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Peter Bayle - heavy drinker, philosopher to-be, anemic lover - somehow finds himself in Kansas, writing a feature article on middle America's newfound love for hockey. There he meets, among others, a morphine-injecting Reverend, a reviled reporter, a teenage drug dealer, and an ex-crack-addicted figure-skating team mascot.

This startlingly original collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Metcalf-Rooke Award. Set in locales and time periods as varied as nineteenth century England, contemporary Spain, and postwar Alberta, these five stories and two novellas introduce us to characters whose obsessions occupy the borderlands between fantasy and reality. In the title story, the half-black grand-daughter of slaves becomes an exotic dancer in New York during the First World War -- and also develops a passion for goldfish.

First published in 1972, Going Down Slow is an intense and very funny novel about one mans attempt to maintain his sanity, and his sense of humour, in the face of mounting odds. Metcalf's young hero, David Appleby, a young school teacher just over from Britain, is pitted against small-mindedness, prejudice, and temptations that are generations old. The writing is, as one would expect of anything by Metcalf, of the highest order. Going Down Slow is a sharp and biting satire, and an unforgettable novel.

Meet Xavier Boland, the untouchable cross-dresser, who walks loose and carefree as an old Broadway tune. Meet Miss Penrice, a lost old woman forced by wartime to parent a child for the first time. Meet a Zamboni mechanic turned funeral porteur, Madame Poirer's lapdog (and its chastity belt), a congregation of hard-singing, sex-obsessed Pentecostals, and more.

Author Ray Smith has correlated the recent electronic version of the Confession with the Dubai Typescript and the even earlier Hong Kong Holograph. In a feat of unparalleled investigative journalism he has travelled the world corroborating the sordid and still highly sensitive details which are to this day denied by the intelligence services of five nations. A saga of perjury, speculation and perversion.

Flirt's unnamed interviewer, like so many celebrity interviewers we know, love and sometimes loathe, is more interested in telling her own story than in listening to those of her subjects.

Cynthia Flood's The English Stories offers a series of twelve linked fictions detailing the story of Amanda Ellis, a young Canadian girl who goes with her parents to England 'for a year that stretched into two,' and her life at St. Mildred's school. Flood's suite is not limited to first person narration by the heroine; rather, the author chooses to spice this collection with a wide range of perspectives and voices.

Terence Young's second collection of short stories, The End of the Ice Age, brings together thirteen tales of hardscrabble characters in their lonely orbits. Young's writing is unadorned and precise, yet witty and unsentimental, and of striking psychological precision. These are stories of unfulfilled expectations, of infidelities'of the body and the mind and conscience and the small though ultimately meaningful victories that allow us to withstand.

In the tradition of erotic confession (with a catch), as delicately written as the tales of Ana's Nin or Pauline Reage, Smith's pornographic novel explores female desire. The unnamed narrator - gorgeous, sophisticated, bored, underemployed - embarks on a series of intense urban encounters in an unnamed city. Her desire is limitless: passionate, playful, intense, humorous and without reserve. Part Jean Genet, part Molly Bloom, part Penthouse Letters, Diana is a literary experiment, a modernist tale told in deft prose, whose goal is to arouse and to paint a sexual portrait of a city.

The eleven remarkable stories in Kevin Hardcastle's debut Debris introduce an authentic new voice. Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.