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In experimental lit veteran Brian Dedora's third novel, prose fragments and narrative threads come in and out of focus as, on a winter's night, a reveller in an upscale Toronto restaurant begins the most dangerous of things: a journey into memory. Is he a narcissist or is he among the wounded? What is it to be gay in a small desert town and in the heart of a sprawling city? The Apple in the Orchard navigates the truths and half-truths of a traveller, a loner plunging through city streets and into the woods, a Canadian wrapped in the myths of the North and tangled in the snare-traps of the urban. As this layered, undulating novel explores class tensions, a family in disintegration, and how the effects of sexual abuse wind through generations, and while cameos by voyageurs, cowboys, Black Robe, and Grey Owl flicker to life and vanish again, the tragic story of the unnamed Her emerges in verbal snapshots.

These nine stories by Chinese young people describe Chinatowns: those of the past, those that were moved, those that are redesigned and lose their character, and those of the future. They describe the importance of Chinatown as a source of Chinese identity, a familiar meeting place for people, and a place to find foods, ingredients, and medicines not found or understood elsewhere.

Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster's Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail's'Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall'• Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023'A writer to watch.'—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he's made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life's watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the superrich.It's 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness “wakes up” in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian.Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her, learning about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse.Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Winner, Atwood Gibson Writers'Trust Fiction PrizeHerring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life, bored of thinking the same old thoughts. One December day, following a hunch, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the course of everything in his life. His wife Euna leaves with their children. He buries the family dog in a frozen grave on Christmas Eve. He and his friend Gerry crash his truck into a field, only to be rescued by a passing group of Tibetan monks.During the spring lobster season, Herring and Gerry find themselves caught in a storm front. Herring falls overboard miles from the harbour, is lost at sea for days, and assumed to be drowned. And then, he is found, miraculously, alive. Having come so near to death, he is forced to confront the things he fears the most: love, friendship, belief, and himself.Some Hellish is a story about anguish and salvation, the quiet grace and patience of transformation, the powers of addiction and fear, the plausibility of forgiveness, and the immense capacity of friendship and of love.

WINNER OF THE 2023 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDSLONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTIONFor fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen RussellGod Isn't Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunningham's characters are presented with moments of choice—some for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to God's office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his truck's song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own.Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunningham's stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human nature—and that redemption can arise where we least expect it.

In the night her whitened toes / cold sole on his calf / between his palms he warms / a slender foot – / twig bones, taut skin.Jean Van Loon's father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother's dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend's father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada's Cold War intelligence service.Rooted in memory and history, Nuclear Family carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the explosions of material wealth that shaped Van Loon's childhood. Poems come alive with image, sound, and texture, portraying the innocence of childhood games, the worldwide effects of prolonged nuclear testing, and the long-lasting legacy of her father's suicide – a fallout of radioactive silences.In Nuclear Family violent events, both global and familial, permeate a girl's coming of age in a story of cataclysm and, ultimately, recovery.

Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars—available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume'Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic… rigorous yet passionate...these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since.'– Kazim Ali, from the introduction From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator. It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life's big questions remain beautifully unanswered. The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars'most lauded novella. Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator's father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father's illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings. The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence. The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen. Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life's (and love's) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself.'The intimacy, grace, and intelligence of these narratives is remarkable. The mystery and quietude honours the beauty of the everyday as it passes, while simultaneously gesturing to vast other worlds. Often I was taken by its openings and distances, and a marvellous, almost translucent quality that permeates the texts. Oddly, at times it felt as if I were inside a whispering many-chambered shell – resonant, enclosed, pearlescent – the pleasure afforded, enormous.'–Carole Maso, author of Ghost Dance'From 1989 to 1998, the Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars published five novellas, each detailing specific moments in the writer's life. Gathered here for the first time, they offer a significant new strand of thinking about the rise of autofiction and the history of innovative women's writing in Canada. If you loved discovering Annie Ernaux, you'll love discovering Kristjana Gunnars.'–Sina Queyras, author of Lemon Hound

