As someone who loves short fiction, both to write it (my latest book, Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, was published in the spring) and to read it, I’m always excited to have a chance to share my recent favourites. This has been an exceptional year for short fiction. Some of these I discovered when I had the privilege of being one of the judges for this year’s Danuta Gleed award, others were by writers whose previous work I loved, or were highly recommended by friends. Here are some incredible collections that I can’t stop recommending to everyone.

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Wild Failure, by Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall is one of my all-time favourite writers, and this collection unsurprisingly is stunning. Her turns of phrase, and descriptions as always, are exacting, poetic and beautiful. In the opening story, "Half Pipe," she writes, “there is one white towel, hanging from a rack, wet and greying like a detached eyelash” and later, “my thumb scrolls the air like a dog who runs in place while he’s dreaming.” In "Oh, El," her narrator describes a teenage date as having “a laugh like a handful of shaking change.” Her dialogue is note-perfect, revealing and wry, and her character’s inner monologues are the perfect mix of grit and vulnerability, observation and fear, alongside moments of great tenderness. There are multilayered stories about bisexuality, trans characters, sex work, literary and indie music culture, feminism, and some great Toronto and Montreal references. The ending of "Oh, El" is especially beautiful, and both "I Need A Miracle" and "This is Carrie’s Whole Life" made me cry. I can’t recommend it enough.

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Death by a Thousand Cuts, by Shashi Bhat

Reading this collection felt like an intimate conversation with a brilliant, wry and sensitive friend, whose ability to observe with honesty and complexity makes every story they tell riveting. Bhat is able to convey complex emotions with such skill, and nuance, from the tensions of dating and imbalances in relationships to race, career, and health. "Her Ex Writes a Novel" and "Am I The Asshole" both play brilliantly with our ideas of art and fiction, and the addictive Reddit forum. "Chicken & Egg," which beautifully utilizes the second person, is about a woman who is slowly gaslit about her health, first by doctors and then by her partner. Its ending is devastating. "Indian Cooking" is about a mother who scorches her face in a cooking accident, and the ways, subtle and direct, in which it changes her and her family. That the story is full of dark humour only adds to its multilayeredness. Bhat also writes beautifully, in "We’re All in This Alone," about chronic illness and its effect on one’s perception of self in a way I’ve never seen before. “Here is the reason you can’t trust the body,” a paragraph starts, as the narrator describes a childhood with juvenile idiopathic arthritis in such beautiful, excruciating detail. Later she writes: “I landed on the word crippled. I knew what it meant, but this was not a word I had ever heard her say out loud. It was a word with ripple inside it, a bewildering, insidious threat.” I loved it all so much I bought two copies.

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Smoke, by Nicola Winstanley

This collection of linked stories follows a handful of characters from small community in New Zealand, throughout their lives, which includes for some of them, time in Canada. The collection opens with the title story, a heartbreaker about a young girl named Amanda whose home and school life falls apart after the death of her mother. Winstanley is incredibly skilled at capturing the curiosities and cruelties of childhood; she catches their voices, fears, and dreams with such authenticity, through multiple perspectives. Winstanley is so skilled at humanizing and empathising with her characters that I felt deeply invested in the way their lives turned out, from Amanda, who appears in multiple stories, to Clare in "Everything Happens for a Reason," Liz in "Rubber," Fiona in "Chicken," and even Vic in "It Means Beloved." A riveting and moving collection.

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Here Is Still Here, by Sivan Slapak

The linked stories in Here Is Still Here follow Isabel, a character who is Jewish and from Montreal as she navigates her family’s generational trauma. Her grandmother, whom she adores, is a Holocaust survivor, and is brilliantly described as “lov[ing] me with the smothering anxiety and possessiveness of a woman who had once watched everything she held precious disappear.” Her parents and sister have issues and tensions of their own, and we watch as Isabel navigates cultural and religious expectations and explores questions around her own identity and what she wants in romantic relationships. Her observations are always brave and insightful. In "Close Calls," Isabel says “I often assumed he was reaching out to touch me tenderly, when in fact he was endangering me in some glorious way.” In "This is About Running in Jerusalem," a story about a former roommate whose friendship disintegrates after years of being close, Isabel wonders if “maybe I was in in essence and everywhere, just too much to take. Just too much after a while.” She also writes about tensions in the Jewish communities, between Palestinians and Israelis and racism and cultural coexistence in Montreal. Truly, this collection contains multitudes.

