National Network for Equitable Library Service

From celebrated Toronto poet, Domenico Capilongo, comes a collection of powerful and humorous stories inspired by love: the love of family and tradition, the passion shared between two people when love is found, and the impact felt when it is misunderstood and lost. These stories travel the globe from Toronto to Vancouver, WWII Sicily, Rome, Japan, Thailand, and even the gardens of Paris. Capilongo succeeds in capturing the beat of relationships in their many stages of complicated development.

The game of life. Stories about competition in sports and games and activities. The Greek conception of the agon, competitive tests of skill and endurance and fortitude – and experiencing what an old TV show once called the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. There is more, however, than the pleasure of a score and the pain of a loss. More than the outcome of the competition is what the competition reveals about character. And, though all playing involves fun and skill and struggle, there is the game that leads to the short-term outcome and there is the game that is without end.

Len Gasparini is a master of the dark, hard-edged, densely layered story. In his latest story collection, The Snows of Yesteryear, he charts the climate of the human heart with compassion, humor, nostalgia, and irony. His characters are shaped as much by fate as by the hungry ghosts of their own pasts. A desperate publisher dreams up a clever hoax to save his weekly newspaper from going under. Life and art are crucially juxtaposed when a painter sees his ideal model in a young black stripper.

The resistance of the human spirit in face of time, disloyalty, and oblivion is the theme of Marina Sonkina’s new collection of short stories. Her seemingly naïve and helpless protagonists inhabit disparate social stations, geographical locales and cultures; all are persons displaced in their own lives. But in their struggles for survival, they discover the redeeming and dangerous power of unconditional love – the only weapon available to them. Strange and incomprehensible to everyone, love makes its sudden appearance to an eight-year-old hunchbacked boy in the title story of Lucia’s Eyes.

With their staccato rhythm and attention to detail these stories recall emotions, memories, atmosphere, and even physical sensations with a powerful freshness. Gasparini's ability to render passion and humanity ensure a truly memorable and compelling collection.

The two short stories in this collection are steeped in the revelries and tragedies of nostalgia. A woman living in war-torn Prague contemplates revenge against her oppressors but instead chooses to "sleep with the enemy." The stories in this work are set against a glimmering and dangerous Prague-populated by characters who are equally mysterious and beautiful.

This offbeat story collection effortlessly captures dark underworlds and the eccentric characters that inhabit them. In one story, a jealous tattoo artist revenges himself on the woman he loves. In another, one horrifying realization after another comes to light during a harmless childhood game. Told with a Hitchcock-like flair for psychological detail, these disturbing stories reverberate with gruesome plot twists and remarkable turns of fate.

A classic short fiction writer, Wade Bell lets his characters do the talking for him, electing to stay in the background. His style is simple but he's not afraid to pry open the heart of a character and expose it for all the world to see. Bell's latest collection features a young wife who deliberately sets up her husband to kill or be killed; a struggling artist who is picked up by a mysterious six-foot woman at a bar; a girlfriend called Jupiter Moon; and a drill instructor who gets his kicks ordering a seven-year-old to march.

Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies – by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns childlike and naive, grotesque and very dark, the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones.