A Canadian writer argues for more oddness in contemporary Canadian literature and offers a short recommended list of strange, funny, and emotionally sharp books—mostly short fiction—that take risks with form, tone, and subject.
Short stories and microfiction are highlighted as efficient, fearless forms that accommodate strangeness and emotional intensity.
Specific Canadian titles exemplify different kinds of ‘weird’: comic and grotesque, formally inventive, speculative, and tenderly strange.
# Why the author wants Canadian literature to get weirder
The author opens by asking readers and writers to accept more strangeness in Canadian fiction—whatever that looks like: sex slapstick, revenge plots, body horror, demon possession, talking animals, or formal experiments. The pitch is practical: weird books expand the range of feeling and make space for stories about loneliness, economic pressure, and community without flattening them into familiar realism.
# What "weird" does in service of story
Weirdness is presented not as novelty for its own sake but as a way to dramatize real pressures—wealth disparity, predatory development, and late-capitalist loneliness—while still being funny, human, and compassionate. Friendship and community recur as grounds where the strange and the tender meet, and humour is named as a decisive reason to read.
# Recommended books and what they show
# A practical nudge to readers and writers
The piece ends with an emphatic call to read more short stories and to writers: keep experimenting. The tone is affectionate and insistent—readers who want novelty, emotional risk, or compact intensity will find that many Canadian writers already take those risks.
# Bottom line
The author wants Canadian literature to be bolder about oddness because the strange can make social realities feel fresh and the emotional stakes sharper. The recommended titles offer a range of ways to do that: brief explosions of microfiction, novel-length commitments to the uncanny, and short stories that move between laughter and discomfort.
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