Journey Prize winner Shashi Bhat's'powerful, surprising and terrifying'(Rufi Thorpe) story about a high school student's traumatic experience and how it irrevocably alters her life, for fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Girlhood, and Pen15. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina spends her spare time reading Beowulf and flirting with an internet predator. She has a vicious crush on her English teacher, and her best friend Amy is slowly drifting away. Meanwhile, Nina's mother tries to match her up with local Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, and Nina's worried father has started reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. Beginning with a disturbing incident at her high school, The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina's life from the ‘90s to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret and discovers that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply affecting, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat's irresistible novel-in-stories examines the relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe Mystery of Right and Wrong is a masterwork from one of the country's most critically acclaimed and beloved writers that is both compulsively readable and heartstopping in the vital truth it unfolds. In a novel that grapples with sexual abuse, male violence and madness, Wayne Johnston reveals haunting family secrets he's kept for more than thirty years.Wade Jackson, a young man from a Newfoundland outport, wants to be a writer. In the university library in St. John's, where he goes every day to absorb the great books of the world, he encounters the fascinating, South African-born Rachel van Hout, and soon they are lovers. Rachel is the youngest of four van Hout daughters. Her father, Hans, lived in Amsterdam during the Second World War, and says he was in the Dutch resistance. When the war ended, he emigrated to South Africa, where he met his wife, Myra, had his daughters and worked as an accounting professor at the University of Cape Town. Something happened, though, that caused him to uproot his family and move them all, unhappily, to Newfoundland. Wade soon discovers that Rachel and her sisters are each in their own way a wounded soul. The oldest, Gloria, has a string of broken marriages behind her. Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaner dealer husband, Fritz, can lay his hands on. Bethany, the most sardonic of the sisters, is fighting a losing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads The Diary of Anne Frank obsessively, and diarizes her days in a secret language of her own invention, writing to the point of breakdown and beyond—an obsession that has deeper and more disturbing roots than Wade could ever have imagined. Confronting the central mystery of his character Rachel's life—and his own—Wayne Johnston has created a tour-de-force that pulls the reader toward a conclusion both inevitable and impossible to foresee. As he writes, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong is a memorialization of the lost, the missing women of the world, and of my world. I see it not as a dark book, but as one that sheds light—a lot of light—on things that, once illuminated, lose their power to distort the truth.”

A grossly inaccurate'memoir'about Canadian folk legends. Henry Adam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene—and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, including honest accounts of the folklorist's myriad trials and tribulations. This experimental and genre-defying book mixes the adventurous energies of Alan Lomax and Stompin'Tom, the intertextual conceptualism of Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the searing intensity of Elizabeth Smart and Chris Kraus.'Comically entertaining, presented with'performative verve', as novelist Jacob Wren puts it.'—Atlantic Books Today'This book is cracking me up—and I don't even like football—but it is just so well written.'—Robert Dayton, author of The Canadian Romantic

Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity.'All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal.'With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc Ah-Sen writes about love blooming between two writers belonging to feuding literary movements. Emily Anglin explores an architect's search for her twin at a rural historic house. Devon Code documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman. And Lee Henderson imagines Dada artist Kurt Schwitters finding unlikely inspiration in a Second World War internment camp in northern Norway. Wildly different in style and subject matter, these four virtuoso pieces give us a 360-degree view of a philosophical theme that has never felt so urgent.“Despite the disparity of their subject matter – a Nazi-evading Dadaist detained in Norway, urban and familial estrangements, complicated love amid the avant-garde, the vicissitudes of old age – these brilliantly inventive, delightfully strange stories cling together like four unlikely soulmates, unified by art's pursuit of coherence through life's various disintegrations.” —Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall

Patricia Robertson's new collection of short fiction, Hour of the Crab, is a work of insight and mastery, each story demonstrating an original vision, intriguing characters, and sophisticated skill. Readers will travel with Robertson's vivid characters, sharing their journeys, their challenges, their complicated choices. They will also discover other worlds — from an eleventh-century monastery in France to a near-future British Columbia where apocalyptic wildfires seem to be never-ending. A young woman discovers the corpse of a Moroccan teenager washed up on the beach in southern Spain and sets out to find his family in a gesture that destabilizes her own. An international aid worker shares her house with the very real ghost of a gardener's boy. The last speaker of a dying Norse-like language carves the words he remembers into the stones of his house. Urgent and evocative, immersed in issues of our time, the stories of Hour of the Crab reveal Robertson's ability to draw in her readers with the heightened realism of her imagined worlds.

