National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind.

Once a celebrated war photographer, Lucas Zane is burnt out after covering twenty years of war. Drunk, hallucinatory, all ambition fled, Zane earns the rent working for an impresario of shoestring pornographic movies. Here he encounters Melissa and hatches a plan that might save her, his career, and quite possibly himself. The power of Combat Camera lies in its voice, a voice that is restless, ceaseless, meandering, tragic, sometimes very funny, a mind and a voice maintain an almost hypnotic grip on the reader.

The fourth title in Biblioasis's Renditions Series, Century begins with the nightmare visions of a young woman named Jane Seymour, catching the reader up in a chronicle of the Seymour family that moves from Austria, America and Africa, through Edinburgh and Venice, and then back through the Paris of the Belle Epoque and forward to 1923 Germany. Terrifying, powerful, slashing and satiric, yet at the same time musical and wonder-filled, Century remains the most important work of Ray Smith's ouevre, and one of the most impressive, and far-reaching novels ever published in Canada.

It is 1984. The latest recession is said to be over, and in the steel city of Hamilton, things are picking up. For Paul, however, an ex-rock guitarist and current art gallery attendant, life has slowed to the pace of a still life on a wall. He badly needs a jolt -- and he gets one. Soon after the arrival of an exhibition of Surrealist art, puzzles start to multiply around him.

First published in 1969, Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada remains as refreshing, innovative and important today as it has in every previous incarnation. Sophisticated, playful, crafted, sly, self-referential and extremely funny, it marks the beginning of a long and important, if unfortunately under appreciated, career by one of Canada's best humourists and innovative story-tellers.

What has to die before you force yourself to change? That's the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver's East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen's debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Yet in this joint-smoking urban underground, we also glimpse the families, communities, friends and strangers from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air.

Rose LeClair has everything she ever wanted: a successful career as a box office starlet, a handsome, successful Hollywood husband, more fans and money than she could have hoped for, her face on the cover of every check-out magazine. And she is about to take her own life. At the last moment, however, she recoils from the act, and tries to imagine a future of even greater possibility.

When Brenda Bray, better known to the world as Rae Brand, author of the popular Elsinor Grey mystery series, returns home to Hamilton, she is set upon by vivid memories of the fall of 1962 when she struck up an intense relationship with a classmate, and together they sought to track and catch an escaped serial killer believed to be hiding out on the escarpment. Brenda and Jori search for this elusive murderer, their friendship twisting as the weeks pass, becoming tautly fantastic and pre-adolescently sexual, eventually resulting in real tragedy.

In this sparkling collection of stories drawn from the surreal edge of life, playful irony vies with more poignant evocations of solitude, mortality, and the dawn of sexual awareness - all bodied forth in a language that is precise, elegant, and immediate.

What are boys and men thinking? That's what the wry, observant, heartbroken and hilarious girls and women in these stories want to know. What are they thinking when they warn women against adventure, gulp ale in moonlit truck wrecks, steal their fingers down their nurses' thighs, tell their little girls fairy tales? What are insane boys the most exquisite, and where have the musical geniuses flown without our love? What is Jerome Hepditch doing in a loincloth, and how will his wives acquire escape vehicles?