John Metcalf has been the leading student, scholar, writer and champion of the Canadian short story for more than five decades. As an editor, he has worked with several generations of Canada's best short fiction writers, from Alice Munro and Norman Levine to Caroline Adderson, Rebecca Rosenblum and Annabel Lyon. In his new critical book, The Canadian Short Story, he sifts and sorts through a lifetime of reading, writing and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, offering up the most authoritative and important book on the subject to date. Building and expanding on his Century List of the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years, The Canadian Short Story offers up a guide not only to what to read, but in a series of far-ranging and personal essays, offers careful and considered instruction on how to read short fiction as well. Essential reading for academics, critics and all students of the form.
