead. Goodreads currently lists it as 300 some pages when in fact is 650+ and reads much longer than that. But, to you my fellow hairshirt clad friars, sophists, haughty highbrow boppers, curmudgeon lit-snobs with neck beard aspirations: read on, you'll be rewarded.
Metcalf provides a history of what has gone into the development of imagism, progressive literature and its criticism, and finally the Canadian cannon (or lack thereof). The back third of the book is filled with samples and analysis of what he considers to be the leading lights of the "Canadian" short story - which he deems to our best best contribution to literature.
Metcalf writes that our best are generally not Canadian in any particular way, and that those that are put on pedestals for reflecting Canadian themes (for the wrong reasons) are often poorer examples of the form, or (regarding the mostly invisible quality scribes) influenced by writers, methods and landscapes from elsewhere. He further comments that the literary community in Canada rarely seriously reads and competes with itself, which compounds to the absence of a cohesive Canadian form. If that seems bleak, despite this commentary, Metcalf can point you to a great number of Canadian writers (and foreign) that are worthy of any well worn bookmark - an ability hard earned from decades of editing and not compromising.
While the essays up front will educate anyone interested in Western literature, I had a love/hate relationship with his listing of Canadian short story writers - the update to his "Century List." On the one hand he parades a long line of superior writers, on the other you're given a somewhat awkward and exhausting format of long excerpts with commentary writer by writer. I was bogged down to a near crawl through this, sacrificing the time I might have spent actually reading a handful or two of the featured authors to instead slowly inching through literary quicksand about them.
On the whole this is an excellent guide to the Canadian short story and literary criticism. Its just not a quick lead. Goodreads currently lists it as 300 some pages when in fact is 650+ and reads much longer than that. But, to you my fellow hairshirt clad friars, sophists, haughty highbrow boppers, curmudgeon lit-snobs with neck beard aspirations: read on, you'll be rewarded.
Displaying 1 of 1 review