A collection of the year's best stories selected by celebrated two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn WardIn her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor Jesmyn Ward says that the best fiction offers the reader a “sense of repair.” The stories in this year's collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy's gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience. These stories are poignant reminders of the possibilities of fiction: as you sink into world after world, become character after character, as Ward writes, you “forget yourself, and then, upon surfacing, know yourself and others anew.'The Best American Short Stories 2021 includes GABRIEL BUMP • BRANDON HOBSON • DAVID MEANS• JANE PEK • TRACEY ROSE PEYTON • GEORGE SAUNDERS • BRYAN WASHINGTON • KEVIN WILSON • C PAM ZHANG and others

The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening. There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. In this collection of linked stories—part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery—magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations. A girl with mermaid syndrome disappears into a field, a fugitive boy dreams of finding anonymity in Toronto while his abandoned pregnant girlfriend hallucinates his second coming, and a nostalgic chambermaid finds her memories vanish when she puts on a stranger's wig. There's a rash of killings in the city that attract a lovesick police officer. No one knows who's responsible for the crimes, but the city has plenty of candidates, like the crazy son of a judge who murdered a man in Disney World and the grieving vandal who's obsessed with the idea of cutting a woman in half. Then there are the abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives. Are the characters in this oddly probable world masters or victims of their own fate? How do their lives intersect? Is it likely that destruction will ultimately prevail over this desolate land, or will consciousness, like a flaming firebird, lead at least some of the city's inhabitants to self-acceptance, redemption, or escape? (Includes book group and study guide.)

Quinze anys després dels fets d''El conte de la Serventa', el règim teocràtic de la República de Galaad, tot i haver entrat en decadència, s'aferra al poder. Les vides de tres dones radicalment diferents convergeixen en aquest moment crucial; dues han crescut a bandes oposades de la frontera, l'una a Galaad, com a filla d'un Senyor d'alt rang, i l'altra al Canadà, on participa en les manifestacions contra la dictadura i en segueix amb horror les notícies a la televisió. Les veus d'aquestes dues noies, pertanyents a la primera generació que assoleix la majoria d'edat sota el nou ordre, s'entreteixeixen amb una tercera, la d'una còmplice del règim, el poder de la qual es fonamenta en els secrets que ha anat guardant amb el pas del temps. I quan, a la fi, la veritat surti a la llum, totes tres hauran d'acceptar qui són realment i decidir fins on estan disposades a arribar per defensar les seves conviccions. En'Els testaments'Margaret Atwood torna a endinsar-se en l'univers galaadià, que tants lectors ha fascinat al llarg dels anys, per revelar-nos amb sagacitat i perícia narrativa l'entramat profund d'una societat on, malgrat el règim del terror, s'ha encès l'espurna de l'esperança. PREMI MAN BOOKER 2019'Margaret Atwood en la seva màxima esplendor. Tothom hauria de llegir Els testaments'. Los Angeles Times

“Twenty masterfully crafted short stories” by T.C. Boyle, Emma Cline, Mary Gaitskill, and more: “Outstanding and well worth the read.” —Booklist (starred review)“To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,” recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. “They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.”Decades later, Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year's edition. The result is a striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To read these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish. The Best American Short Stories 2020 includes selections by: T. C. BOYLE • EMMA CLINE • MARY GAITSKILL • ANDREA LEE • ELIZABETH McCRACKEN • ALEJANDRO PUYANA • WILLIAM PEI SHIH • KEVIN WILSON • JANE PEK • CAROLYN FERRELL • SCOTT NADELSON • MENG JIN • and more

Precocious ten-year-old Vanessa Dudley-Morris knows lots of secrets. In 1949 when she and her family are forced to move into two rooms on the second floor of 519 Jarvis Street in Toronto, a genteel but somewhat rundown rooming house owned by a reclusive pianist, she learns a lot more. Despite the family's drastically reduced circumstances, her parents struggle to keep up their old standards. Threatened by blindness due to an eye condition, Vanessa is kept at home, tutored by an erratic succession of eccentrics, some with questionable credentials. Consequently, she spends a lot of time alone, wandering the dim corridors of the old house, silently listening at doors and watching the odd characters who live there. She becomes fascinated by a mother and son who move into a room on the third floor. Eventually she agrees to take secret notes from the son to his mysterious friend at her church, unwittingly unleashing a chain of events that leads to tragedy.

