National Network for Equitable Library Service

Ian Williams's Not Anyones Anything is a trio of trios: three sets of three stories, with three of those stories further divided into thirds. Mathematical, musical, and meticulously crafted, these stories play profoundly with form, featuring flash cards and musical notations embedded in texts, literal basements, and dual narratives, semi-detached. Roaming through Toronto and its surrounding suburbia, Williams's characters wittily and wryly draw attention to the angst and anxieties associated with being somewhere between adolescence and more-than-that.

These ten strikingly original stories explore love and escape--how we escape to love, escape through love, and escape ourselves and hold on to love. Together, the stories of Welcome to the Circus highlight the courageous, acrobatic circus acts we all learn to perform in search of love.

"In any skin purple is a heavy tone that penetrates to the core." Paulo da Costa's stories get under your skin, bruise your consciousness with their exploration of the forces that hold us together, not always benignly, and those that pull us apart. A hunter and cougar ponder the positions of predator and prey under the dense canopy of a West Coast forest. A nine-year-old girl tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her.

Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic that will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Barbara Gowdy, and Jonathan Lethem, and readers of both speculative fiction and literary fiction alike. Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, academics researching erotica, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them.

In Prerequisites for Sleep, her first published short story collection, Jennifer L. Stone has created a fictional world rich with dilemmas.

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.

The stories in Permanent Tourists feature displaced characters loosely connected through a support group, all of them dealing with loss precipitated by an elusive father, husband or lover, by a wife's death, a lost child, sibling rivalries. Tourists in their own lives, these characters are often paralysed by emotional inertia and are fleeing to evade their responsibilities, their failed relationships, their own shortcomings. Within the unfamiliar, their problems resurface and they're forced to confront and re-examine them.

*2013 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE LONGLIST* A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi's keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better or for worse-we see ourselves for what we truly are.

In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships.

Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.