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No Stars in the Sky, by Martha Batiz

In reading "Jason," the first story in Martha Batiz’s astounding collection, the first thing that struck me was the author's fearlessness. Batiz jumps directly into the life of a mother who has lost her only child to suicide, and to say it’s heart wrenching puts it mildly. Batiz is incredibly skilled at capturing every emotion in its rawest and truest form. "The General’s Daughter," about a girl who grows up with relative privilege because her of her father’s position within a dictatorial regime, is horrified when she discovers the reason her best friend disappeared. The final lines in the story are chilling: “I began to panic, my mind refusing to believe what I saw before me…I was holding it in my hands, hands that did not feel like my own… I looked around me and did not recognize anything except the small pink t shirt with the face of Hello Kitty, staring up at me beneath dark brown stains.” Other standouts include "Broken," about a mother whose daughter disappeared, "The Other Side," about a Mexican teenager who crosses the border on foot to find her father, and "Camp Westerbork," which has a truly excellent twist at the end that I did not see coming. Every story affected me deeply.

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Her Body Among Animals, by Paola Ferrante

This collection, which was a runner-up for this year’s Danuta Gleed Literary Award, is spectacular and singular in its vision and execution. Ferrante’s descriptions are highly poetic and gorgeous, merging fairy tale, speculative and horror elements seamlessly with realism. I was especially taken with her imagery in "Mermaid Girls" and I was deeply moved by the sensitive, insightful way Ferrante handled mental health struggles in the book. In the story "The Underside of the Wing," a grad student suffering from depression merges with an albatross in what I think is the best metaphor for depression that I’ve ever encountered. The final scenes articulate the urgency so perfectly “…from what the albatross has told the woman… she probably just had a panic attack and should go home and get some rest…A girl is fine, but the albatross is not fine with the orange plastic chairs, or the plastic window, the albatross is telling the woman that plastic is killing the oceans… she wants to take of those orange plastic chairs and hurl it through the glass… The albatross is telling the woman with the white undersides of her wings pressed hard against the plastic glass… the girl is feeling how the wings of the albatross get pinched when held behind her by security…”

I was also moved deeply by the story "A Trick of the Dark," and  love the tensions and inner dialogue in "Finding Houdini."

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Tell Me Pleasant Things about Mortality, by Lindsay Wong

I was astounded by this accomplished and wildly imaginative collection. The way Wong combines Chinese mythology with contemporary elements is vibrant, subversive and feels very real despite how wild the premises of the stories sometimes are. I found myself struggling not only to describe the fantastic plot of the opening story, "Happy Birthday!" (succinctly: the ghost of a murdered stripper comes to haunt a wealthy Hong Kong family, in the body of the family’s patriarch, who we find out was actually the murderer and this upends an already tense, fraught family dynamic) but to uncover how Wong pulled off such an original story so seamlessly. As a reader, I didn't even feel like I was suspending my disbelief. Everything felt entirely (disturbingly) natural, down to Wong’s excellent dialogue and descriptions. Every story is unique and engrossing, from the title story, about a woman who has lived for centuries against her will after eating a death lily, and is starting to literally decay from age, to "Wreck Beach," about a girl who is in love with her cousin and can summon crows to take revenge when he uses and rejects her.

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Chrysalis, by Anuja Varghese

This multi award-winning collection is pure magic, and worthy of all its accolades and more. Varghese’s characterization is incredible; every character is someone the reader can identify with and feel instantly and deeply invested in. Her descriptions are beautiful and otherworldly. In "Dreams of Drowning Girls," Meena goes on dates with men and women, seeking connection but feeling adrift and having nightmares until she meets Mwani, “a glitter lip gloss goddess” who rescues her from a overwhelming, packed club, where they remind her that she doesn’t belong and assures her that she’s safe with them. Watching her panic disappear, as she tries to “explain why Meena wrapped in Mawani is so funny and so right… the taste in her mouth so sweet, the sound of the rain so far away,” and watching her morph into dreams where she “breathes the water in through her skin as her ancestors have done for a million years… the tickle of a seaweed strand… brushing her dead scales away until whatever is left of her is left alive” is the one of the most sublime endings ever. I also loved the complexity of emotions and intersectionality of stories like "The Vetala's Song" and "Cherry Blossom Fever," and I loved Varghese’s delightful, contemporary twist on Cinderella, "Chitra."

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The Rage Letters, by Valerie Bah

I discovered Valerie Bah’s writing when I read this book as one of the Danuta Gleed judges this year, and it made me want to read absolutely everything they’ve ever written. The Rage Letters is so brilliant and incisive, full of searing commentary and unexpected moments of sharp humour. In the opening story, "Theft," written in the second person, a child in Grade 3 in trouble for drawing clothes on naked figures in library books and later stealing books, explains to friends that she is dressed up, and her mother had visited the school to “fight racists.” A book, the child explained “is just raw material: to dissect, to debone, to create anew.” In three connected stories, "Filles de Roi I," "I" and "III," Bah explores a corporate diversity and inclusion workshop, the reactions to it, and its effect on racialized staff members, as it also examines issues of class. The tension and micro tension was expertly plotted, and the character’s response to misogyny in "Filles de Roi III" is so satisfying. I also loved Bah’s reflection of the Black and Queer experience. I also loved the references to art culture, Haitian culture, and the way they reflected both family and chosen family. Kama La Mackeral did a wonderful job with the translation, too.  

