Master short story writer and novelist Lisa Moore brings her talents to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories, spanning the last two decades of the twentieth century to the present. An enthralling and irresistible collection of twenty-two established writers and talented new voices who attest to the richness and continued popularity of the short story. The authors featured include Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Burnard, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields, among others.

I started collecting the stories in this anthology with the idea of representing all the geographic regions of Canada. I thought that having writers from regions as far apart as British Columbia and Newfoundland would ensure a diversity of voice. I also wanted a good mix of emerging and established writers. I wanted an anthology that would reflect Canadian experience and innovation in form, the way the prism that hangs in my kitchen window refracts light, sending shimmers of unexpected rainbows over the cupboards, walls, and appliances.
 

I gathered together the best short story collections and literary magazines I'd read over the last twenty years. I thought of the writers I'd heard read at literary festivals across the country, and writers who had come to Newfoundland to read through the Canada Council.
 

I was looking for the short fiction that had moved swiftly through me, over those twenty years, whipping me up into an altered state, changing me for good. I wanted the new stuff too, the stories that reflected the twenty-first century, the buzzing paranoia of post-9/11 and the white noise of the information age. I sought dislocation, bomb scares, sexual freedom, aberration, fractured identities, nakedness, awakenings of every sort, redemption, and love.
 

Sometimes I found myself reading the stories here for a second, third, or fifth time, determined to discover how they worked, but at the very last minute, I always fell in. The stories were like swimming pools, and just when I leaned in close enough, I'd lose my balance, be fully submerged.
 

“The new Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories is a dazzling sample of a literature in its prime.”
—The Globe and Mail
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"...22 stories on a smorgasbord of issues such as 9/11 paranoia, sexual freedom, fractured identities, nakedness, awakenings of every sort, and more..."
—Ottawa Citizen