Elements of Fiction: An Anthology

J.V. Rahilly was an engineering librarian in Ontario.

This collection of short stories, meant as a text for undergraduates, was originally published in 1981 and geared for the American market. Rosemary Sullivan has “Canadianized” it by adding twelve stories written by such Canadian authors as Stephen Leacock, Morley Callaghan, Sinclair Ross, Mavis Gallant, Anne Hébert, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, Rudy Wiebe, and Leon Rooke. The short stories here begin with Hawthorne and Poe and move forward chronologically (by birth date of author); the Canadian writers are tucked into this chronological sequence. All of these modern short stories are representative of the genre, and the book is certainly useful for the commentaries and analyses provided by Scholes and Sullivan — particularly the first hundred pages, where the shorter pieces of fiction in theory are covered extensively. Also, it is a useful collection of short stories’ “greatest hits” for the impoverished or small library collection.