Best Canadian Stories 99

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

The nine stories in the current Best Canadian Stories 99, a collection
that marks the series’ 30th year, are quirky, mordant, and sometimes
wildly funny. The same adjectives could apply to Douglas Glover’s
“My Romance,” a longish tale of death, sex, pain, pathos, and
bewilderment. Obviously, the editor’s taste affects his choices; in
his introduction, Glover says that all the stories in this collection
are about “lost love, cracked love, broken dreams and nostalgia.”

Mercifully, this description does not apply to Bruce McCall’s short,
witty parody: “The Hidden Life of Doges” (no, that’s not a
misprint, although McCall expects readers to examine that possibility)
is not about dogs. Somewhere, sometime in the course of our education,
we learned that the medieval rulers of certain city–states in northern
Italy were called doges. The narrator’s obsessive observations of the
three doges (three stooges?) who were boarders in his house form a
hilarious parody of the well-known dog book.

Matt Cohen’s “Napoleon in Moscow” is indeed about “cracked love
and broken dreams”; the narrator’s fantasy of being Napoleon in his
days of glory adds lyrical and tragic notes to a modern suburban tale of
pathos. Jane Eaton Hamilton’s comically bittersweet lesbian romance,
“Goombay Smash,” charts the downward path of a failing five-year
relationship as two women holiday in Key West; the contrasting
personalities are well drawn, but the black humor is painful. Stories by
Libby Creelman, Mike Barnes, Francois Bonneville, Madeleine Thien, and
Adam Lewis Schroeder complete the volume.