National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the Cote-de-Negre area of Montreal, the first stop for many new immigrants, live people of more than 100 nationalities, Marcelo, the sensitive son of Chilean refugees, and Cleo, a shy boy from Haiti, find friendship on the track, winning a major relay race together. Years later, in the same streets, two violent gangs, the Latino Power and the Bad Boys, confront each other, and their leaders must decide whether they will be united by their childhood friendship, or divided by race...

At Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher, people are struggling to do more than their jobs. They struggle to fall in love. They struggle to stay that way. They struggle to be good parents, and to be good children. They struggle to have friends, to eat lunch, to be happy, and to answer the phone. And all that struggle can be pretty interesting especially when it happens on company time. In The Big Dream, acclaimed short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum documents a new generation discovering itself in the workplace, and gives us an In Our Time for the present age.

Now in its 47th year, 'Best Canadian Stories' has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many of the writers, throughout their respective careers, who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon.

Eduardo, an architect from Lisbon, has come to Montreal to be with his wife Geneviève. Geneviève researches fungi and likes to catalogue her orgasms. But when Eduardo is caught in an explosion and rumors of arson begin to circulate, both his marriage and his fledgling architecture firm verge on collapse. Gorgeous, colourful, and richly described, Backspring is a sensual taxonomy of desire.

Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality'and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.

In a linked collection that presents the secret small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by an affair she cannot end; a receptionist, and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce.

These fourteen stories by acclaimed poet Patricia Young explore the small victories and lurching disappointments, losses and betrayals of the everyday with a language and style that is tautly poetic and beautifully unsentimental. A woman who cannot leave her house loses almost everything, her only companion a garrulous radio talk show host; a house fire sets in motion the end of a marriage as a couple re-examine the meaning of truth and commitment; a teenage girl cannot extract herself from a doomed relationship with a heroin addict.

Prompted by a mysterious summons from his past, a man known only as 'The Super' begins an investigation into maternal neglect by a privileged Toronto family. As the case deepens, revealing a web of systemic crime and depravity, The Super undertakes a series of adjustments: his word for the personal interventions that he conducts on behalf of the powerless. These increasingly chaotic retributions soon pull him into a spiral of brutal violence. Working within six-to-eight week windows of hyper-time periods of near-sleepless activity and hyper-awareness that precede his own mental collapse.

It's 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small town of Chatham with his father and older sister. So far, so normal. But Tom's dad is the local tattoo artist, his older sister might be in love with the new girl in town, and his Mom ran off and shacked up with pastor Bob who runs a Christian evangelical sect. And no one looks at Tom the same since he was brought back from the dead that time when he was eight. Tom delivers the Chatham Daily News, and he can give you all the news that's fit to print about the folks around here.