National Network for Equitable Library Service

David Constantine's short fiction is a revelation. Gorgeous and primally resonant, it belongs alongside the best of the last century, including the works of Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, and Thomas Mann. Already regarded as one of the greatest living short story writers in the United Kingdom, where his work has won critical praise and numerous prizes including the prestigious Frank O'Connor Award Constantine has remained virtually unknown in North America. Until now.

Norman Levine was a permanent outsider, by temperament and by choice as Polish born immigrant, as resident alien, as writer, as Jew and he observed life from the margins with an unsentimental eye. Raised in Ottawa after immigrating, Levine served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World war. He then lived an itinerant life for a time before settling down in the community of St. Ives in England, becoming close friends with painters such as Francis Bacon and Patrick Heron.

Hitting the Charts brings back into print stories that go as far back as 1980, offering up the full range of Leon Rooke's voice and accomplishment. These are stories as improvisations, as performances, stories which push the boundaries of form and function, as free from constraint as a Monk solo and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. A new sort of literary riff, then, a dazzling display of language and sensibility, deserving of its own unique adjective: Rookian.

This startlingly original collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Metcalf-Rooke Award. Set in locales and time periods as varied as nineteenth century England, contemporary Spain, and postwar Alberta, these five stories and two novellas introduce us to characters whose obsessions occupy the borderlands between fantasy and reality. In the title story, the half-black grand-daughter of slaves becomes an exotic dancer in New York during the First World War -- and also develops a passion for goldfish.

Meet Xavier Boland, the untouchable cross-dresser, who walks loose and carefree as an old Broadway tune. Meet Miss Penrice, a lost old woman forced by wartime to parent a child for the first time. Meet a Zamboni mechanic turned funeral porteur, Madame Poirer's lapdog (and its chastity belt), a congregation of hard-singing, sex-obsessed Pentecostals, and more.

Flirt's unnamed interviewer, like so many celebrity interviewers we know, love and sometimes loathe, is more interested in telling her own story than in listening to those of her subjects.

Cynthia Flood's The English Stories offers a series of twelve linked fictions detailing the story of Amanda Ellis, a young Canadian girl who goes with her parents to England 'for a year that stretched into two,' and her life at St. Mildred's school. Flood's suite is not limited to first person narration by the heroine; rather, the author chooses to spice this collection with a wide range of perspectives and voices.

Terence Young's second collection of short stories, The End of the Ice Age, brings together thirteen tales of hardscrabble characters in their lonely orbits. Young's writing is unadorned and precise, yet witty and unsentimental, and of striking psychological precision. These are stories of unfulfilled expectations, of infidelities'of the body and the mind and conscience and the small though ultimately meaningful victories that allow us to withstand.

The eleven remarkable stories in Kevin Hardcastle's debut Debris introduce an authentic new voice. Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind.