The Canadian short story - widely recognized as a distinctive and unusually strong genre in the creative literature of the country - was celebrated in 1986 with the publication of The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Published to great acclaim, the original collection has been a great commercial success. It is here revised and updated to reflect the increasing diversity of the genre, and the growing reputation of a new generation of writers. Of the original inclusions, eight were dropped and thirteen replaced. Eighteen writers (among them Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Timothy Findley, W.P. Kinsella, and Audrey Thomas) are represented by different stories. Writers appearing for the first time include Caroline Adderson, Ann Copeland, Bonnie Burnard, Cynthia Flood, Barbara Gowdy, Thomas King, Rohinton Mistry, Diane Schoemperlen, and Linda Svendsen.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

Robert Weaver was Canada’s pre-eminent literary impresario. He joined the CBC in 1948, and for almost four decades he guided the most significant cultural programs in the country. His radio programs, especially Anthology, provided an encouraging yet rigorous forum for story-writers, as did the Tamarack Review, of which he was a co-founder and the inspiring force. In 1979, he founded the Canadian Literary Awards, co-sponsored by the CBC and various partners, including the Canada Council for the Arts and Saturday Night, which since 1994 has published the winning stories. As well as organizing the Canadian Literary Competition, Robert Weaver was fiction editor of Saturday Night. He edited many anthologies, including six editions of Canadian Short Stories and The Anthology Anthology: A Selection from Thirty Years of CBC Radio’s “Anthology.” He co-edited two editions each of The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature and The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, and he was the editor of Mavis Gallant’s collection The End of the World and Other Stories.

Robert Weaver's profile page

"An admirable addition to the series of short-story anthologies published by Oxford University Press" - Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement

"A show of extraordinary imaginations that just happens to be Canadian." - Financial Post

"Bite-sized treasures will fill many a winter evening and summer afternoon. This anthology should be in every English-language library in Canada and abroad." - Canada Book Review Annual

"A rich and lively selection." - Philip Marchand, Toronto Star

"Will stand as a text if not a monument for the next number of years." - Saskatoon Star Phoenix