Introduction

These are stories I remember the impact of if not always the content of. I seem to forget the details of my favourite stories shortly after I finish reading them, and each reread was almost like déjà vu, like I was remembering the stories as I read them. Except the last one, for reasons that’ll be clear when you get there.

My Canadian-ness is on display here: a quarter of these (or a third, depending how you categorize William Gibson) are by Canadians. They seem to skew to science fiction and horror, two genres which are best suited to the form.

As with many Personal Anthology contributors, these are the pieces that resonate today. If I were to compile this list a couple weeks from now, it might be entirely different. In fact there’s an alternate version on my website.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ by Ted Chiang

This is a perfect Ted Chiang story – speculative fiction about people and relationships, not really about technology. Chiang weaves two timelines together here. In the first, a journalist investigates a new technology called “Remem”, which provides perfect, searchable access to personal memories. In testing the technology, he learns that his memory of a pivotal event is wrong, which makes him doubt his own self-perception.

In the other, Chiang imagines an encounter between the Tiv people in the 1940s encountering the written word for the first time when the Europeans show up. The newcomers impress upon one of them how important accurate record-keeping is, but a conflict arises with the society’s oral traditions.

Taken together they call into question whether absolute truth in history is desirable, or if we as humans are wired to seek harmony over accuracy.

First published in Subterranean Magazine, 2013, collected in Exhalation: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

‘New Rose Hotel’ by William Gibson

I grew up in a remote town without a bookstore, but somehow there were books everywhere in my house when I was young. My mom and my sister Norma were science fiction nuts, and every issue of OMNI magazine a proper event. I remember finding the issue that had this story in it, in a box in the basement.

Neither my mom nor sister cared for William Gibson, so he was the first science fiction author I felt was mine. Even though I didn’t always understand the stories on first read, I loved how gritty and high-tech everything was. I’ve recently re-read his books, and the stories in Burning Chrome set the template for all of his novels — including elements of his current Jackpot series.

‘New Rose Hotel’ sets the table for Neuromancer and its sequels. The language is urgent and fragmented, with an edge that felt like a new kind of science fiction, even to 15-year-old me.

First published 1984 in OMNI, collected in Burning Chrome, Arbor House, 1986

‘The Paper Menagerie’ by Ken Liu

I first encountered Ken Liu as the translator two of the three volumes of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, but he’s a renowned author aside from that work. ‘The Paper Menagerie’ is the story of Jack, the son of a white man from Connecticut and his mail-order bride from China. When he is a child, Jack’s mother makes him origami animals from scrap paper that come to life.

Being bullied at school, Jack begins to resent his Chinese heritage and his mother, refusing to speak the language which cuts off virtually all communication with her until she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer while he’s at college. When she dies, he digs the animals out of storage and finds a letter from her.

I won’t spoil the content of the letter. You should track down the story.

First published 2011 in Fantasy & Science Fiction, collected in The Paper Menagerie, Saga Press, 2016

‘Trogloxene’ by Lena Valencia

It was Valencia’s Personal Anthology that introduced me to this site. Her story ‘Trogloxene’ concerns sisters Holly and Max. The narrator’s perspective stays with Holly, as Max is recovering from a recent misadventure where she spent eight days lost in a cave. But something isn’t right:

There was something weird about Max’s face, thought Holly. Something off. Max had always been the pretty one, while adults used words like “unconventional” to describe Holly. But now Max’s eyes, once a crystal green, were dulled and bloodshot. Her shimmering golden hair had lost its sheen and hung limply around her face, which was sharper now, more angular. She twitched at every fork clank, sniffling and shifting in her chair.

Like many of the stories in her collection, ‘Trogloxene’ has an 80s-horror-movie feel that made me feel like a kid staying up past my bedtime watching TV.

First published in her collection Mystery Lights, Tin House, 2024. Read it online at Electric Literature here

‘Ahegao, or The Ballad of Sexual Repression’ by Tony Tulathimutte

In an interview between the author and Lincoln Michel, they discuss a bit of writing advice that Tulathimutte gave to Michel: “Pick your dumbest idea and write it as seriously as possible.” ‘Ahegao’ seems like an extreme example of that, and the result is almost overwhelming.

This story was almost too much for me. It’s so explicit, so boundary-pushing that I nearly tapped out. But the payoff at the end is unforgettable and makes the discomfort of the preceding pages worthwhile. I still get squirmy thinking about this story, but I’ll never forget it.

First published in The Paris Review, Winter 2023, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Rejection, William Morrow, 2024

‘The Haunted Boy’ by Carson McCullers

McCullers wrote misfits and weirdos with such heart and compassion, and her short stories are often as moving as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, probably my favourite book of all time.

In “The Haunted Boy”, a kid named Hugh (yikes) has been ostracized by his peers because his mother spent time in a psychiatric facility after a scary episode. Hugh’s trauma affects every aspect of his life. He tries to form a bond with John, and older kid who is taking care of him.

