National Network for Equitable Library Service

Idaho Winter begins as the story of a boy with an extraordinarily painful existence. He is, through no fault of his own, loathed by everyone in the town where he lives. His father, Early Winter, feeds him roadkill for breakfast. The crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road. Parents encourage their children to plot cruelly against him. One morning Idaho finds it too much to bear and hides down by the river where he meets Madison. Madison, astonishingly, is as hurt by how he’s treated as he is.

America lies in ruins during an age of decline, despair, and death. The year is 1975 and a radical far-left group has kidnapped a young woman from one of America's richest families. She will later join their cause and will eventually be arrested and convicted of armed robbery. She will claim it was a 'different personality' that robbed the bank. The jury didn't buy it, but author Brian Joseph Davis did. The important difference is: Davis thought her 'different personality' was more interesting and deserved her own fake memoir.

An outlandishly funny, unambiguously bloody novel about fame, love, religion, politics, and appetite

It is one thing to die, alone and confused, trapped with your pants down around your ankles in the filthiest bus restroom in existence. It’s quite another thing to wake up during the autopsy, attack the coroner, and flee into the wintry streets of Toronto.

Bizarre sexual parables, hilarious science fiction, fables, text-tangles, dirty stories, lush love letters, re-visionary fairy tales, predictions,strange new games, dream transcripts, and a complete handbook of absurdist instructions, including one on the dangerous arts of pig-swallowing. With all the lyricism and wit which have made his columns in NOW magazine and his Dr. Poetry segments on CBC's Wordbeat so entertaining and provocative, this collection gathers for the first time the very best of Robert Priest's short prose.

How I Came to Haunt My Parents is storytelling for parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this beautifully written suite of short fiction Natalee Caple explores fables from the dark side of adulthood and imagines what moral Aesop may have offered to a mother who gave birth to a murderous dictator. Caple's animals and humans are imbued with modern complexity as they confront sex, death, and history, but her stories are as witty as they are profoundly lucid.

Levi Hayes is out for gold — and blood — in this high-magnitude historical tear through the mean streets of San Francisco

In the days before the great earthquake and fire of 1906, Levi Hayes returns from San Quentin Prison with a plan. After serving five years for the theft of $30,000 in gold coins from the San Francisco Mint, he’s ready to take back what’s his and exact revenge on the now-powerful Healey brothers who set him up and had his barroom, House of Blazes, seized by court order.

You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood — the horrors that led you to take the lives of your own father and grandfather.

You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the brutality of the men you’ve just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and unspeakable things that went on.

And still, hope burned.

A merry band of Newfoundland smugglers carrying on a grand tradition. A high-powered RCMP inspector obsessed with their capture. A day-dreaming police scientist caught in a dilemma between the call of duty and his infatuation with a voluptuous femme fatale. A multi-million-dollar cargo of pot on a creaky freighter. A merry high-seas romp from Newfoundland to Colombia to Miami and the North Atlantic. Undercover plots, double-dealing, triple betrayal, and murder. These are the elements that bulleted High Crimes to the top of the best-seller list.

Bullets squared everything. Wilson left his old boss alive in exchange for a clean slate. Wilson held up his end of the bargain and stayed off the grid for two years. Two years of peace until a man came calling. The man brought a gun and a woman in his trunk. Thousands of miles from home, Wilson learns that the city doesn't let go so easily. The city is more than bricks; it is a machine running on the blood of hard men and women. The hardest man in the city remembers Wilson and he will stop at nothing to get him back.

At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of a modern couple's apartment. In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives voice to the anguish of a generation of people who grew up with great expectations, and are now settling into their own personal failures and compromises: James is obsessed with completing his life's work.