The train went by, with Ben seated there on his bike, staring after it
Jackson Weaver
Illustration by Teddy Kang Ben wandered past the bedroom. Inside, he could hear, his mother was helping the boy get dressed. Snaking his ankle down through the cuff of the jeans she’d pooled on the floor, cajoling him to raise his arms and draping the sweater from his own closet over that other boy’s chest. […] More »
Lately though, it’s like the electricity conductor of my own body isn’t enough. I want more.
Clark Bondy
Illustration by Sal Scheibe They move in on the first day of August when the air feels like a panting dog’s breath. From our third-floor balcony, I watch the pickup truck pull up with a cat-shredded couch sticking up out of it like the half-sunk Titanic. Five of them get out. There are three guys […] More »
We’re posting the winners of the 2011 Great Canadian Literary Hunt all this week. Read the other finalists here and follow or friend us to stay up to date on 2012’s contest! Selena Wong is an illustrator and artist living in Toronto with her Netherland Dwarf Rabbit. Like the condensed urban environment of her place […] More »
We’re posting the winners of the 2011 Great Canadian Literary Hunt all this week. Read the other finalists here and follow or friend us to stay up to date on 2012’s contest! Now The power went out. The television emitted an electric squelch before the picture vanished into darkness. In that moment Sam saw his […] More »
We’re posting the winners of the 2011 Great Canadian Literary Hunt all this week. Read the other finalists here, and follow or friend us to stay up to date on 2012’s contest! Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of Robin Evans’s story — the full version will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of The Fiddlehead. We’re […] More »
In his new book, Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened, Hal Niedzviecki at times assumes the malaise of his characters seamlessly: “I’m a mortgage broker who works from his basement home office. I can find a lender suitable to your needs. A lot of people go to the bank. Don’t go to […] More »
“It has been some time now that I have wanted to speak to you about the youth gang. Since July there has been much conjecture about how the youth gang started, and when, and where, and what exactly the youth gang is, and who belongs to it, and whether its members wear ‘colours,’ and which […] More »
The characters in Rebecca Rosenblum’s second collection of short stories, The Big Dream, have one thing in common: they work at Dream Inc., a lifestyle magazine publisher struggling to stay afloat. Like the troubled company, most face an uncertain future, navigating their problems from trial separations and parenthood to a terminally ill parent. Drawing from her […] More »
Dear Katie, I woke up with a lingering vision of my Aunt Agnes’s swollen feet propped on her filthy coffee table. They looked like two puff pastries stuffed into once pastel blue slippers, now the colour of a graying robin’s egg. Aunt Agnes smoked like a tire yard on fire. When I was a child […] More »
Lorna Goodison’s latest collection of short stories, By Love Possessed, fuses a sharp ear for language with a keen eye for human behaviour. The Jamaican-Canadian poet, memoirist, and short story writer casts a shrewd yet loving gaze on the mores and idiosyncrasies of contemporary Jamaican society. At first glance, Goodison’s world plays into North American […] More »
Anne Perdue’s characters face a tough, unforgiving world in her first collection of short fiction, I’m a registered nurse not a whore. Writing from a litany of perspectives—an overworked suburban dad, a frustrated couple renovating their first home, and an alcoholic grandmother—Perdue builds gritty characters who are pathetically funny, keenly aware of their own flaws, […] More »