Short story collections are the source of life. We believe Geoffrey Chaucer said that. Or maybe it was Walt Whitman. Some of us think Edgar A. Poe started it all (this thing called the "modern short story"), but at the end of the day we know there's a campfire and a tale and more recent concerns about "incident" and "flash" are just superficial preoccupations that pale beside the most important question: What happens next?

Three top ~10 lists from TDR's Editor

Recent Canadian short story collections (by writers who are not Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Carol Shields or Bonnie Burnard):

• 19 Knives by Mark Anthony Jarman
• 16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover
• White Buick by Greg Hollingshead
• Angel Wing Splash Pattern by Richard Van Camp
• All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner
• We So Seldom Look On Love by Barbara Gowdy
• Fresh Girls and Other Stories by Evelyn Lau
• Fiction for Lovers by Tony Burgess
• Please by Peter Darbyshire
• Smell It by Hal Niedzviecki
• One Good Story, That One by Thomas King
• Marine Life by Linda Svendsen

Short story collections you should *definitely* read before you die:

• The Stories of John Cheever
• Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro (or anything else by her)
• Dancing Girls and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
• Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
• 60 Stories by Donald Bartheme
• The Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
• Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes by Terry Southern and/or Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon

The Editor's fav's from five years of TDR:

• Gabe Camozzi, Jacket Walk
• Tim Conley, The Watch
• Corin Cummings, excerpt from "Night Support"
• Paul Glennon, The Man Who Would Not Believe
• Phil Jones, Bushed
• Shane Jones, Figure Four Leg Lock
• James Lewelling, Monkey Boxes
• Kabeera McCorkle, Evidence
• Michael O'Neill, Poema Woman 
• Gerard Varni, The Hole Between Them