Simple Creatures

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, featuring stories set in locations from the Pacific Northwest and upstate New York to the English coast, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories consisting of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, and 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.

Along the way, 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