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A woman carries a placard bearing the question “Are you content to be nothing?” as she conducts her way through the interconnected stories of this thought-provoking collection. A pianist herself, eventually she'll be the soloist in her own story, but first we'll encounter the contrapuntal lines of “Café Society”, the discord of “The Companion's Tale”, the slowly evolving dark harmonic resolution of “Aquarium”. These are the songs of people – many of them seniors – sidelined and dismissed, but refusing to go gently into that good night – a night that isn't even on their concert program! Be it through a percussive storm of revelation, or a quietly insistent ostinato that won't be ignored, this is an orchestra of characters never content to be nothing, determined to be heard.

“Expect pleasure. Expect delight. Expect surprise. Expect these twelve writers to emerge as some of this country's most interesting voices.” Anthony De Sa, Tanis Rideout, and Carrie Snyder (from their Introduction) The celebrated annual collection showcasing the best stories by the best new writers in Canada, all contenders for the prestigious $10,000 Writers'Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. A must-read for anyone looking for exciting new voices in Canadian fiction. For three decades, this acclaimed annual anthology has introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. With settings ranging from a small-town hobby farm to the streets of Hong Kong, from a dance club in 1979 to the years after the end of the world, the twelve stories in this collection represent the year's best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging writers. Among the stories this year: When Mercy Beatrice decides to seek out her long-lost father against the advice of her late pro-wrestler mother, she discovers that wrestling may be in her blood. After her dying husband makes a surprising wish, a woman sets herself the task of finding him a lover. A young man—lost and craving reinvention—makes the unlikely trip back to his hometown after he inherits his uncle's farm. In a touching story about the intersection between Chinese tradition and modern expectations, a woman must weigh the possibilities in her own life when her family prepares for the naming ceremony for her cousin's month-old baby. A philosophy student struggling with a broken heart and the meaning of Being must also contend with her new neighbours and their wildly precocious infant. Two travellers in desperate straits look for refuge on a remote Italian farm that proves to be anything but idyllic. The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Journey Prize, which is made possible by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener's donation of Canadian royalties from his novel Journey. The 2015 winner will be announced by the Writers'Trust of Canada on November 3, 2015. For more information: www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize

Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction AwardOne of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is'extraordinary, his stories gripping,'and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again. In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer. A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease. He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman's stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories received the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and second-wave feminism. Garner takes on issues ranging from anglophone–francophone conflict in Canada to racism in the American South, from the disenfranchisement of First Nations people to the mistreatment of the mentally disabled. Best Stories is not only notable for the devastating precision of its prose, but also for its contribution to the Spanish Civil War literary canon. This new edition brings short fiction by Garner into conversation with the wider canon of Canadian and transnational leftist and proletarian literature.

Ten ingenious tales of speculative fiction from a World Fantasy Award finalist: “Masterful... Extraordinary... A great talent” (San Francisco Chronicle). The ten stories collected in The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind take us to places that are awesomely new yet achingly familiar. Terence M. Green skillfully examines the thorny bonds of family in the tale of one man's strange journey into the past to find a vanished uncle, as well as in the story of a son who is legally mandated to unearth a murderer by communicating with his dead father. The intricate workings of memory and the human heart are explored in the account of a space traveler's decision to end his life after one final resurrection, and in the unforgettable title story in which a lonely hospital worker on a colonized planet 420 light years from Earth becomes entranced by a newborn alien-human hybrid child. Speculative fiction becomes great literature in the hands of Green, a World Fantasy Award finalist who was proclaimed “one of Canada's finest writers” by science fiction and fantasy luminary Charles de Lint. The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind pushes the boundaries of a genre already renowned for its farsighted invention and establishes Green's as a science fiction humanist on par with the immortal Ray Bradbury.

New Beginnings is the sequel to Eric Koch's landmark work The Golden Years: Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Lester B. Pearson, Rene Levesque & John G. Diefenbaker published by Mosaic Press in 2013. Once again, Koch is inventing a new literary form that is special and astonishing, crafting five intimate stories of six fascinating and important figures in Canadian history.

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.