In her biography of McCullers, Mary V. Dearborn paints her as a bit naïve and childlike even as an adult, and perhaps this is why she wrote children so well. When Hugh finally confesses his fears to his mother, and his father validates him at the end, it’s impossible not to tear up.

Collected in The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, Houghton Mifflin, 1951

‘Rewind’ by Erica McKeen

What Draws Us Near is one of the first books published by Little Ghosts, an independent publisher and horror bookshop in Toronto. In ‘Rewind’, a detached, maybe supernatural narrator describes a mysterious video, like a surveillance video of a crime scene. It describes the action in affectless prose, offering logical interpretations of things that are obviously much more sinister. It’s one of the creepiest and most gruesome stories I’ve ever read.

First published in What Draws Us Near, Little Ghosts, 2023

‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is the first story in Lahiri’s first collection. It’s a perfect distillation of what makes her a special writer: the language is spare and precise, filled with emotional tension. The story is quiet and subtle and devastating.

Shoba and Shukumar recently suffered a miscarriage, and they’re each in a deep depression. They barely speak to each other, and each day they just go through the motions. Because of some roadwork, they are told that their power would be off for one hour every night for a week. They pass the time dining by candlelight, revealing increasingly personal secrets to each other. For most of the story it feels like they’re reconnecting and finding each other again, but then devastation happens.

First published in The New Yorker in 1998 and available for subscribers to read here, and collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin, 1999

‘Headlights’ by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Schweblin writes weird stories – her work has frequently been compared to David Lynch. In ‘Headlights’, newlywed Felicity and her husband stop at a roadside rest stop and he drives away while she’s in the washroom. A woman named Nené comes explains that this is the place where husbands abandon their wives when they decide to move on.

As another car pulls up to drop off a woman, Felicity and Nené manage to hijack it, leaving the man by the side of the road. As the horde of abandoned women fall on him like zombies, the road lights up with the other men’s cars – returning not for their abandoned wives, but for the one man left behind.

Schweblin’s stories often leave a lot of room for interpretation, but this ‘Headlights’ hits like a sledgehammer.

First published in English in Mouthful of Birds, Riverhead Books, 2019. Read in Hotel online here

‘Mani Pedi’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Thammavongsa came to Toronto as a refugee, and many of the stories in her collection How to Pronounce Knife feel like they could only take place there. “Mani Pedi” is about Raymond, a boxer who quits fighting and goes to work in his sister’s nail salon. He starts off working the phones but eventually becomes a nail technician himself.

Raymond is a dreamer, and his sister is a hilariously vulgar and cynical realist. His dreams of making it as a boxer didn’t work out, and at the nail salon he dreams of falling in love with his clients. At the end of the story, when his sister berates him for his dreams, he explains:

Raymond, not one to speak up to his sister, but this one time said, “Well, you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don’t got a chance in hell and faced with that I wanna have that thought anyway. It’s to get by. It’s to get to the next hour, the next day. Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”

First published 2013 in Ex-Puritan, and available to read here, collected in How to Pronounce Knife, McClelland & Stewart, 2020

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury was my sister’s favourite author (and still is, I just asked her). I didn’t get him when I was a kid, and then when I was 13 my sister moved out and took all her books with her. I only started reading him again in the past couple of years. He’s an easy top 5 for me now too.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ takes place on August 4, 2026. An automated house stands alone in a neighbourhood that has otherwise been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. The house goes through its routine to take care, preparing meals and performing daily tasks for the absent family. It’s eerie and haunting.

The title echoes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, written 1918, in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu and the beginning of WWI:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

First published 1950 in Collier’s, collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950 and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘Wheat Kings’ by The Tragically Hip

The Tragically Hip was a legendary Canadian band, and until lead singer Gord Downie’s death from brain cancer in 2017 at age 53, he was one of Canada’s greatest musical storytellers. Like an alt-rock Gordon Lightfoot.

One of their most beloved songs is about David Milgaard, a Saskatoon man who was given a life sentence for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. After 23 years in prison he was exonerated, and eventually the killer was found and convicted.

In Wheat Kings, he immortalizes Milgaard’s story. It’s a gorgeous and memorable song even without context.

In his Zippo lighter he sees the killer’s face
Maybe it’s someone standing in a killer’s place
Twenty years for nothing, well, that’s nothing new
Besides, no one’s interested in something you didn’t do

For millions of Canadians, Gord Downie’s songs with The Hip and as a solo artist were an entry point into Canadian history – Downie even dedicated a whole album to the story of Charlie Wenjack, to draw attention to the past and current mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians by the government.

They even played Saturday Night Live once, and it didn’t go well. The story behind that is a pretty good one in itself.

Fully Completely, MCA, 1992. Available to view here.