No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story
in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked
tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help
shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time
editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a
fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the
country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion
several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be
far less without his efforts.
Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the
short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger
currents of world literature, Metcalf's magisterial The Canadian Short
Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most
importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List,
Metcalf's critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of
the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short
Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of
our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often
over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its
author's most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us
all.