The fiction and prose selections included in Charleswood Road contrast stark reality with fantasy, mortality with transcendence and explore both the mundane and pivotal choices people make in shaping their world. Each selection, neither predictable nor conventional, challenges one's assumptions of what is real and what is possible and inspires one to question the role of fate and fortune in one's own life. From first kisses to last breaths and everything in between, sentiment is stripped away to reveal both the allure and acrimony of humanity. Rich and varied, bleak and hopeful, this remarkable collection of short stories and poetry pulls focus on our limitations and in spite of these limitations, our willingness to see each day to the end. The title offering is a wholly original and candid coming of age piece loosely based around real events in the city of Winnipeg.

This collection shows us the battles—fought, lost and won—when we strive to live life to the fullest. In the fabled adventures in both this world and the next, there are many quests to be embarked on, with countless clashes with dragons—seen and unseen. In The Pros & Cons of Dragon-Slaying, the characters struggle with the bewildering aspects of existence and try to prevail against the forces that are arrayed against them, or that are besieging them from within. Despite their multiple points of view, which range from the farce to the surreal, these crusade stories all speak in harmony, as they reveal life's stunning surprises and twisted ironies. The tales also speak for life against death, for love against apathy, and for the human spirit against all forms of oppression. But as you weigh the pros and cons of dragon-slaying, take care to watch out for the tempters and demons of inwardness. Beware the dragons of the mind.

Finders, keepers, is an unwritten law. But the gadget Clark accidentally found had a special set of rules governing its use by whom—and when!

A Golden Wedding A Redeeming Sacrifice A Soul that Was Not At Home Abel And His Great Adventure Akin to Love Aunt Philippa and the Men Bessie's Doll Charlotte's Ladies Christmas at Red Butte How We Went to the Wedding Jessamine Miss Sally's Letter My Lady Jane Robert Turner's Revenge The Fillmore Elderberries The Finished Story The Garden of Spices The Girl and the Photograph The Gossip of Valley View The Letters The Life-Book of Uncle Jesse The Little Black Doll The Man on the Train The Romance of Jedediah The Tryst of the White Lady Uncle Richard's New Year Dinner White Magic

A Fortunate Mistake An Unpremeditated Ceremony At the Bay Shore Farm Elizabeth's Child Freda's Adopted Grave How Don Was Saved Miss Madeline's Proposal Miss Sally's Company Mrs. March's Revenge Nan Natty of Blue Point Penelope's Party Waist The Girl and the Wild Race The Promise of Lucy Ellen The Pursuit of the Ideal The Softening of Miss Cynthia Them Notorious Pigs Why Not Ask Miss Price?

The extraordinary'Knife Party'is from a new collection of stories by Mark Anthony Jarman titled Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, published in the spring of 2015.Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

Alden Nowlan's'A Boy's Life of Napoleon'is a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960 but published posthumously in 1988. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also available pas part of the six@sixty collection.

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.

The beguiling'Woman Gored by Bison Lives'is from Douglas Glover's 1991 Governor General Award-nominated story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

These stories, in all their narrative voicings, deal with sorrow and still seek to find life's joys. Despite conflicts, contradictions, sacrifices, surprises and ironies, the haunted and hunted characters try to comprehend death in detail. In so doing, the human spirit rises up and triumphs against the incomprehensible and bewildering aspects of life, love and death.

Brilliant is a collection of short stories set in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, a polyglot city where cultures collide and converge, where money -- and sometimes justice -- is no object, where in less than two generations towers have replaced tents. In these stories, a cast of characters -- an Egyptian pastry chef, a Filipina nanny, a Canadian nurse, a lusty French urban planner, a newly destitute British couple, and a cross-dressing Emirati -- navigate this land of sudden plenty, discovering the limits of freedom, money, tolerance and their own good sense.

In Prerequisites for Sleep, her first published short story collection, Jennifer L. Stone has created a fictional world rich with dilemmas. From the young unwed mother paying the price for both her own mistakes as well as her family's, to the woman whose unexpected late-in-life pregnancy wreaks havoc on her relationship with her teenaged daughter, to the man who finds a mysterious woman taking over his kitchen and his life, to the elderly woman trying to balance dignity with aggression management in her relationship with her Alzheimer-stricken husband, all the characters in the thirteen stories of this collection must make decisions and compromises that invite insomnia. Although most of these characters are firmly rooted in Stone's Maritime landscape, their challenges are universal. They are people we recognize. They step off the page alive as family, friends, and neighbours.

Why do we keep secrets and why do we confess them? The nine tales in this collection, all told in the first person, are each spun around a well-kept secret, willingly or inadvertently confessed. Sometimes the secrets are at the core of the narrator's life, other times they appear tangential. Regardless of the magnitude of its burden, the confession finds its way to the reader, through a story told perhaps over a cup of tea, in the pages of a journal or within the intimacy of the narrator's mind. Would stories mean as much to us if they did not remind us of our own secrets and regrets, our stolen moments, our ecstatic failures and sad joys? The stories are confessions of intimate events or desires: marital infidelities, betrayal of friendship, crimes including murderous thoughts and actual acts of murder as well as the painful words of those who consider themselves superior directed at those of lesser financial means who perform necessary tasks for them. Most of the stories are set outside of North America, particularly in Turkey, so they have a fresh cultural aspect at the same time as they convey the commonality of human greed, betrayal and heartbreak.

Le Carnaval du quotidien, version française de Dressing up for the Carnival, est le troisième et dernier recueil de nouvelles de Carol Shields. Les nouvelles de Shields dévoilent le côté ludique et l'imagination féconde de cette grande dame de la littérature canadienne. Une grève de météorologistes provoque une suspension totale du climat (Acclimatement). Le gouvernement instaure une taxe sur les fenêtres qui incite la population à se replier dans la noirceur en recouvrant toutes les surfaces vitreuses des demeures (Fenêtres). Stop! aborde la réclusion d'une reine qui est allergique à tout, même à la marche du temps. Reportage porte sur la découverte d'un amphithéâtre romain au Manitoba qui transforme l'économie locale. On rencontre également Titus, un berger de l'Antiquité, qui invente la rêverie dans la nouvelle intitulée Invention. D'une nouvelle à l'autre, le lecteur est invité dans l'univers de Shields où la vie est synonyme de spectacle et le quotidien n'est ni banal ni ordinaire.

Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of'Getting the Cat,'to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of'New Summer Dresses,'to the fatal irony of'Ice Break,'readers will be hooked from first sentences and carried along on crisp prose. You Haven't Changed a Bit shimmers with the energy of a first book while affording readers the subtlety, complexity, and range of an accomplished master of the genre.

Existing somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souled-ness, Christine Miscione's debut collection illumines all that is perilous, beautiful, and raw about being human and brings a new voice to contemporary literature. From the surgically gutted and the racially transformed to the story of self-excision that won the Vanderbilt/Exile Award for short fiction, this anthology is chock-full of razor blades masquerading as lemon tarts and everything in between. The writing and its use of imagery and language is innovative and calls into question the definition of a short story by challenging previous notions of the convention in terms of length, style, and plot. Inventive, assured, and accessible, the stories pair emotional depth with great technical skills and peel back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, and the unexpected. This provocative collection reimagines ideas of the body, the world, interiority, and relationships with the self and with others through a satiric approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, irreverent analysis, and comic existentialism.

From the internationally celebrated author of No Great Mischief comes a moving short story of three generations of men from a single family whose lives are forever altered by the long shadow of war. In the early morning hours of November 11, David MacDonald, a veteran of the Second World War, stands outside his Cape Breton home, preparing to attend what will likely be his last Remembrance Day parade. As he waits for the arrival of his son and grandson, he remembers his decision to go to war in desperation to support his young family. He remembers the horrors of life at the frontlines in Ortona, Italy, and then what happened in Holland when the Canadians arrived as liberators. He remembers how the war devastated his own family, but gave him other reasons to live. As the story unfolds, other generations enter the scene. What emerges is an elegant, life-affirming meditation on the bond between fathers and sons,'how the present always comes out of the past,'and how even in the midst of tragedy and misfortune there exists the possibility for salvation. His first new short story in over a decade, Remembrance is a powerful reminder of why Alistair MacLeod is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

An actress visits a bishop she knew in her college years and gives him the kiss he didn't have the nerve to ask for fifty years ago; a retired diplomat encounters a female colleague he served with years ago in Cambodia and learns an unsuspected secret; an aspiring skater is taken up by a former Canadian champion and has to decide what price he is prepared to pay for his assistance; a terrified young native boy agrees to take on at the last moment the leading role in a musical he has written at his high school; a drama critic ponders his involvement with student actors; an embittered old woman discovers a grandson she didn't know existed; two well-known actors find themselves playing opposite each other in a Shakespeare comedy and wonder whether it will rekindle their old romance; two middle-aged art historians meet in Hong Kong and consider the possibility of a mariage blanc; a successful female academic is confronted by the daughter she abandoned in infancy. These are some of the situations Martin Hunter explores in this collection of short stories whose dates cover a period of fifty years and a variety of settings around the globe. A few famous characters make brief cameo appearances: Federico Fellini, Martha Graham, Anthony Perkins. Hunter's characters are mostly artists trying to work their way through the tensions posed by the conflicts between their professional and emotional lives. Their situations are often comic as they struggle to make choices for themselves and those they care about.

