National Network for Equitable Library Service

The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice. Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children's aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz.

Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children's clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shape-shifting mother must sift through her ancestors' gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother's tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind.

Set on five continents and spanning decades, We Two Alone traces the arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life, pretending to be a girl to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple is caught in when Shanghai is succumbs to violence during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A family struggles to buy a home in South Africa in the early years of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.

In 2010, Vivek Shraya self-published God Loves Hair, her first book; in the ten years since, Vivek has published six more titles, including a novel, poetry collection, graphic novel, and children's picture book, while also working as an artist, musician, and academic. God Loves Hair is a collection of short stories that follows a tender, intelligent, and curious child who navigates the complex realms of gender creativity, queerness, brownness, religion, and belonging.

From John Edgar Wideman, "a master [who] boldly subverts what a short story can be" ( Publishers Weekly) comes a stunning story collection that spans a range of topics from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell. Forty years after John Edgar Wideman's first collection of stories was published, he continues to produce new stories of the highest caliber and relevancy.

Being a wise and just ruler is no easy task. That's what Prince Veera discovers when he and his best friend, Suku, are given the opportunity to preside over the court of his father, King Bheema. Some of the subjects' complaints are easily addressed, but others are much more challenging. How should they handle the case of the greedy merchant who wishes to charge people for enjoying the smells of his sweets? And can they prove that an innocent man cannot possibly spread bad luck?

CWA Gold and Steel Dagger-winner Mick Herron's short fiction, collected for the first time. Mick Herron, author of the Slough House novels, is on his way to becoming one of the most critically acclaimed and culturally important crime fiction writers of the twenty-first century. He has been awarded both the Gold and Steel Daggers by the Crime Writers' Association and has been called "the John Le Carré of the future" (BBC). But Mick Herron does more than "just" write flawlessly suspenseful spy thrillers.

A short story collection from New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu. The title story, "The Wandering Earth," was a blockbuster international film, currently streaming on Netflix. These 11 stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the listener to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined.

In a daring and fierce debut work of fiction-the likes of which comes along once in a generation-Virginia's landscapes, emblems, and Thomas Jefferson's historic plantation set the stage for a cast of unforgettable characters fighting for their right to exist in America. A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe.

The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection, Alligator and Other Stories, are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman preforming burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl," or the great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians." Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of "Only Those Who Struggle Succeed," or the "dangerous" women of "The Daughters of Manāt" who struggle to assert their independence.