National Network for Equitable Library Service

Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies – by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns childlike and naive, grotesque and very dark, the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones.

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceaușescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us.

Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes - perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until meaning settles in a hundred different ways. Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Oldrick must come to terms with his ex-girlfriend's new lover and a belligerent barista in the midst of a smelly garbage strike.

From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted ... Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there's a ghost in the old mill they're stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown. It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality -- if anything, that is.

These stories are diary shreds of young women who are in school but things happen anyway. Girls with their hears open like agar petri dishes. The setting could be Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, a Gothic castle or a bathtub. What people say matters. The girl might finally find someone she can talk to but falls asleep too soon. She will fall down taking the scenery with her. Stars are brought down into sugar containers and stirred into coffee. A couch is thrown out on the grass and you're invited to have a seat.

Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book! An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal, stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Such are the speakers and stars of a collection of stories that explode the conventions of short fiction.

Gravity Changes is a collection of fantastical, off-beat stories that view the quotidian world through the lens of the absurd. Set in a surreal fictional world that is populated by strange characters-children who defy gravity, a man who marries a light-bulb, the Devil and his miracle-worker wife-these stories take wide steps outside of reality, finding new ways to illuminate truth.

"The Woods is the cure-all to Perfect Island Getaway nostalgia. It's a story of everyday domestic survival, peopled by both loveable eccentrics and possibly murdersome cranks, foregrounding the little-known history of violence on Protection Island.

This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of 14 writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, age, and political perspectives.