Short Story Month: People and Places
May is Short Story Month! In honour of that, we’ve put together a series that shares some of our favourite short story collections with you – a guide to our Book*hug gallery, if you will. Whether you’re a connoisseur of the art form or just starting to get familiar, this guide will help you find the short story collection that most suits your reading moods or interests.
Kicking things off is new release Places Like These by Lauren Carter, and Copenhagen by Katrine Marie Guldager, Translated by P.K. Brask. These collections transform the places we visit (both physical and psychological) into an exercise in exposing the most intimate parts of our humanity – good, bad, ugly, sometimes excruciating, all too relatable. Full of contemplation, read these collections if you are in the mood for short stories with big feelings.
You can also listen to Lauren Carter read from Places Like These during her book launch, happening May 4th, 2023.
Places Like These by Lauren Carter
A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend’s secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter’s poignant short stories reflects each character’s journey.
Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.
“The stories in Lauren Carter’s Places Like These explore the landscape of grief and anxiety that disrupt the quietude of so-called ordinary lives and places. Carter turns her penetrating writer’s gaze toward that which makes us human, the ways in which we must carry on, for better and for worse. I loved this highly readable collection.” —Nancy Jo Cullen, author of The Western Alienation Merit Badge
Copenhagen by Katrine Marie Guldager, Translated by P.K. Brask
Copenhagen is a collection of eleven short stories that map the city of København through subtle intertextuality. Each story takes place in a different location within the urban landscape, and these sites become a network through which its citizens move, their lives brushing up against each other but without ever connecting. The narratives lead the reader through a landscape where consciousness, both social and poetic, become the city and the text, isolated and connected, orchestrated and restless. Katrine Marie Guldager’s tales exude what was for Goethe the core of the short story: “the unheard-of event.”
“Copenhagen is a portrayal of a prosperous human… a human trying to make meaning of an orderly world devoid of ideological substance,” writes Gadfly magazine. “Guldager’s genius lies in portraying how this uneventful struggle affects everything around it—and how everything around it is just a sublime facade for a lack of humanity.”
