Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's haunting "What Had Become of Us," is from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, Way Up. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

With blood on his hands, Curtis Woolf flees his home in New Mexico for Canada, where he starts a religious commune, the Family. There he heals others and preaches pacifism while enduring the torment of this own damaged soul. Then his lover, Martha, finds his gun and goes south to discover the truth, whatever that might be. Curtis sets out to bring her back, lest the Family fall apart. In the half-light of a nursing home sits Hollis, dragon lord of a lost Mormon line, who has anointed Curtis, damned him, and now awaits his return.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's writing is full of dark humour and razor-sharp insight. Catching human fallibility head-on, she demands examination, confrontation, and a reckoning of pain with beauty.

In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love -- not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hippies and idealistic students. Baking by day in the hot sun and tormented by mosquitoes and blackflies, Alma and her fellow planters relieve their backbreaking toil at night with sex, dope, and alcohol. But her brief passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer named Willem raises the ire of Karl (whose amorous attentions she has deflected in the past), and he viciously rapes her. Pregnant and alone, Alma flees to an abandoned mining camp where she and Willem once made love. There, with the help of the camp's single weird inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby an increasingly ominous new life.

Weaving together Alma's story with an ancient Flemish folktale about a peasant girl's magical hold over a lustful count, Kuitenbrouwer links the power of narrative with the passion for self-realization. "The Nettle Spinner" is a gritty, sensuous debut that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection. Or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet:

ALDEN NOWLAN's "A Boy's Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, "The Wanton Troopers," written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988.

The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" from DOUGLAS GLOVER's 1991 GG-nominated story collection, "A Guide to Animal Behaviour."

Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY's unforgettable Christmas story "The Three Marys," adapted from her award-winning debut novel, "Strange Heaven," published in 1993.

Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN's glittering story "Simran" from her 1996 debut collection, "English Lessons and Other Stories."

KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER's haunting "What Had Become of Us," from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, "Way Up."

The extraordinary "Knife Party" from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.

In the thirteen stories that comprise Way Up, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's canvas stretches from downtown Toronto to isolated farms, from the Canadian Shield to Nova Scotia and Europe, and even into outer space. In "The Last Magic Forest," she turns her Gothic imagination loose in the bush of Northern Ontario, where tree planters have developed a unique culture. In this wasteland of clear-cutting and scarifying, the concept of "nature" overturns everything readers (and tree planters) expect. When Kuitenbrouwer takes a Canadian tree planter to Belgium in "What Had Become of Us," only the outer topography changes. In the superficially more cultivated European forest, the value and meaning of human life depends on the inner topography the forester brings with her from the Ontario bush. In other stories, Kuitenbrouwer's characters engage in a continual play with perspective, in a perpetual balancing act. In an emotional spectrum ranging from corrosive grief to murderous recklessness, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's characters make -- or fail to make -- the constant adjustments necessary to stay fully human. By intention or accident, each character steps into a more comprehensible life or crosses into seductive darkness.