Best Canadian Stories 96

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

There are only two common threads running through this enjoyably
eclectic assortment of short fiction: all the stories have been
published in Canadian literary magazines, and all have been considered
worthy of inclusion by editor Douglas Glover.

Alan Cumyn’s “Survival Golf” is a superb story. It opens with a
riveting account of an accident—a father who is golfing in a snowstorm
falls through the ice on a pond and is rescued by his young
daughter—and evolves into a moving treatment of the father’s
obsession with golf and his relationship with his daughter. Two other
fine stories about fathers are Claudia Casper’s “Dad’s Place”
and Dave Margoshes’s “A Book of Great Worth.”

Most of the stories in this book are set outside Canada. Among the
strongest is “The Sacrifice,” Chetan Rajani’s powerful tale of
poverty and desperation, which opens with Arjuna pulling his pregnant
wife on a rickshaw to the looming tent where he will sell an organ.
Connie Gault’s “Song of Songs,” the story of a Canadian couple
vacationing in France, deftly conjures character and conflicting
perceptions through shifts in voice and point of view. Thomas
Wharton’s “Dream Novel,” a meditation on reading novels, manages
in spite of its self-consciousness to be unpretentious and at times
lyrical.