I once asked a teacher why there were no Canadian cars. Many of the vehicles on the streets back then were manufactured in Canadian factories by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors, but their provenance was American. I knew that countries like England, Germany, France, and Italy made their own cars, because we imported them. They were called “imports,” whereas cars made by the Big Three qualified as “domestic,” even if they were conceived in Detroit. In fact, there were no domestics — although, as I would later learn, there had been; until he sold his company to General Motors in 1918, carriage maker Sam McLaughlin manufactured an eponymous automobile in Oshawa. But this was the 1950s, and the cars on offer to Canadians were either American or European (the Japanese wouldn’t be players for another twenty years). Why no Canadian products? Because, according to the teacher to whom I posed the question, Canada was too small.

I was satisfied with this answer, until many years later when I noticed the growing number of Volvos and Saabs on Canadian roads and realized that if size mattered no one had told the Swedes. A country with a population half the size of Canada’s was producing not one car of its own, but two. This was perhaps my first inkling that countries sometimes punch above their weight. Or, to put it another way, that weight — in this case a metaphor for geographic size, population, wealth, or military power — is seldom the only determinant of outsized success. Thus, Switzerland and watchmaking, Cuba and music, Finland and shipbuilding, Israel and science. So what, then, of Canada? In what fields, other than hockey — in which our pugilistic inclinations are well known — do we punch above our weight?

Sadly, our foreign service is no longer the envy of the world, as it was in the years following the Second World War. And we still don’t make truly Canadian cars (although we might have if Frank Stronach had succeeded last year in purchasing Opel from General Motors). But there are other reasons to wave the flag. Our financial services industry is universally admired — all the more so in the bloody aftermath of recent bank failures in Europe and the United States. Our engineering firms, expert in resource extraction, energy, telecommunications, and transportation, are in high demand globally. We are among the leading producers of environmental technologies, biopharmaceuticals, wireless equipment, digital entertainment, plastics, chemicals, and medical devices. Our food and beverage sector is the most productive in the world. And we rank third, after the US and France, in civil aircraft production; and fifth, after the US, the UK, France, and Germany, in aerospace sales and employment.

And then there’s literature, especially fiction, in which we’ve recently made a sizable international splash. When Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize for The English Patient eighteen years ago, it was front page news, but such victories now seem commonplace. Margaret Atwood was shortlisted for the Booker three times — for The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace — before winning in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. In 2003, the year after Yann Martel won for Life of Pi, Atwood was nominated again, for Oryx and Crake. And that’s just the Booker. Canadians have also won the Orange Prize (twice), the International Impac Dublin Literary Award (twice), and the Pulitzer Prize. But awards only hint at the dimensions of our literary achievements. The more revealing metric is foreign sales: Canadian novels are now read in the millions by people who live elsewhere, and the names Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Carol Shields, Anne Michaels, and Douglas Coupland — in addition to Ondaatje, Atwood, and many others — resonate in literary circles throughout the world.

This didn’t happen by chance. Canada has been generous in its support of writers since the founding of the Canada Council in 1957 (Margaret Atwood likes to say that the grant she received to finish her first novel was the best investment the Canadian government ever made). And, as the American novelist John Irving has observed, Canada has an appetite for good writing. We have been quick to applaud the work of our most talented writers, and our publishing houses have been nurturing. While the majority of Canadian writers still struggle to make a living, we have created a literary environment that is, for a country our size, remarkably fecund. So new writers continue to spring up from wherever writers spring up from, a process in which The Walrus — the only mass magazine in the country that publishes fiction in every issue — plays a part. In this, our Summer Reading Issue, we are pleased to bring you the work of nine Canadian writers (“Canadian Studies,”) who were given a simple challenge: write a truly Canadian short story. Not surprisingly, the results are impressive.