An ALA 2014 Over the Rainbow SelectionAn Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013: Top 100/Editors'PickA Vancouver Sun Favourite Read of 2013“Reading Cullen is a little like drinking booze. Definitely not wine, because it's not all that genteel, and not beer, because it's not all that commonplace, but hard liquor because it's edgy, fast-acting, more than a little disorienting and frequently mixed with something sweet.”—The Globe & MailWhat has to die before you force yourself to change? That's the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver's East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen's debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Yet in this joint-smoking urban underground, we also glimpse the families, communities, friends and strangers from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air. Trashy but poignant, comic and profound, Canary hangs luminous above the coal-heap of fiction debuts—and proves Nancy Jo Cullen a writer of astonishing depths.'Cullen's prose is volcanic even when she's describing the most domestic situations possible—the language is full of subterranean rumbles that simultaneously disturb and delight. The writing is always surprising, always bright, even in the most somber moments. Moving and funny, these stories will break your heart in the very best way.'—Suzette Mayr'Nancy Jo Cullen mines humanity's beautiful fault-lines. There is not one lousy story in this bunch, but there are plenty of lousy people, all of them gleaming with the shimmer of real. Cullen knows just where to find the funny in tragedy, and how to make words feel like life.'—Kathryn KuitenbrouwerNancy Jo Cullen is the 4th recipient of the Writers'Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award for an Emerging Gay Writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph Humber. Her fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Grain, filling Station, Plenitude and Prairie Fire. Her short story “Ashes” was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology in 2012.Cullen is also the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry with Frontenac House Press. Her first collection, Science Fiction Saint, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta's Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. Her second collection Pearl was shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize and won the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. A transplanted westerner, Cullen lives in Toronto with her partner and children. She is at work on a novel and a fourth collection of poetry.

“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It's the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world. In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quade's “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham's “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mother's declining health and her daughter's helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink's “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents'estrangement.“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one's writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”

The Jesus Year explores the space between joy and tragedy, happiness and despair, sincerity and absurdity. A husband won't throw his wife a party for her thirty-third birthday; a woman becomes obsessed with redecorating her familial cabin; a couple's west coast elopement turns dangerous; a father must talk his daughter out of canceling her wedding; a mother meets her thirtyyear- old daughter for the first time; three friends'lives collide at an annual Christmas party; and a downtown couple drive to a prairie church to plan the perfect wedding. In these stories, the banal details of life crash against momentous occasions, revealing what is hidden, and recasting what is already in plain sight.

Thirteen short stories inspired by Broken Social Scene s groundbreaking album, You Forgot It In People. With a foreword by Carl Wilson, author of Celine Dion s Let s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.In celebration of both Arts ten-year anniversary and You Forgot It In People, the acclaimed album that launched the record label and caused a sensation worldwide, House of Anansi launched the Broken Social Scene Short Story Contest.More than four hundred works of short fiction from all across Canada were submitted to the contest, each inspired by one of the thirteen tracks from You Forgot It In People. Broken Social Scene members Amy Millan, Brendan Canning, Leslie Feist, and Charles Spearin, along with House of Anansi Featuring some of the best new voices in Canadian literature, this collection is for fans of music and literature alike.

The eighteen pieces collected in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories bring together the many and subtle voices of Ethel Wilson, demonstrating her extraordinary range as a writer. From the gentle mockery of the title story to the absurdist reportage of “Mr. Sleepwalker,” Wilson exerts unerring narrative control. Revealing what is “simple and complicated and timeless” in everyday life, these stories also venture into irrational realms of experience where chance encounters assume a malevolent form and coincidence transmuted into nightmare.First published in 1961, Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories is a diverse and rewarding collection, unified by Ethel Wilson's distinct and engaging wit.

