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Beginning with seductive thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped from the mind of the protagonist who returns and sees his old hometown as it once was. Additionally, there is the suffering caused by migration.

Ranging from the Persian Gulf to the American South, from ancient Greece to pre-Islamic Arabia, Ali Eteraz's stories observe the clash of civilizations through the surrealist's monocle: lovers playing with Koranic numerology; the sorrows of the Minotaur; the innocence of a genie; a woman obsessed with wine and virgins; brothers caught in a national security dragnet. Sensual, fabulist, mystical, gothic, the stories in Falsipedies & Fibsiennes search for love and solidarity within madness and oppression.

Writing Our Way Home is an important contribution to literary studies. “Italian-Canadian writers are not just Canadian writers, but world writers,” states literary critic Elena Lamberti in the introduction to Writing Our Way Home.

Her characters stumble into the light, clutching their existential problems. Their stories float up like dark episodes from the subconscious. Twelve stories so intimately linked that the characters seem to walk the same unsolid geography.

Whether it's Toronto, a French or Italian town, Pierre L'Abbe's stories are rich with a sense of place where the ambiance and characters fuse in a loaded sense of expectation. The characters, much like those in Henry James, challenge the norms of their overbearing societies. Nothing turns out as expected, and the twists often come with a dose of black humour.

Each of these impeccably crafted and sensitive stories is built around the outstanding ordinary individuals, the eccentrics of the rural working class of Mary Bush's native upstate New York. These are gritty depictions of the day-to-day lives of the hardworking poor, carrying with them their secret burdens. At the cores of these wide-ranging narratives are moments of surprise, illuminations that stun the thoughtful central personalities themselves.

Kenneth Scambray's first collection of short stories, set in Southern California, the Central Coast, and the San Joaquin Valley, depict that expansive California landscape also found in John Fante's fiction. In Scambray's stories, California's history and Italian Americans are inextricably intertwined. California is a place of settlement, struggle, and success for Italian Americans. While some of his protagonists must fight for survival, others begin that typical Ameri-can quest for identity in a modern world.

The accomplished stories found in this book take the reader from Cuba to the Yukon, from a parched landscape in Canada to the cool streets of southern Spain, from Toronto to the Rockies, and from the narrowing world of the dying to the wondrous expanse of a child's imagination. Uncannily adept at transporting his audience, Wade Bell's collection offers a satisfying depth of experience.

Twelve stories that provide startling glimpses of contemporary life in Bombay, and elsewhere. A wealthy business woman compelled by the desire to hurt her best friend; an old woman in a Tokyo apartment seeking the touch of a baby's hand; a woman reflecting on violence as a riot rages outside her home. Tales about friendship and repulsion, family ties and freedom; violence, public and private; ambition and uncertainty, alienation and acceptance, growing up and growing old.

I have written Life Stories virtually in the space of one breath -- these stories have been imagined in such concentration, that I had to free myself from them. They came so naturally, that I am very happy to have returned to the short-story format. It seems to me that in these eight stories each individual and different life is so strikingly intense that it was not possible to place all into one novel … Also in terms of style, I searched and found a different approach to each of the stories. I wanted to express myself more clearly and more simply.