Winner of the 41st International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest Alan is unsure if he is dead or dreaming, he only knows that he is stuck in a loop. He finds himself being forced to walk along a straight path through an unending pine forest where any deviation from the path causes him to black out and begin again. Dipping in and out of an endless purgatorial walk, Alan relives key moments in his life where he missed the opportunity to learn, escape, and change: The death of his mother, an abusive relationship with his father, and the opportunity to connect with his only real friend, a neighbour he never speaks to named Edgar. The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

Set in the mid-1930s, Filthy Sugar tells the story of Wanda Whittle, a nineteen-year-old dreamer who models fur coats in an uptown department store, but who lives in a crowded rooming house with her hard-working widowed mother and shrewd older sister, Evelyn, in the “slums” behind the city's marketplace; a world where “death is always close but life is stubborn.” Bored with the daily grind and still in shock from the sudden death of her father, Wanda finds both escapism and inspiration in the celluloid fantasies of the Busby Berkeley musicals, Greta Garbo dramas, and Jean Harlow sex comedies. Strutting up and down the aisles of Blondell's department store, her peep-toe high heels drumming out a steady beat on the waxed linoleum floors, Wanda fantasizes that she's Ruby Keeler, the tap dancing sweetheart from 42nd Street. But Wanda wants more than to wear a glamourous woman's coat—she wants to live inside of her flesh. Her dreams come true after a chance encounter with the mysterious Mr. Manchester, proprietor of the Apple Bottom burlesque theatre. Suddenly Wanda is thrust into a world of glitter and grit. Descending from the rickety, splintered roof top of the Apple Bottom theatre on a red velvet swing, Wanda Whittle morphs into a dream named Wanda Wiggles; sweeter than a strawberry sundae and tastier than a deep dish apple pie. At the Apple Bottom she meets Lili Belle, a naughty cartoon flapper brought to life; Queenie, a sultry headliner whom Wanda feels drawn to like a bee to a butterfly bush; the sweet and salty Eddie, a drummer who thumps out his words like bullets from a machine gun and Brock Baxter, the Apple Bottom's vaudevillian comic whose apple cheeked, pretty boy exterior belies his sinister intentions. All will have an impact on Wanda's journey. Cowardly boxers, shady coppers, dime store hoodlums, and painted ladies—Wanda will encounter them all! On her voyage from rags to riches and back again, Wanda experiences a sexual awakening and achieves personal independence as she discovers that a girl doesn't need a lot of sugar to be sensational!

#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr brings his“stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. “As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong,” writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year's best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring everything from America's rich rural culture to its online teen culture to the fragile nature of the therapist-client relationship. This astonishing collection brings together the realistic and dystopic, humor and terror. For Doerr, “with every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.” The Best American Short Stories 2019 includes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamel Brinkley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manuel Muñoz, Sigrid Nunez, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Jim Shepherd, Weike Wang, and others.

Le 21 janvier 2017 à 11h04, la mère malade de Jordan n'est toujours pas réveillée. Il ouvre la porte de sa chambre pour vérifier si tout va bien. Son regard s'ajuste sur la forme allongée dans le lit. Monica vit-elle encore? Liminal tient dans cette seule seconde. Toute la vie revient alors en une bouffée de souvenirs, une plongée immense dans un seul mystère : être un corps. Qu'est-ce qu'un corps? Quelles en sont les limites? Des androïdes aux sex clubs, de l'extase mystique de Sainte Thérèse d'Avila à la castration d'une performeuse queer, au carrefour de l'autofiction, de la saga milléniale et de la pop philosophie, le récit s'organise en une prodigieuse odyssée personnelle peuplée d'artistes, de scientifiques et de marginaux magnifiques. Traduit de l'anglais par Mélissa Verreault

Young and homeless, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by an unusual source of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India. Together with Aditi, a student of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto, he dreams of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her twisted and malevolent PhD supervisor. When a murder on campus threatens to draw the police's attention to Ben and his friends, events spiral out of control, drawing them all towards a possibly bloody culmination in which the couple's hopes for a distant future peace may not survive. A novel based on the author's early years on the streets of Toronto.