In What We Hold in Our Hands, a teen mom longs for a different kind of life, a divorced dad struggles to come to terms with his ex- wife's involvement in their son's life, a woman cares for a dying younger sister, and a granddaughter wonders about the man her grandmother killed. The ten stories in this debut collection are about the difficult choices inherent in caring for children, siblings, and partners, and the limits and limitlessness of love.

With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last.A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can't seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day.Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.

“If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect pitch.'—Isabel HugganA soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in a small town.“Colette Maitland writes like a dream, with a touch that's compellingly subtle—almost deceptively so, since in these stories, danger lurks around every corner, and trouble is resolved in the most surprising and unsentimental ways. By the end I felt I'd experienced a literary sleight-of-hand. I had to double-check that I was reading a debut collection and not the latest in a series of Maitland's wise and lovely books.”—Charlotte Gill'Here are the stories you didn't know about the people you do know, and about strangers too, those people you pass on the street without giving them a second thought. Colette Maitland has the inside track on the abiding truth that it is our stories that make us human, for better or worse. Keeping the Peace is a superb debut collection by a writer to watch.'—Diane Schoemperlen“These residents of Tim Horton's Nation struggle with illness, death and depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a fine new writer of everyday realism.”—Antanas SileikaColette Maitland is the winner of a Kingston Literary Award, the WFNB Literary Competition, and the “Ten Stories High” Short Story Competition.

With unsentimental prose and ironic dialogue, Katie Boland brings to life a variety of characters who all have one thing in common—a need for something more. A literary debut by a refreshing new voice in fiction, the stories in Eat Your Heart Out are about the haunted and heartbroken, about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. From a sixteen-year-old autistic savant who's sleeping with his best friend's mother, to a tattooed beauty coming to terms with an alcoholic parent, to a newspaper man forever changed by a tender drifter, to a grief counsellor trying to reconcile her own tragic loss, the stories examine the fragility of human relationships and why people love the way they do.Bold, poignant and affecting, Eat Your Heart Out is a clear-eyed exploration of youth, life, love, sex and death.

In this collection, award-winning author Austin Clarke has caught, in his characters, a sweet longing for youth and an anxiety-stricken rage at old age; an immigrant's longing for a placid, lost home and his lust for a new high-speed motorcar life; and an intellectual's sense of empowerment by black history even as he watches what little he knows about such history engulf him. These are intense and private lives made public by the force of their individual voices, voices that may be rambunctious and fractious but that are, nonetheless, elegant in their intent and humor and their acceptance that is never acquiescence. The volume also includes a prose portrait of Austin Clarke by acclaimed author Barry Callaghan.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born at Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, Canada, on November 30, 1874. She achieved international fame in her lifetime, putting Prince Edward Island and Canada on the world literary map. Best known for her'Anne of Green Gables'books, she was also a prolific writer of short stories and poetry. She published some 500 short stories and poems and twenty novels before her death in 1942.

A “profound and beautiful” (Francine Prose, O: The Oprah Magazine) collection of ten stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “Filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations.... Munro has an empathy so pitch-perfect... you are drawn deftly into another world.”—The New York Times Book Review A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, The Economist, Slate With clarity and ease, Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories about the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives. In the first story, a young wife and mother, suffering from the unbearable pain of losing her three children, gains solace from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other tales uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and, in the title story, the yearnings of a nineteenth-century female mathematician.

In Richard Van Camp's fictionalized north anything can happen and yet each story is rooted in a vivid contemporary reality. The stories offer a potent mix of tropes from science fiction, horror, Western and Aboriginal traditions. The title story pits Torchy against Smith Squad, fighting for love and family in a bloody, cathartic, and ultimately hopeful narrative. Van Camp's characters repeatedly confront the bleakness of sexual assault, substance addiction and violence with the joy and humour of inspired storytelling.

