Reviewed by B.J. Epstein

Rightly or not, Canada often gets left off the list of English-speaking countries and literatures. The US and the UK tend to take over, and the huge country of Canada is forgotten, along with smaller places like New Zealand or South Africa. If those of us outside Canada, however, made an effort to read anthologies like Best Canadian Stories 06, we would not be likely to forget the nation or its writing again.

There are 10 stories in this collection. Before I opened the book, I asked myself what authors I thought were likely to be included. The only one I could guess at was Alice Munro, who, of course, is one of the top two literary Canadian exports, with the other being Margaret Atwood, and is therefore one of the few Canadian authors familiar to us non-Canadians. I was not wrong; Munro was duly included, with "The View from Castle Rock," which was originally published in The New Yorker and which was about a Scottish family immigrating to Canada in the early 19^th century. I felt that the novella/story was too long and was not one of her best. 

Since it was so long (around 50 pages, while the second-longest piece in the collection was just above 30 pages, and most were between 10 and 20), I couldn’t help but think that it might have been more interesting to either include something else by her that was shorter or else nothing at all, so other Canadian writers could have been featured. 

The editor, Douglas Glover, has been editing this anthology for ten years and he wrote in his introduction that he "would have put Alice Munro in the book every year if her editors had let me." While I can understand his admiration for her skills, perhaps this book could be seen, as I already implied, as a sort of marketing tool for Canadian writers, and thus some variety would be welcome.

Moving on from Munro, I found it interesting that only two of the ten authors were female (Munro and P.K. Page), that none had an ethnic-sounding name, and that not a single one of these stories was in French or at least translated from French. The last time I checked, Canada was a bilingual nation. So I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of French-language writers. Perhaps the editors purposely focus on works written in English; in that case, Best Canadian Stories in English is a more appropriate title. Alternatively, maybe there were no good French-language stories in 2006, although that seems hard to believe.

My favorite stories in the anthology were Dave Margoshes’ "Bix’s Trumpet", Bill Gaston’s "The Night Window", and David Helwig’s "Wakefulness". Margoshes, whose story is described in the introduction as being about "the sad, downward spiral of a brilliant, promising drunk whose father once won Bix Beiderbecke’s trumpet in a crap game," apparently has published five collections of stories, a novel, a biography, and poetry. Gaston is the author of five novels, six collections of short stories, plays, and poetry, and his story is about a boy who is on a camping trip with his mother and her boyfriend and who ends up discovering where two musicians grow marijuana. The boy seems to get along better with those musicians than he does with his mother and her boyfriend. And Helwig, whose story focuses on a blind war veteran and the woman who tries to help him by taking him on a trip to Venice, founded the Best Canadian Stories series 36 years ago and has published 13 volumes of poetry, 19 works of fiction, and other texts.

Other works in this anthology included "Wasps" by Patrick Lane, which was just one (four-page) sentence long, and "Men of Salt, Men of Earth" by first-time author Matt Lennox.

It was nice to be exposed to these stories and to see what kind of contemporary writing is going on in Canada. I certainly hope to read more work by some of the authors I discovered here and I look forward to learning more about Canadian literature in the future. I recommend that other people outside of Canada look into this series of anthologies so that we no longer forget our fellow English-speaking nation.

B.J. Epstein is a Swedish to English translator, copy editor, and writer. She has a BA in English and creative writing from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA in fiction from Queens University, both in the U.S, and is currently a Ph.D. student in translation studies at Swansea University in Wales. Please visit her website http://www.awaywithwords.se/ or her blog on translation http://brave-new-words.blogspot.com/ for more information or to contact her.