How to survive the unthinkable? This is the question nine-year-old Tom has to face after witnessing his parent's murder-suicide. After the horrific event, Tom refuses to speak. At first, he moves in with his childless Aunt Sonya, but she is ill equipped to deal with the traumatized boy. Before long, Tom is forced to move again, this time to Claremont Street in downtown Toronto, where he shares a run-down house with his mercurial Aunt Rose and his reckless yet endearing Uncle Will. As the seasons change, Tom's silence becomes a powerful presence, allowing this fractured family to hear one another for the first time— and for Tom to finally find a home. Claremont is a gripping story of one family's journey through grief and toward healing.

In the stories in Winning Chance, Katherine Koller explores second chances, how we find them, and how we find the courage to take them. Whether they are contractors running into an ex while on the job, a busy mother pursuing community theatre, or a family building an illegal ice rink after an environmental collapse, Katherine Koller has created empathetic portraits of characters searching to connect.

Joseph, the tactician behind the Piccadilly Circus bombing, finds himself in a nursing home in Pierrefonds, Quebec. A visit from a long-lost former fellow cell member interrupts his dalliance with the night nurse, provoking both a crisis and a period of reflection. Did he lose his mind back then as a young man? Or is he losing it now? Why did a systems analyst living on the Kandahar Road in London, with a PhD from the London School of Economics and an enthusiasm for Bobby Darin's hit'Dream Lover'(the Farsi version), bring home fertilizer? Will his former associates give him up with deathbed confessions?

A Japanese detective agency in Midwest America; a sex triangle with the vampish Angela at its apex, and love-sick Pohl and lust-warped Burnett at the receiving ends; a Fat Man devouring a huge luncheon amidst the splendours of his garden; and has-been vixen Violet seeking justice and revenge. Just some of the elements of No. 22 Pleasure City, a novel that ranges in flavour between Japanese manga, pulp fiction and tongue-in-cheek pornography. The novel is a story of betrayal, obsession, rejection, friendship, and -- ultimately -- redemption.

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year's Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. “I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018, “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”

The work of men and women of many tribal affiliations, this collection is a wide-ranging anthology of contemporary Native Canadian literature. Deep emotions and life-shaking crises converge and display the Aboriginal concerns regarding various topics, including identity, family, community, caste, gender, nature, betrayal, and war. A fascinating compilation of stories and plays, this account fosters cross-cultural understanding and presents the Native Canadian writers'reinvention of traditional material and their invention of a modern life that is authentic. It is perfect for courses on short fiction or general symposium teaching material.

“Heartfield's impressive novel tells the story of folklore figure Mad Meg (or Dull Gret), who legendarily led a group of women to pillage hell” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In 1328, Bruges is under siege by the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras—humans mixed with animals or armor, forged in the deep fires of the Hellbeast. At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows. Margriet de Vos learns she's a widow herself when her good-for-nothing husband comes home dead from the war. He didn't come back for her—in fact he moves right past her, pulls a secret chest of coins and weapons from under his floorboards, and goes back through the mouth of the beast called Hell. Margriet killed her first soldier when she was eleven, and she's buried six of her seven children. She'll do anything for Beatrix, her last surviving child, even if it means raiding Hell itself to get her inheritance back. Beatrix is haunted by a dead husband of her own, and blessed—or cursed—with an enchanted distaff that allows her to control the revenants and see the future. Together with a transgender man-at-arms who has unfinished business with the Chatelaine, a traumatized widow with a giant water-powered forge-hammer at her disposal, and a wealthy alderman's wife who escapes Bruges with her children, Margriet and Beatrix forge a raiding party like Hell has never seen. “A strange, compelling, genre-bending debut... Part horror, part fantasy, part history, and part epic, it combines all of its elements into a commentary on gender, power, and patriarchy.” —Tor.com

In the fifth book of the series that the Globe and Mail calls “terrific,” Lane Winslow investigates the murder of an unidentified man she found adrift in a boat near King's Cove. Lane Winslow is enjoying a perfect, sunny day at the lake when she spots a gravely injured young man drifting in a sinking rowboat. Hypothermic, bleeding, and soaked in icy, bloody water, he is unable to speak, leaving Lane at a loss. What series of events brought him to this grisly fate? Darling and Ames are quick to pick up the case, but leads are few until Angela's young son finds an unsettling clue on the beach—a bright red swastika lapel pin—that points to the National Unity Party of Canada. When the anonymous man succumbs to his injuries, Darling and Lane are thrown headlong into a murder investigation with ties to the old country. Fans of Maisie Dobbs, Bess Crawford, and the ever-popular Kopp Sisters will be enchanted by Lane Winslow, a clever, no-nonsense sleuth based on the author's own mother, who was a wartime spy.

Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a quixotic search for the mythical fountain of youth. The protagonists sparkle into fullness as each is depicted in his struggle to remain vital while age slowly steals his significance away.

This “excellent anthology” of noir fiction set in Canada's City of Glass features all-new stories by Linda L. Richards, Sam Wiebe, Yasuko Thanh and more (Quill & Quire, starred review). For many people, Vancouver is a city of affluence, athleisure, and craft beer. But if look a little closer at this gentrified paradise, you'll find the old saying holds true: behind every fortune there's a crime. Hidden beneath Vancouver's gleaming glass skyscrapers are shadowy streets where poverty, drugs, and violence rule the day. These fourteen stories of crime and mayhem in the Pacific Northwest offer an entertaining “mix of wily pros, moody misfits, bewildered bystanders, and a touch of the supernatural” (Kirkus). Vancouver Noir features the Arthur Ellis Award-winning story “Terminal City” by Linda L. Richards, and the Arthur Ellis Award-finalist “Wonderful Life” by Sam Wiebe. It also includes entries by Timothy Taylor, Sheena Kamal, Robin Spano, Carleigh Baker, Dietrich Kalteis, Nathan Ripley, Yasuko Thanh, Kristi Charish, Don English, Nick Mamatas, S.G. Wong, and R.M. Greenaway.

The Canadian Prairie teems with life - not all of it of this world. Get acquainted with baby dragons, killer insects, faery kings, infernal entities and more, as 19 authors let the Manitoban landscape inspire weird and wondrous tales.You thought the Prairies were flat, plain, and boring.You were wrong.

The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories about strong female characters dealing with difficult life-changing situations. The turmoil that they face is, often, the result of a social structure that discriminates against women. Through these powerful women characters, the stories reflect attitudes and ways of life in a village in India, and in modern day Mumbai; they highlight the values of an older generation, and the dreams of a new one. Beneath all their differences, The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories illuminate the quality of women's lives, exposing the pain, the injustices, as well as the triumphs that make up their existence.

From internationally acclaimed and Governor General's Award-winning author Steven Heighton comes a passionate novel of buried secrets, the repercussions of war and finding love among the ruinsElias Trifannis is desperate to belong somewhere. To make his dying ex-cop father happy, he joins the military—but in Afghanistan, by the time he realizes his last-minute bid for connection was a terrible mistake, it's too late and a tragedy has occurred. In the aftermath, exhausted by nightmares, Elias is sent to Cyprus to recover, where he attempts to find comfort in the arms of Eylül, a beautiful Turkish journalist. But the lovers'reprieve ends in a moment of shocking brutality that drives Elias into Varosha, once a popular Greek-Cypriot resort town, abandoned since the Turkish invasion of 1974. Hidden in the lush, overgrown ruins is a community of exiles and refugees living resourcefully but comfortably. Thanks to the cheerfully corrupt Colonel Kaya, who turns a blind eye, they live under the radar of the Turkish authorities. As he begins to heal, Elias finds himself drawn to the enigmatic and secretive Kaiti while he learns at last to “simply belong.” But just when it seems he has found sanctuary, events he himself set in motion have already begun to endanger it.

Loss, trauma, memory, and, above all, the ties of family and being Jewish are the elements that weave together this panoramic story. Come Back for Me travels through time and place only to bring us, ultimately, to the connections between generations. Artur Mandelkorn is a young Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose desperate quest to find his sister takes him to post-war Israel. Intersecting Artur's tale is that of Suzy Kohn, a Toronto teenager whose seemingly tranquil life is shattered when her uncle's sudden death tears her family apart. Their stories eventually come together in Israel following the Six-Day War, where love and understanding become the threads that bind the two narratives together. Like Sarah's Key, Come Back for Me deals evocatively with the scars left by tragedy and the possibilities for healing.

The New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings compiles a stunning anthology of literary short fiction with T.C. Boyle, Emma Cline and others. “If you know exactly what you are going to get from the experience of reading a story, you probably wouldn't go looking for it; you need, in order to be an open reader of fiction, to be willing. To cast a vote for what you love and then wait for the outcome,” writes Meg Wolitzer in her introduction to this volume. The Best American Short Stories 2017 casts a vote for and celebrates all that is our country. Here you'll find a man with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, naval officers trapped on a submarine, a contestant on America's Funniest Home Videos, and a gay man desperate to be a father—unforgettable characters waiting for an outcome, burning with stories to tell. The Best American Short Stories 2017 includes entries by T.C. Boyle, Jai Chakrabarti, Emma Cline, Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, Eric Puchner, Jim Shepard, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jenn Walter and others.

