National Network for Equitable Library Service

Amy Jones's Metcalf-Rooke Award-winning short fiction collection What Boys Like brings together a motley assemblage of urban misfits and outsiders, and explores their love/hate relationships with their city and one another.

In the Foreword to his The Collected Short Fiction Bruce Jay Friedman wrote: "In her late years, my mother confessed to me that she had dropped me on my head when I was two. As I've grown older, I've come to believe that her presumably innocent mistake resulted in the 'tilted' quality I've been accused of having in my work." We can now add to the stories in The Collected Short Fiction the splendidly tilted fictions in Three Balconies, vintage Friedman all.

When a woman discovers a fortune in the attic, she begins a pilgrimage that takes her to the knife-edge between blessing and curse. Two fatherless children think Mrs. Crisander is nothing more than the creepy next-door neighbour'until they nearly kill her pot-bellied pig and learn the secrets of her past. A young girl talks about grade six, stealing cigarettes, and her sister's no-food diet while being photographed by an Internet pornographer.

In Something About the Animal, Cathy Stonehouse's first collection of short fiction, the world keeps coming apart at the seams: these are stories of imminent and often destructive crisis, which in their form and structure capture the hysterical edge of hallucinatory madness in a way few writers have ever managed. These are stories about the search for meaning, of fragile, haunted understanding, real life horror stories, stories bleakly, blackly humorous, but also imbued with real hope, generosity and beauty; stories simply not reducible to cover copy.

Women. Young women, old women. The hair-obsessed, the politically driven, the sure-footed, the bonybutted, the awkward and compulsive and alone. Sleep-deprived and testy. Exhausted and accepting. Among the innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity throughout the collection, Cynthia Flood's protagonists stand out as masters of a reality that the rest of the world will only partially understand.

In the world of The Reasonable Ogre, magic is nothing if not paradoxical. Ogres can indeed be reasonable, prisons may prove porous, gifts often come disguised as curses, and springs gone dry are only waiting to resurface. At once comic and moving, troubling and restorative, Mike Barnes's original stories are here to remind us that fairy tales aren't about the happily-ever-after: they're about the strange detours we take trying to get there. With seventy drawings from the striking brush of Segbingway.

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, these first short stories from Terry Griggs herald one of the most original voices to appear out of Canada in the last several decades. The stories in Quickening are eccentric, wildly inventive, whimsical and fantastic. Her narrative energy sweeps us along, though the real delight of these stories is the gorgeousness of the writing.

Psychologists are people we love to hate. At best, they're compassionate detectives of the human soul, healers and diagnosticians, assessing the internal machinations that structure our lives and behavior. At worst, however, they're smug, hyper-educated, bombastic, yappy, socially deaf, thrice-divorced and twice-separated spouse-swapping cat-torturing perverts. Plus, they're all in this book. And so are their patients. C.P. Boyko's Psychology and Other Stories is a brilliant study of mental illness, mental health, and the people who try to tell them apart.

The rubble of an ancient civilization. A village in a valley from which no one comes or goes. A forest of mother-trees, whispering to each other through their roots; a lakeside lighthouse where a girl slips into human skin as lightly as an otter into water; a desert settlement where there was no conflict, before she came; or the town of Wantwick, ruled by a soothsayer, where tourists lose everything they have. These are the places where things begin.

Rebecca Rosenblum's Once is a fiercely original and assured debut, a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twenty-somethings'students, office techies, waitresses, warehouse labourers, street hustlers'who inhabit them. These are stories grounded in the all-too-real comedy and tragedy of jobs and friendships and romances, books and buses and bodies.