National Network for Equitable Library Service

Abdallah's encounter with the military governor on the eve of his departure for America opens this collection of stories, and Khalil al-Ibrahami's moving search for his lost fiancée in Jerusalem closes the collection. In between, Issa J. Boullata's stories show what it's like to be an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt making a new life as an immigrant in Canada or the United States. This is what it is, to be displaced. This is what it is to leave your home and start over in a new country.

A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through Utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories.

A Haitian woman survives the ravages of an earthquake only to find her sister, an émigré in Montreal, the subject of a grisly crime. A chambermaid in a Mexican tourist resort frequented by Canadian tourists wonders why all the men in her life seem to leave her for distant lands. A Jamaican migrant worker at an Ontario chicken farm comes to the aid of his Peruvian co-worker on the eve of a fatal car accident. And a young Pakistani-Canadian woman finds herself in the midst of a protest march defending Muslim women's rights on the same day she has agreed to meet her Moroccan lover.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant's work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant's portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience.

With birth, death, contemplation, and close calls, Send More Tourists ... the Last Ones Were Delicious explores how we respond to the weight of social expectations. From the hidden pressures of wall paint and tarot card predictions, to the burden of phone numbers and the dismembering of saints, Waddleton takes us on a surrealist road trip through the missteps of her vivid characters with honesty and compassion. These are stories of survival.

In twelve dialed-in and exceptionally honed short stories, Terry Doyle presents an enduring assortment of characters channelled through the chain reactions of misfortune and redemption. A construction worker's future is bound to a feckless and suspicious workmate. A young woman's burgeoning social activism is constrained by hardship and the desperation of selling puppies online. A wedding guest recognizes a panhandler attending the reception. And a man crafts a concealed weapon with which to carry out his nightly circuit of paltry retribution.

In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R.W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet -- sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.

Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. Along the way, these characters don't always make sound choices: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a melancholy man has a one-night stand with a whale trainer. In his debut short story collection, R.W. Gray deftly uncovers human reactions to loneliness and unrest through tales about relationships, secrets, and a longing to connect.

An Old Man's Winter Night: Ghostly Tales is the newest collection of ghost stories by Tom Dawe, one of Newfoundland and Labrador's most distinguished writers. The stories, all based on ones Dawe himself has collected across the province over the years, include tales of visitations both malevolent and benign. There are stories of ghostly galleons, of unsettling graves, of strange omens and fetches; an eerie tale of a notoriously haunted house haunted, or built on a fairy path; and another of a ghostly sled dog that returns to save its master lost in a blizzard.

Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards) - The stories in Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands mostly take place in hot weather, where dust and sweat envelop everyone and everything. A teenage boy spends a summer with his hard-livin', hard-drinkin', messed up uncle and has to fight for a position in his new, temporary "family." A recent widower gets swept up in the world of the local swingers' scene. A band of misfits struggles to survive at a makeshift commune.