Love and Pomegranates: An Anthology of Short Fiction

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Skip the introduction, which reads like explication aimed at high-school
students, and jump right into this marvelous collection of short
stories—a thoroughly enjoyable anthology of slick, well-plotted
pieces. The epiphanic tradition of the Canadian short story lives on
here.

There are no weak stories in the collection, but two deserve special
mention. Norma De Pledge’s “A Phantasmatic Place of Calm” and Bill
Stenson’s “The Only Sign of Fire” are almost mirror images of each
other. In the former, a husband throws his wife over for her best
friend—an act the wife describes with eerily calm detachment. In the
latter, a man sits in a tree peering into a window as his wife has an
affair with her sister’s husband. The man’s detached good humor
about the whole situation is idiotically cheerful (I wanted to throw
stones at him until he fell off his perch). Congratulations to the
editors for putting together such an excellent book.