Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada Edited by Lynn Coady Anchor Canada, 200 pages, $21

Anne of Green Gables is in the gutter outside Trapper John's, drunk on screech, wailing in Gaelic about Gilbert Blythe's affair with her (former) best friend Diana Barry. This is the spirit in which Victory Meat has been assembled; there are no noble and brave fisherpersons in sou'westers, no capsized dorys, no cod to be kissed. These are stories about the emotional landscape of Atlantic Canada.

The geography of Eastern Canada is noticeably absent -- when familiar icons of Atlantic Canada do appear, they are twisted, perverted or surreal, such as in The Whales by Lee D. Thompson, a magic-realist tale of a whale migration through the streets of a Moncton suburb: "The nightair is thrumming with song, with haunting intertwining melody, with harmony that is all prayer, and the younger whale ripples to our driveway, flattens our prickly hedges, and settles in for the night."

As editor Lynn Coady explains in her introduction, even if Easterners still sometimes talk funny, they are modern and sophisticated yokels: "Yes, we say 'arse.' We also use e-mail, collect air miles, and have the entire third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD." In That Fall, by Michael Crummey (of River Thieves fame), a fortysomething woman named Grace is taken "to a small martini bar on Duckworth Street that featured black lights around the baseboards and a relentlessly nebulous soundtrack of acid jazz and trip-hop and house music." Not that everyone in Newfoundland automatically feels at ease in such a sleek urban den: "Grace had never tried a martini before and couldn't finish her first, the mix of gin and vermouth too unadulterated."

Despite some local idioms and landmarks, all of these stories will translate easily to other time zones across the country. Stubborn Bones, by Karen Smythe, deals with a funeral, old lovers reunited and a train trip full of slow, unpleasant realizations. Carol Bruneau, meanwhile, blends a suburban pond, a grisly discovery and a vacating lover in Why Men Fish Where They Do. The underutilized topic of back pain is prominent in Libby Creelman's Cruelty, and an insomniac in Halifax visits a video store to relieve her boredom in Insomnis, by Christy Ann Conlin.

It is tempting to suggest that Atlantic Canadian fiction -- or what Coady dubs "At-Can" -- is "hot" at the moment. Lisa Moore earned a Giller Prize shortlisting last year for Open, a stunning collection of intricate short stories. (Melody, from Open, is included here). An article in the April, 2002, issue of Saturday Night proclaimed Newfoundland hip and happening, brimming with fancy coffees, lofts -- even a high-end spa. And The Burning Rock Collective, a St. John's writers' group looks to be the East Coast's answer to the UBC creative-writing program, minus that fiction factory's conveyor belt and assembly-line churn.

But to suggest that At-Can short fiction is a trendy, lucrative fad to profit from is laughable, ludicrous even. Instead, Victory Meat replaces the rustic clichés of Don Messer's Jubilee and Newfie jokes with a new set of myths. Such a sea-change in the style and subject matter of Atlantic fiction comes none too soon. In his 1995 book, Making it Real, literary critic Robert Lecker claims that "the argument that there is no monolithic Canada is self-evident. Once this is accepted, there is no choice but to imagine the 'actual society' in an entirely new way."

Bitches on All Sides, the opening story by Rabindranath Maharaj, accomplishes this reimagination with fierce wit and rattling anger. Observe the manic and mangled English of the main character, Ramjohn, a 42-year-old immigrant from Caura searching for non-existent work in Fredericton: "And you know what does really eat me up? How they so blasted polite with everything. 'Sorry, sir, we have nothing now. Maybe you can try again next month.' As if next month they will suddenly start liking black people."

Lecker goes on to suggest that our idea of Canada will always be constructed, but this projection of national identity is a process in which we can all participate. "[T]he country can become a collective fiction that is constantly renewed. After all, Canada is nothing less than a dramatic narrative about community," he explains. "The strongest expressions of this community will be those that recreate the country by imagining it anew." Victory Meat is fresh, a salty buffet of young, urban Easterners heaving old, rusty narratives aside and metaphorically smashing the wooden lobster traps of their literary predecessors.

Lest mainlanders feel too guilty about ignoring their Eastern brethren until now, it should be observed that Michael Winter and Lisa Moore are published by Toronto's House of Anansi press, proving that the centre of the universe is occasionally able to gaze past its navel. And, at the risk of sounding impudent, anthology editor Lynn Coady calls Vancouver home -- an appropriate if not quintessential irony of modern Canadian life.