Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine

Can'tLit is prefaced with a "Not your parent's short stories" rant about how Margaret Atwood is ruining Canadian Literature for everyone else.  The editor promises the grotesque, the avant guarde, the So-Hip-It'll-Make-your-Ears-Bleed sentimentality.  Work that finds its way onto Broken Pencil and by extension this book are meant to reside on the edge, where the cutting happens, and fuck you if you don't like it Gramps.

"Whoa" says I.

So I open it up in the middle as I am wont to do with Short story books with that tingling sensation that makes me feel like I should be wearing a seatbelt.  What does Can'tlit deliver me?

Nice stories, sad stories, stories about sex, stories about sad or even violent sex, but this hardened soul did no blushing.  You get the feeling that some of these writers are carrying some serious baggage, but never once do you think they are anything worse than the kind of hipsters who'd help you shovel your driveway if you looked at all fatigued.  I didn't feel grossed out and I didn't feel disturbed.  I felt welcomed, I felt witty, I felt good.

Dear Broken Pencil,

When I was 18 I read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, when I was twenty I read American Dream by Mailer, my grandparents have a copy of the Satyricon next to their Asterisk comics.  If you want to shock me with sex you had better dig real real deep into the tickle trunk because I have to believe when you've read about a guy strangling his wife, sodomizing his maid and then clunking up the stairs to chuck his wife's body out a window, there's no mountain of shock left to climb.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.  Can'tlit is not a book that's clankering for a censorship debate, it's a collection of very good writers writing very good stories.  It was a pleasure to read and I really liked it.  It dug into some pretty unorthodox sexual dissertations, but always with one foot on the ground and usually tempered with a playful tongue in cheek.

In one story a flat chested preteen falls for a boy with moobs, in another Jesus buys hookers so he can have somebody to talk to, in yet another a gal tours around town in a car painted to resemble her lady bits (or somebody's lady bits).  These stories are too hip and too thoughtful to be shocking, and never does any writer do any shocking for shock's sake.

Therein lies the trick I guess.  I could probably describe some of the stories in such a way so as to make them seem grotesque, but the writers with no exceptions paint a good story behind even the worst descriptions and make the final product...palatable.

I read Can'tlit at a cottage and the lovely summer weather on the lake didn't hurt the ambiance one bit, so If you're making a late run North to enjoy the last bit of August, pick this one up.  May you have as good a time as I did.