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"Pike's Portage plays a very special role in the landscape of Canada's Far North and its human history. It is both an ancient gateway and the funnel for early travel from the boreal forest of the Mackenzie River watershed to the vast open spaces of the subarctic taiga, better known as the "Barren Lands" of Canada.

With exceptional power, Robinson exposes both the gravity and levity of relationships — formed in duty, in fear, in need — and the subtle ways we attempt to escape their persistent pull. At turns humourous, chilling and tender, Robinson's fiction displays a versatility in tone and subject that mirrors the stories of our lives, real or imagined, domestic or exotic. His writing elevates the "What If?" to new imaginary heights.

In Repeat This and You’re Dead, celebrated dramatist Lawrence Russell ventures for the first time into fiction. With gritty and unforgiving realism, these "short short stories" cast a harsh eye on the Ireland of the last half of this century, a country brutally divided while fiercely loyal to an ambiguous past and an even more turbulent future.

Inappropriate Behaviour has a magnetism as alluring as the sirens, summoning readers to revel in the coy seduction that preludes desire, the truths women deny and the longing they supress, unleashed in startling moments of betrayal, loss, and reclamation. Mock widens the threshold–exposing a desire not only for touch, but for understanding, for family, for a love which satiates more than the physical appetite.

Kingston writer Richard Cumyn’s second book of short stories is a remarkable collection of fiction about the curse of modernity–displacement. In striking scenes Cumyn subtly explores our own sense of abandonment and loneliness in the face of change, movement and loss. Cumyn’s prose is sparse and direct, the violence supressed beneath the surface casual and foreboding. His characters are at once familiar and eerily distinct, their relationships a tender blend of heartbreak and affection.

Charles G.D. Roberts’s fame rests on a series of very popular animal stories. Charles G.D. Roberts was a distinguished writer of his time who published more than forty volumes of poetry, romance fiction, and nature writing – making him one of the most popular writers of his time. He pioneered the animal story in which he went beyond surface elements of nature and endowed his animal "characters" with qualities of feeling and intelligence that brought them closer to their human cousins.

What does it mean to be a nobody? How does it feel to be a somebody? And why is it so hard to be ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Nobodies, a darkly comedic collection in which a neurotic teenager experiences his first rejection; a stalker emails her favourite movie star; a young man wages war against God; and an aspiring philosopher tries to save the world from itself. In seventeen genre-bending stories, Nobodies explores the paradoxes of status anxiety, the pitfalls of fame, and the dialectics of identity in the twenty-first century.

From the author of the novels Love on the Killing Floor and Dragging the River, Trevor Clark’s new collection of stories covers broad territory, from an addict’s confessions to the corruption of academia, in such diverse locales as Jamaica and the UK.

The short stories in God`s Autobio, Rolli’s debut collection, are impossible, quite probable, and everything in between. There’s a story about a man with a ridiculously huge coupon; about an elderly woman who befriends a frenzied robotic chimpanzee; an overzealous, if increasingly masochistic butler; plus twenty-three other surreal, sublime, and satirical creations by Canadian writer/poet/artist, Rolli, recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award, and one of the winners of the 2008/2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

Though But When We Look Closer is a collection of eighteen stories that approaches its subjects from a parade of landscapes, running through these tales is a singular motif—taking control. Characters find themselves in skins they wish to shed, with vices held close and with voices that must be heard. Whether it be seeking a life in a foreign land, lusting after a street junky, driving through the city with a gun or searching for buried treasure, But When We Look Closer offers a fascinating examination into the occupations and obsessions of those who walk beside us and live next door.