FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE
With an intimate, comic, and compassionate eye, the twelve stories in Simple Creatures consider what it means to live with less in the twenty-first century.
In this debut collection, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories taking the form of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, or the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed with a famous Canadian writer, Simple Creatures also shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves.
We meet a teenager who wants to live among a community of Bigfoot that he claims to have discovered in the woods; the widow of a famous endocrinologist after she gains custody of a chimpanzee from his lab; a boy whose fledgling hockey career is troubled by the fact that his name is Leo Gretzky; and a divorcee seeking out the mysterious author of a viral environmental pledge. Through their lives, Simple Creatures offers an acute, sympathetic portrait of our time.
"Here are people struggling with simple needs and small dramas that nevertheless got entirely under my skin – sublime awe, tender longing, painful anxiety, too. Robert McGill's masterful Simple Creatures reminded me of how potent an elixir the short story form can be – the magic of words alchemically transforming within me into raw feeling. The stories in Simple Creatures truly live and breathe." – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Wait Softly Brother
"Robert McGill writes hilarious, smart, heart-breaking stories. A master of voice and dialogue, character and perspective, he knows everyone's loneliness. We're all in here, the whole arc of life: children in the beginning, elderly athletes battling to the end, and middle aged lovers trying to love in the middle of the internet and a climate disaster. Come watch as one of our best stylists plies his trade, pushing short fiction to its contemporary, ecstatic edge." – Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting and Animal Person
"Simple Creatures was my introduction to McGill's delightfully ever-so-subtly off-the-wall narrative voice which never fails to be surprising, whether he's writing from the point of view of a wife watching her 76-year-old philandering husband run races from her wheelchair parked on the sidelines, a PhD candidate writing her thesis on an iconic author whose chronicles of small town Ontario have created their own mythology (and then some), an ASMR Youtuber, a third person story about an endocrinologist reincarnated as a chimpanzee, and more." – Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf
"Simple Creatures stretches the short story to its glorious, contemporary limits. A big-hearted, slick collection that is as playful as it is precise, surprising as it is insightful." – Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist jury citation
"With foot in mouth and tongue in cheek, McGill's stories are humorous, but that humour goes alongside serious matters that may be ominous." – Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review
"For all the experimentation, humour, and nods to online life, at their core, McGill's stories are grounded in human feeling-our yearnings, our anxieties, our obsessions, and our relationships with each other." – Monika Warzecha, The Walrus' "The Best Books of Fall 2024"