With the world facing the greatest global crisis of all time – climate change – personal and political indifference has wrought a series of unfolding complications that are altering our planet, and threatening our very existence. Reacting to the warnings sounded by scientists and thinkers, writers are responding imaginatively to the seriousness of changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself. These stories of Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) feature perspectives by culturally diverse Canadian writers of short fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and futurist works, and transcend traditional doomsday stories by inspiring us to overcome the bleak forecasted results of our current indifference. Featuring the stories of Rati Mehrotra, Nina Munteanu, Richard Van Camp, Kate Story, George McWhirter, Linda Rogers, SeÁn Virgo, Holly Schofield, Halli Villegas, Wendy Bone, Leslie Goodreid, Phil Dwyer, Geoffrey W. Cole, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, John Oughton, Frank Westcott, Peter Timmerman, with an afterword by internationally acclaimed writer and filmmaker Dan Bloom.

Worlds collide when a naïve young heiress takes a tumble for a bootlegger with a murderous temper and his business partner falls in love with Montreal, the way Americans are prone to do. One world war has ended and a second is in the wings. In the space between, the neon-powered city on the St. Lawrence is notorious for its lavish nightlife, obsessive gambling and evident corruption. Controlling the action from behind the scenes is a large and mysterious figure called the Carpenter. He is the city's fixer, mediator and manipulator. He is the boss of the night, le caïd de la nuit. In this cinematic and genre-bending novel, George Fetherling both honours the roots of serious noir fiction while also pushing its boundaries.

Bridge Retakes, the debut novel by Angela Lopes, is a whirlwind tale of love and family and the distances that people will (or won't) go to secure what they want. A Bahian man and a Brazilian-Canadian woman meet on an online dating site. They come from very different worlds--geographically, economically, religiously--and yet, their connection is undeniable. When these long-distance lovers run up against their own belief systems and those of their families and communities, it's their desire to build a life anew that keeps them moving forward. But all the while, issues of money, class, gender, and corruption threaten to tear them apart.

Revolutions is the first book-length critical survey of twenty-first-century Canadian fiction, with in-depth essays examining subjects such as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effects of the digital revolution, and the dark legacy of what has come to be know as the Canadian literary establishment. Throughout, close reading is given to many contemporary authors, with particular attention paid to such central figures as Douglas Coupland and David Adams Richards. Alex Good explains and contextualizes this period in Canadian fiction for the general reader, providing a much-needed critical re-assessment of Canadian writing in the new millennium. By offering a contrary yet thoughtful position to that taken by our nation's most prominent literary tastemakers, Good offers a vigorous commentary on the state of Canadian literature—where we are and how we got here.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction 2014 Winner of the Prix des Lecteurs at the Quais du Polar for Best French Crime Novel 2017 Winner of the Prix du Conseil des Arts and des Lettres de Quebec for Book of the Year 2015 Winner of the Prix Saint-Pacôme for Best Crime Novel 2014 Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2017 A chilling thriller as compulsive as Emma Cline's The Girls. A chilling thriller as compulsive as Emma Cline's The Girls. It's the Summer of 1967. The sun shines brightly over Boundary lake, a holiday haven on the US-Canadian border. Families relax in the heat, happy and carefree. Hours tick away to the sound of radios playing'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'and'A Whiter Shade of Pale'. Children run along the beach as the heady smell of barbecues fills the air. Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, with their long, tanned legs and silky hair, relish their growing reputation as the red and blond Lolitas. Life seems idyllic. But then Zaza disappears, and the skies begin to cloud over... (Originally published in the UK in hardback and trade paperback as Boundary)

Esqueça tudo o que acha que sabe sobre zumbis. Todd, um guitarrista de 20 e poucos anos de Aspen Falls, conhece uma nova droga com efeitos devastadores. Após rejeitar a oferta de um velho misterioso, ele rapidamente descobre que o mundo está à beira da destruição. Com efeitos colaterais terríveis, a droga psicodélica'Cinza'está transformando seus usuários em mortos-vivos. Uma praga está rapidamente infestando o mundo todo, unindo Todd e seu irmão, Mitch. Será que os dois serão capazes de deixar suas diferenças de lado e sobreviver ao apocalise? Uma história de apocalipse zumbi diferente.'Das Cinzas às Cinzas'traz uma visão original e profunda desse gênero tão popular e é diversão garantida para qualquer fã de terror.

