Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Zsuzsi Gartner

There's always been something sinister about Vancouver, something dark and disturbing underneath that sheen of natural beauty and high livability index scores.  Gartner taps into this weirdness in this collection of short stories. Houses disappear, taking people and dreams with them. Civilized, home-owning males takes a few steps back on  the evolutionary chart to deal with a interloper into their suburban enclave. Angels take possession of teens and homeless junkies get publicly funded plastic surgery to boost their self-esteem.

Under the hyper-acute prose, filled with tangled sentences and cultural references, beats a heart. A dark one perhaps, but one that you can identify.

Pulse - Julian Barnes

A collection of short stories about how we get together or how we fail to, how we try to stay together but can't,  how we are connected but fail to connect.  The thread that holds most of these stories together is a series of dialogue-only scenes about three couples that meet at dinner parties and talk about love, marriage, sex and politics. Some of these scenes made me feel as if I showed up late and hadn't enough to drink to fully enjoy myself.  The second half of the book are stories set in the distant and near past.

The best story is also the title of the book, a first-person story about a man who cannot keep his relationship together, a sharp contrast to the way his parents endure through hardships.

This Cake Is For The Party - Sarah Selecky

10 stories, remarkable for being even in their distribution of style, wit and a high degree of writing. All are about loss, and what comes before and what comes after.  The most skillful is the last in the collection, One Thousand Wax Buddhas, which plays with narrative structure and first-person perspective to tell the story of a candle-maker and his mentally ill wife. Hints of Munroe, suggestions of Carver, but Selecky makes these stories her own.

Esquire's Big Book of Fiction - Adrienne Miller

Reads like a who-who of American fiction of the 20th century, with all the names you'd expect - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, Carver, Ford, McCarthy, O'Conner, Wallace, Cheever, Barth, DeLillo.  Some are good, others are great, and a few were added just to be inclusive. A book you can pick up at different times, turn to a story and read - one of my favourite kind of books.