Archibald excels at long, fast-paced stories, page-turners with a whiff of genre fiction (one of his academic specializations at UQAM, where he’s a professor). “The Animal (Blood Sisters II)” is a drawn-out, harrowing tour de force. The collection’s longest and strongest stories are Chekhovian in their structural integrity and moral ambivalence.

“House Bound” is a taut, mean yarn spun by a characteristic Archibald narrator. Fiercely intelligent but emotionally stunted, he lovingly describes every plank and panel of his house but can’t find one nice thing to say about his ex. Throughout Arvida, Archibald gives eloquent voice to men most articulate with chainsaws and hunting rifles, men for whom clouds are “swollen with water, like the plastic sheets you hang up over drying wood.”

In its original French, Arvida made waves in Quebec, won awards, and sold briskly. (Archibald has since published a novella; a children’s book is forthcoming.) No small part of the appeal lies in Archibald’s masterful ear and wholehearted embrace of Québécois vernacular, not excluding borrowings from English. In a province where even bathroom stall graffiti is routinely corrected, this is still a big deal. It’s also slippery to translate. Perhaps inevitably, certain narrators and characters have lost some of their salt. But translation is an art of mitigating loss. Donald Winkler has given us a tight-knit, readable collection whose best stories spirit us along to the bitter-sweet end. Arvida is an important contribution to Canada’s increasingly ebullient translation scene.