can'tlit

fearless fiction from broken pencil magazine

puts the new face, and the new underbelly, of the Canadian literary scene on full display - representing a selection of almost fifteen years of stories from the voice of the underground, this collection smashes together the avant- and apres-garde with whatever's in between; a shot over the bow of everything established and orthodox (or boring and stuffy) in Canadian fiction.

In 1995, Canadian novelist and critic Hal Niedzviecki started publishing Broken Pencil, a magazine dedicated to the zine scene, the independent and alternative arts community that had been boiling below the surface of Canada's culture. Broken Pencil's mandate was (and is) to bring the submerged cultural urge into Canada's collective consciousness, to help lift it up and lend it legitimacy. And this includes promoting writing, from writers within Canada and outside it whom nobody here had ever heard of or wouldn't touch, that was too weird or uncomfortable for the (all-too) serious literary journals, too visceral and punk rock for the likes of the Margarets and their ilk.

The stories in this anthology are outcasts. They don't fit into traditional CanLit and, in most cases, they don't even resemble the contemporary short story we've come to know and love. They are anti-literature. By and large, they read ragged, lacking the refinements of metaphor, magical realism, and perfect epiphany on the prairies. A few of them might even be badly written. On purpose? By accident? Who really cares? This is Broken Pencil, where the words do the work, voices are discovered and developed, and the place for sharp, offensive urban fiction.

stories | contributors | buy | contact

join us! together we can kill canlit.