Un prétendu éditeur découvre un mystérieux coffre rempli de manuscrits. C'est là le prétexte pour retracer les pas de personnages associés à la famille Ashfaq, issue de la bourgeoisie musulmane d'une ville indienne dévastée par les émeutes religieuses des années 1990. Au fil des nouvelles de ce recueil, le lecteur voyage en Inde, en Birmanie, en Angleterre, en République tchèque, au Groenland, aux États-Unis et au Canada, de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à aujourd'hui. Il y découvre une gamme de personnages et de sociétés aux prises avec la violence et l'oppression. Pour en accentuer l'artifice littéraire, la plupart des nouvelles sont racontées par un narrateur ou une narratrice dans un style distinct qui explore les mille et une façons connues d'aborder les thèmes choisis. En empruntant la voix des opprimés, les narrateurs mettent à mal leur propre récit. Et en mettant en doute la lecture qu'en fait l'« éditeur », sa femme lève le voile sur l'embarras et les inclinations de son mari. Aussi persuasive soit cette logique de narration, le cadre qui régit l'ensemble joue sur la vraisemblance des histoires racontées. Ce premier recueil de nouvelles signé Saidullah repousse les limites de la langue littéraire grâce à la parfaite maîtrise qu'en a son auteur, qui manie avec brio une multitude d'affects, d'émotions, de styles et de genres narratifs. Le Bonheur et autres troubles, œuvre hautement originale et remarquablement élaborée en un lacis de récits entrecroisés, saura plaire à tous ceux et celles qu apprécient la nouvelle et la fiction. - Ce livre est publié en français.

A powerful short story collection from Cree-Métis author Lisa Bird Wilson.A nitanis (daughter) invents the mother she never knew. A fourteen-year-old girl struggles to come to terms with her feelings of abandonment. A young man struggles with his Mooshum's imprisonment in a damaged body and what it means for his own Métis identity. A department store clerk falls for a homeless man who woos her with Heart of Darkness.At the centre of these stories are notions of identity and belonging, and the complex relationships between children and parents, both those who are real and those who are just pretending.

“This year, eighty-one different stories battled for our affections, ranging in content from a post-apocalyptic suburb coping with rumours of cannibalism, to a movie theatre in Mauritius where dreams of a better future flicker onscreen, to a mattress store where a long-lasting friendship threatens to come undone. For each of us, it was a chance to partake in a process that now stretches back twenty-five years, a sneak peak at authors who – in the future – will likely become favourites.” --Miranda Hill, Mark Medley, and Russell Wangersky (from their Introduction) Among the stories this year: Brimming with restless energy, Doretta Lau's “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” is a sometimes provocative portrait of adolescent angst and rebellion set among a gang of “dragoons” growing up in Vancouver. It vividly brings to life a twenty-first-century culture clash and illuminates the struggles, and alienation, of Chinese youth – whether from Hong Kong or the Mainland – now living in “Lotus Land.” Doretta Lau's story positively hums, the language a well-shaken cocktail of influences ranging from hip-hop and Asian cinema to Chinese history and “the slang of the West.” As vibrant and colourful as graffiti. Well-timed and yet still carefully fractured enough to be jarring, Eliza Robertson's “My Sister Sang” is a marvel of unexpected directions and sharp edges. A deftly-told story of two eavesdroppers, one a linguist, the other, professionally tuned to acoustics, who listen – over and over – to every scrap of a tragedy. Even with the distance and detachment of its characters from the centre of its disaster, there is no easy peace, no mere scientific examination of cause and effect: this is writing as carefully crafted and fine as pastry, with thin, perfect layers where every line serves to strengthen the rest. Naben Ruthnum's “Cinema Rex” is as rich and visual as the films at its centre, which play on the new movie screen in one neighbourhood of Mauritius in the 1950s. The author beautifully draws the connections between the changing community, inundated by Hollywood and after-school English lessons, and a season of vital shifts for three friends transitioning out of boyhood. Full of heady sensory details, Ruthnum's deft observations of family and class interactions create an entire world of established histories and hierarchies, even though the reader is only privy to a sliver of these stories.

Revelling in the value of social polyphony from Walt Whitman's'Song of Myself,'Multitudes looks at its contemporary theatres of Facebook and Twitter, post-riot police surveillance, protest culture and poetry itself. With wit, perceptiveness and her trademark linguistic sonar, Margaret Christakos keenly examines intimacies and banishments, as well as intergenerational grief, self-display and social hope.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born at Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, Canada, on November 30, 1874. She achieved international fame in her lifetime, putting Prince Edward Island and Canada on the world literary map. Best known for her'Anne of Green Gables'books, she was also a prolific writer of short stories and poetry. She published some 500 short stories and poems and twenty novels before her death in 1942.