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The Girl Who Cried Diamonds, by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

I knew I would love this collection from its beautiful title, but each of these stories is a dazzling and wildly original revelation. Like the love child of Heather O’Neill, Mariana Enriquez and Carmen Maria Machado, Hirsch Garcia is particularly skilled at subverting our world as we know it, upending the experiences of relatable protagonists or making readers confront their assumptions about who the characters are, and what they need and feel. She is also amazing at seamlessly extending a metaphor. In the title story, a girl whose every bodily fluid becomes a precious mineral, is not treated as an anomaly until she is suddenly exploited. In the chilling story "Mother," the daughter of a sociopath reveals that the woman she has called mother is just one in a series of abducted women who are eventually replaced by others. As the reader, beyond the terrifying premise, we see the daughter become slightly attached to her latest mother, and as we learn of this woman's fate we have a moment of hope that the daughter’s thinking could shift, and that she could herself could potentially escape. In the incredible final story, "Woman Into A Cloud," a mother and wife who feels so confined by her existence, and the disappointments in her marriage, that she becomes a cloud “…shrouded by a thick fog. Tessa occupied the entirety of the first floor of their home. It felt delicious.” Profound and incredibly insightful.

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The Private Apartments, by Idman Nur Omar

The Private Apartments is an elegantly crafted, deeply moving collection about the lives of Somali immigrants that spans almost thirty years, from 1991, the start of the Somali civil war to the pandemic in 2020. I love Idman Nur Omar’s succinctness and emotional directness. Her settings and descriptions, which range from stories set in Rome to London, Welland, Ontario, Amsterdam, Dubai and Toronto and are evocative and her characterization is complex, and sensitive. I love the way Omar writes women, and watching her characters upend expectations or subvert power was deeply satisfying. I was particularly moved by her stories set in Welland and Dubai, and the collection’s final story, "Toronto 2020," set in Lawrence Heights brought me to tears. I grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood right next to Lawrence Heights, and I loved her descriptions of a deeply connected community and its challenges, and reality-blurring ending, which added an element of a magic to an already heartbreaking and beautiful story.

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Cocktail, by Lisa Alward

The winner of this year’s Danuta Gleed award, this collection is absolutely masterful. When a writer writes with such precision and authorial control, it’s such a joy to read their work. There's a stylistic elegance that I admire so much, the way that Alward disrupts domesticity, the tensions inherent in her stories, her expert pacing and her beautiful descriptions are all incredibly impressive. The title story, among other is deeply unsettling, in the best way, as are many of the stories that contain secrets about marriages, households, and family dynamics. "Hawthorne Yellow" was incredibly original and "Pomegranate" and "How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" were both brilliant and moving. If you haven’t read it yet, you have to.

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Anecdotes, by Kathryn Mockler

Kathryn Mockler’s Anecdotes is one of the most original collections I’ve ever read. I love the way she delights in playing with form – from overheard conversations, to incredibly short flash fiction, to one line stories and anecdotes, Mockler disrupts the reader’s very notion of what a story is. With a mix of dark humour, real emotion, and insight and elements of the absurd, these stories will stay with you for a long time.

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Peacocks of Instagram, by Deepa Rajagopalan

Deepa Rajagopalan’s debut is a vibrant and whip-smart collection of deftly plotted short stories that address race, class, agency and power, with a deep understanding of her characters. In the title story, an artist who makes jewelry from peacock feathers that she sells on Instagram, upends a protestor’s assumptions about her in the most moving way possible, she briefly reoccurs in the amazing story "Rahel," whose subversive ending made the story even more satisfying. "Cake," a story that addresses power imbalances at work, in terms of both gender and race, is brilliant. "Morningside," about the tensions in a marriage is heartbreaking in its realism, but I was most moved by "Surya, Listen," a story about the parents of a child with special needs, and the accident that changed their lives: “She looked at Surya and felt all the love brimming to the top in a way that made little else matter. No one could take that away from her.” A beautiful debut.

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Learn more about Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness:

Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha’s third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it’s like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old ("Born, Not Made") to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways ("Blasting Molly Rockets"), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s wish to protect her sister ("Able to Pass") to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank ("Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish"), these stories pulse with Botha’s signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity ("Soulmates") to those who hold on at all costs ("Dark and Lilac Fairies"). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.