Take Metatron. This publisher grew out of a reading series hosted by its eventual editors, Ashley Opheim and Guillaume Morissette, in Montreal’s cafe-bars. These events were as much about building a social community as a creative one. Sofia Banzhaf’s Pony Castle and Fawn Parker’s Looking Good and Having a Good Time, like all Metatron books, would make appealing public reading. Banzhaf’s novella and Parker’s story collection are speed reads – Pony Castle is forty-four pages, Looking Good, sixty-one – and their conversational prose, as if written for wandering attentions, brims with aggression, humour, surprise, and sarcasm.

The manuscript of Pony Castle won Metatron’s Prize for Rising Authors of Contemporary Literature. In these snapshots (chapter 22 is one short sentence) of a naive woman’s unmaking through depression and drugs, there’s plenty of millennial discontent and disconnection: “My desire to be understood by others is the primary way in which i introduce resistance and suffering to my experience.” But the emotional core of the book comes from the painful contrast between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and reality. The title refers to a plastic symbol of childhood, the protagonist’s “plastic Barbie pony.” When she finds her baby teeth, she acknowledges, “I always feel sad when I think about the smallness of my child body.” Banzhaf grants us access to the internal narrative of mundane actions: eating fried chicken, holding a garage sale. Then her language turns them into poetry. She describes the protagonist observing her period blood on bedsheets: “I put my finger on the spine of the butterfly staining the sheet.” And having sex: “I am performing girl performing slut performing real person performing fantasy.”

Looking Good and Having a Good Time is breezier in tone, its dark edges submerged in self-effacing humour. Parker makes fun of her generation, and of contemporary literature. The title of one of the four stories, “Doreen, Doreen,” is taken from a scene where the protagonist sifts through submissions to the Alien Baby Anthology:

Another submission is titled ‘Photo of My Ass’ and the document is empty.

The last submission is called ‘Untitled,’ containing only:

DOREEN, DOREEN.

In the next scene,

Heather O’Neill is reading at Monument-National. I show up with no clothes on and sit at the bar. A man is on stage holding a wooden moose, saying, It’s a give and take.

John Travolta comes over and sits behind me at the bar. He writes on a napkin: I want to fuck you.

Magical realism has arrived in millennial Montreal. Parker plays with form, incorporating a fictional interview in Vice magazine. Here, the young person’s desire for a life instruction manual is made literal. In the last story, a teenaged girl discovers a self-help book titled Looking Good and Having a Good Time. And it costs seventy-five dollars.

The mind of a self-doubting young person is a tiresome place to be (for both the protagonists and the reader), so it’s hard to imagine these books sustaining their prose for much longer than their short page counts. These books are the right size, although such short books are unusual. Also rare, regrettably, are stories by and about young women testing their independence, conveyed through the form of independent literature. That’s reason enough to read these books. mRb