The Best American Series® First, Best, and Best-Selling The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind. The Best American Short Stories 2012 includes Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Haigh, Steven Millhauser, Alice Munro, Lawrence Osborne, Eric Puchner, George Saunders, Kate Walbert, and others

Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching. Praise for Valery the Great:'15 Finest Book Covers in Spring Fiction This Year'selection (Something Daily blog) “By turns comic, pathetic, and tenderly tragic, Valery the Great is a charming collection.” (Quill & Quire) “Her voice is scathing, very funny, her stories twisting at the end to leave me a bit stunned. … I loved this book, a short story collections whose curation had as much thought put into it as the stories themselves, a fantastic package with a gorgeous design. In addition to considerable talent, there is furious energy at work here, McCluskey giving it her all, and as a result, reading was a pleasure.” (Pickle Me This) “McCluskey is at her finest when she uses sharp humour and skillful, economic description to communicate her fatalistic worldview.” (The Globe and Mail)

This debut collection of stories—featuring a talk-show host and her talking hand, a women's activity group that writes to prisoners, and a poncho-making nudist—is as unique as it is compelling. Set in their own melodramatic worlds, the stories take inspiration from Old Hollywood, Gothic novels, art-world gossip, and maybe a Lifetime movie or two. Balzer's observations are as sharp as Flaubert's, and his characters are drawn with the complexity of George Saunders (and the wit of George Sanders). Beautifully illustrated throughout, Contrivances proves that tragedy is comedy when you play with it long enough.

From a young atheist who hopes to catch the goodness of the Christian boy she dates, to a girl who decides to have her first sexual experience with a much older man whom she finds both erotic and repellent, the protagonists in Krista Bridge's subtle and resonant stories confront the elusiveness of true connection and the inevitability of restlessness and dissatisfaction. These stories have at their centre the unsettling dynamics of family, the tenderness and cruelty of romance and friendship, and the troubling ties by which we are bound to each other. Like the people who populate them, these stories are by turns moody and introspective, sad and funny, and all are steeped in the longing that defines our search for that archetypal home. Most importantly, they reveal a writer with a beguiling sensibility, uncommon insight and a voice of promise.

'A heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a man in a world where violence trumps reason, and bad decisions begin with good intentions. With wit, tenderness, and intelligence, Bull Head exposes the raw underbelly of male experience.'—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love StoryA line-dancing aficionado visits his brother in jail in hopes of mending their relationship, and instead discovers his own unwitting role in his brother's failed life. After the death of his wife and children, a logger tries to survive the Thanksgiving weekend on his own. A delinquent teen's life is changed forever by a work-camp placement with a violent older boy. A truck driver seeks sanctuary from his abusive wife in a fantasy world of strip clubs and personal ads.Bristling with restlessness and brutality, these linked stories set in the Pacific Northwest catapult readers into the gritty lives of social outcasts lost in purgatories of their own making. John Vigna tempers raw and at times cruel rural masculinity with graceful prose and breathtaking tenderness to illuminate the plight of men living in small towns and backwoods who belong neither to history nor the future. A startling homage to the great Southern Gothic tradition, Bull Head is a dazzling debut that heralds a powerful and exciting new literary voice.John Vigna is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers'Workshop. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. John lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, writer Nancy Lee.

In the surreal world of Buffy Cram's stories, someone or something has slipped beneath the skins of her already beleaguered characters, rearranging the familiar into something strange and even sinister, making off with their emotional and even physical goods.In Large Garbage: A Radio Belly Single, a smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the'hybrids,'the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on pate and reciting poetry. Equally repelled by the hybrids'uncleanliness and intrigued by their freedom, Henry draws dangerously close to their secret nighttime life of sloshing claret and Proust quotes that overflow from finger-printed wine glasses and dirt-smudged lips. As the LA Times wrote: this''new breed of homelessness'...cleverly envisions an alternative to the ever-widening circle of consumption that defines us now.'

In the stories of Mad Hope, Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both unrecognizable and alarming. We think we know these people but discover we don't—they are more alive, more real, and more complex than we first imagined. A high school science teacher is forced to re-examine the role he played in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania after a student makes a shocking request. The uncertainty, anxiety, and anticipation of pregnancy are examined through an online chat group. Parenting is viewed from the perspective of a gay man caring for his friend and her adopted son. A tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents. Birrell uses precise, inventive language to capture the beautiful mess of being human—and more than lives up to her Journey Prize accolades. Her characters come to greet us, undo us, make us yearn, and make us smile. Heather Birrell is the author of the story collection I know you are but what am I? Her work has been honored with the prestigious Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative nonfiction.