National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Kid accompanies her parents to New York City for a six-month stint of dog-sitting and home-schooling, she sees what looks like a tiny white cloud on the top of their apartment building. Rumor says there's a goat living on the roof, but how can that be' As Kid soon discovers, a goat on the roof may be the least strange thing about her new home, whose residents are both strange and fascinating. In the penthouse lives Joff Vanderlinden, the famous skateboarding fantasy writer, who happens to be blind.

They said she was going to be my ruin... Then let her ruin me. Caleb Lockhart has everything-wealth, adoration, a brilliant future. Until a chance encounter with a siren in a red dress changes everything. Until he meets the woman he dubs Red. Veronica Strafford's past makes it hard for her to trust anyone. Now, kicked out of her apartment, she reluctantly accepts Caleb's offer for a place to stay. Caleb feels intensely drawn to Veronica. And, for the first time in his life, he really wants something-someone. Too bad Veronica's heart might just be the one thing Caleb can't win.

The year is 1967, and everyone in Montreal is waiting for the day when they can visit Expo's exotic foreign pavilions. Meanwhile, CEline Poulin, self-conscious midget and former waitress, has started a new job: hostess in a bordello just opened by Montreal's famous Madame, Fine Dumas. Its specialty' All the "girls" in "Le Boudoir" are transvestites. This is Celine's record.

In 2012 yet another jar was uncovered near Qumran. The jar contains a memoir written by Mary, the mother of Jesus. It becomes known as Mary’s Jar. Whereas to date the world has only had glimpses of Mary through Matthew, Luke-acts, John and the Protoevangelium of James, now we discover the humanity of a questioning literate wife and mother. She loves to dance. She is overflowing with human feeling and emotion that supersedes her chosen position – a woman hand-picked to bear one of the most unforgettable men of all time.

These eight stories deal with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, war and its aftershocks prominent among them, where the reality is often much more surreal than fiction.

An old record player; an unposted letter; a pearl necklace never purchased; a badly written poem from the woman you love: tokens, gifts, and objects lost or left behind, desired or not wanted at all are the starting points for the stories in 'Worldly Goods', a new collection by Alice Petersen. The stories reveal that ownership is more than possession, for Petersen shows how small objects stand as markers of our attempts to communicate with each other.

Newly divorced, Lydia's life is in a downward spiral. Looking for respite, she takes off on a vaca'tion to Mexico with her formerly estranged mother. But instead of sun and sand, what she finds beyond the hotel's miniature jungles and Mayan statuary and folk dancing is a country where the people, many of whom serve her and her mother at the resort, live in fear, their lives dominated by cartels and corruption, and where journalists and politicians are made to disappear for even poking around the truth.

Amy Jones's Metcalf-Rooke Award-winning short fiction collection What Boys Like brings together a motley assemblage of urban misfits and outsiders, and explores their love/hate relationships with their city and one another.

Listless, bored, alienated, and mistrustful, Trace Patterson has finished his first year of university and is living with a drunken aunt in North Van. He divides his nights between slasher films and high school house parties. When two old buddies resurface, however one in a psych ward, and the other on a paranoia bender. Trace's careless-if-not-carefree existence becomes paralyzed by self-doubt. Does he actually want to help his friends, or is he secretly hoping they'll go over the edge?

A place: the Traymore Rooms, downtown Montreal, an old walk-up. Those who live there and drink at the nearby caf' form the heart of Traymorean society. Their number includes: Eggy, red-faced, West Virginian, a veteran of Korea; Eleanor R (not Eleanor Roosevelt); Dubois, French Canadian, optimist; Moonface, waitress-cum-Latin-scholar and sexpot inexpert; and, most recently, our hero Calhoun. A draft dodger and poetical type. For a time all is life-as-usual: Calhoun argues with Eggy and Dubois, eats Eleanor's cobblers, gossips of Moonface, muses on Virgil and the current President.