For Short Story Month, we’ve compiled a list of ten essential short story collections from our catalogue that everyone should check out! From speculative worlds to flash fiction and well beyond, these impressive collections prove that, while the stories may be short, they pack a powerful punch that will leave a lasting impression. Discover them for yourself today!
- PS) In celebration of Short Story Month, we’re having a sale!
Save 20% off all short story collections from May 25 to 31, 2026.
*Sale excludes forthcoming releases and subscription packages.
Without further ado, here’s our Short Story Month Essential Reading List:
How You Were Born by Kate Cayley
The stories in How You Were Born examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.
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.
Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler
With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse. These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.
The Handsome Man by Brad Casey
The Handsome Man is a collection of linked stories that follow several years of the life of a young man as he is drawn around the world: from Toronto to Montreal, New York, Ohio, New Mexico, British Columbia, Berlin, Rome, and Northern Ontario, along the way meeting hippies, healers, drinkers, movie stars, old friends, and welcoming strangers. He isn’t travelling, however; he’s running away. But as far and fast as he runs, the world won’t let him disappear, and each new encounter and every lost soul he meets along this journey brings him closer and closer to certain truths he’d locked away: how to trust, how to live in this world, and most of all, how to love again.
Just Pervs by Jess Taylor
In Just Pervs, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires and bodies. Through these characters, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated. These stories explore the strange oppression and illumination created by desire, the bewilderment of adolescence, and the barriers to intimacy both discovered within and imposed upon ourselves.
Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante
In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas
Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India, in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on siblings Aiden and Ally Pinto and their experience of growing up in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures. Here, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada.
A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News by Cary Fagan
Multiple award–winning author Cary Fagan displays his extraordinary range and talent in this propulsive new story collection that is by turns sensitive, surprising, and outrageously funny. With witty dialogue, compelling characters, and superb writing, each of the five exquisite stories in A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News differs vastly from the next, yet together conjure a world fuelled by the power of our wildest imaginings.
Rats Nest by Mat Laporte
Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, Rats Nest builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century. In this collection of sci-fi stories, Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self-reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.
We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie
This linked stories in We All Need to Eat revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty, and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.