Following an unprecedented explosion of literary talent in Newfoundland over the past twenty years, The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction assembles the very best work by the island’s most accomplished fiction writers. Featuring selections by Michael Crummey, Jessica Grant, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter, among others, this stellar anthology, expertly edited by Larry Mathews, stands as the quintessential introduction to Newfoundland fiction. These are the best stories written by our most talented writers during the most exciting time in the island’s literary history.

Larry Mathews was born in Montreal, grew up in Ottawa, and was educated at Carleton University (BA and MA) and the University of British Columbia (PhD). He taught at six Canadian universities before joining Memorial University’s English Department, where he taught until his retirement in 2015. In 1985 he taught the first creative writing course ever offered at Memorial, and he was the first co-ordinator of the creative writing program. His writing students include such now-published authors as Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Claire Wilkshire, Aimee Wall, and Bridget Canning. His own academic specialization, originally William Blake, was contemporary Canadian and Newfoundland literature. He has published many articles on such writers as Alice Munro, David Adams Richards, Hugh Hood, Mavis Gallant, Norman Levine, and Keath Fraser. He has published about thirty stories in journals and anthologies, a collection of stories The Sandblasting Hall of Fame (Oberon, 2003), and two novels with Breakwater: The Artificial Newfoundlander (2010) and An Exile’s Perfect Letter (2018). He lives and writes in St. John’s with his wife, Claire Wilkshire.

Larry Mathews' profile page

"All the work is of high quality.”

The Telegram

With the quality of the writing uniformly high throughout, what is there to quibble with? We could take issue with the absence of some notable names, such as Wayne Johnston, Kenneth J. Harvey, Donna Morrissey, Michelle Butler Hallett and Robin McGrath. But then one remembers that Larry Mathews faced an impossible task when he agreed to edit this volume because in the last thirty years Newfoundland has produced more than its fair share of excellent writers of fiction, and an anthology that included everybody whose work deserves recognition would be unwieldy and possibly too heavy to lift. The very act of making a selection means that good work by talented writers is going to be left out. But The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction more than fulfills its mandate, by bringing together into one volume a rich and varied sampling of the best fiction Newfoundland has to offer.

The Antigonish Review

"Breakwater asked [Larry Mathews] to edit, and his reasoning behind each story makes for a nice prologue. The end result is ten stories that showcase and emphasize how well the sentence-level writing is in local fiction.”

The Overcast

"The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction is a greatest-hits ensemble.”

Atlantic Books Today