A wicked fairy tale of witchcraft, bullying, revenge, and a mysterious bowler hat. Includes Ron's own whimsical illustrations.Deryn Hedlight was not having a very good day and it was about to get much worse. He'd read stories of witches as a boy, but never believed for a second they were true. That is, until an unfortunate hunting accident turns his world upside down. What seemed like an honest mistake leads to an altogether unexpected transformation. But poor Deryn wasn't the only wronged character tied up in these gloomy circumstances and sinister forces.Deer Life tells the story of a kind-hearted boy from Hinthoven and his mother_s undying love. Mostly though, it's all about patience, friendship, and heroism where you least expect it.

Skye Rayburn, a somewhat eccentric but well-respected veterinarian, always had a troubled relationship with her daughter Moira. When Moira is killed in a car accident, Skye has no choice but to take in her two-year-old grandson Duncan. Maybe this time she will'get it right.'Over the years, Skye creates a diary: Life Lessons for Duncan. This diary, a surreal blend of fact and fiction, catalogues human and animal characteristics—their similarities and differences, as well as their complex interdependencies, which she hopes will help Duncan understand his now-homeless father, his mother's death and her own heartbreaking secrets. As her story unfolds we learn how her life choices have, at times, contradicted her alleged love of c hildren and animals. In the summer of 2011, Skye, now 91, finds herself alone when Duncan is invited to show his art at the Edinburgh Festival. Skye must make peace with what she's done and Duncan must to come to terms with who he is.

Everyone knows everyone's business in the small fishing community of Kitsum. So when young Brenda Joe fears she might be pregnant, she also worries that rumours will spread quickly. Things look up when Brenda's favourite aunt, Monica returns to Kitsum for Christmas, although she is preoccupied with her own relationship problems. It's become clear to her that the white man she's been living with in Vancouver sees her as his “Indian Princess,” his own exotic arm candy, and she's had enough. When she learns about Brenda's secret relationship with a local man, Monica is appalled and goes to set him straight. But is there more to this attractive loner and his hard-partying relations than meets the eye? Come spring, amid their secrets and betrayals, each family member will be tempted down to the water to collect herring eggs from artfully placed hemlock branches. The question is, will they be able to face one another?

Starting in the 1950s, Cadillac Road is the story of Sharon Desjardins: from her earliest childhood memories leaving Northern Quebec and a violent father to adventures in Buffalo and Crystal Beach with her mother and younger sister, Gloria, to dreams of escaping claustrophobic poverty in shabby Grenville by going to Toronto and marrying a wealthy lawyer whom she doesn't love, having turned down local boy Clinton McClary because she doesn't think he'll amount to much. In the end, depressed and on pills, Sharon realizes she needs to be true to her heart, abandons her marriage and takes to the road, a road that could very well lead back to her original hometown of Cadillac.

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2018 Crime Book of the Month, Sunday Times, February 2018'A tough, close-up look at a side of female life that's often hard to acknowledge: the violence girls and women sometimes display towards other girls and women... An accomplished writer who will go far.'- Margaret Atwood Stella, a young Métis mother, lives with her family by the Break, an isolated strip of land on the edge of their small Canadian town. Glancing out of her window one winter's evening Stella spots someone in trouble; horrified, she calls the police. But when they arrive, no one is there, scuff marks in the compacted snow the only sign anything may have happened. What follows is a heartbreaking and powerful tale of a community in crisis as the people connected to the victim, a young girl on the edge of a precipice, begin to lay bare their stories leading up to that fateful night. From Lou, a social worker grappling with the end of a relationship, to Cheryl, an artist mourning the premature death of her sister. And from Phoenix, a homeless teenager released from a youth detention centre with no one to turn to, to Officer Scott, a Métis policeman caught between two worlds. Through the prism of one extended, intergenerational family, Vermette's urgent story shines a light on the power, violence and love shared between women of all cultures, creeds and ages.

A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders'Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.