National Network for Equitable Library Service

<p>Longlisted for the ReLit Award</p> <p>Editor's Pick, <i>Vancouver Sun</i></p> <p><i>Dirtbags</i> is a novel about reckoning?with one?s past, one?s choices, and one?s expectations for the future.

<p><i>Burqa of Skin</i> is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, <i>Putain</i> (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death. Now beyond the ripples of scandal Arcan’s work has caused, here are the last echoes of her work, and it is as stunning as it is brief.

<p>Drinkin’ rye and water with Grandma. Guns in False Creek. Frat boy homies from the North Delta ghetto. Samuel L. Jackson. Phantom Lord & Metallica. A kid who’s got the hots for his mom…</p> <p><i>Hunh?</i></p> <p>That’s right.

<p>“Literary escapades enlighten and entertain in this boundary-pushing collection.” (<i>Foreword Reviews</i>)</p> <p>“The maestro is at it again” (<i>The Vancouver Sun</i>)</p> <p><i>Ten Women</i> is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada’s preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can’t really tell for sure.

<p>When jazz musicians of the ’30s and ’40s were gettin’ down, when things were really cookin’ they’d say, Yeah, make it tight like that. It meant things were good, as good as they could get. It’s a good thing in fiction, too. The stories in Jim Christy’s latest collection span time and space, taking us from the depression-era Deep South to the modern-day Vancouver commute. Private eyes. Old drunks. Yuppies, hippies, and everyone in between gets the trademark Christy work-over. He roughs ’em up until they show their mettle.

<p><i>The Skeleton Dance</i> takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers.</p> <p>Wiped out in the rush of the thousand-eyed crowd hurrying to beehive office cubicles, and unhinged by the death of a close friend, musician turned ad copywriter Robert Walker drifts into a hallucinogenic, violent world of drugs, pornography, and murder.

<p>Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.</p> <p>As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the same man, Charles.

<p>Winner, 35th International 3-Day Novel Contest </p> <p>Jack Minyard is a private eye down on his luck. He’s badly overweight and on the wrong side of sixty. He’s lost his marriage, and maybe a little of his mind, too. After narrowly escaping charges in a statewide fraud and money laundering scandal, Jack has been working private contracts and counting on the kindness of strangers (not to mention a pile of prescription drugs) to get by.

<p>Finalist, ReLit Award </p> <p>Finalist, McNally Robinson Book of the Year (Manitoba Book Awards) </p> <p>Finalist, Bisexual Book Award (USA)</p> <p><i>Whitetail Shooting Gallery</i>, a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie.</p> <p>Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households.

<p>Finalist, Trillium Book Award</p> <p>The stories in <i>Animal</i> depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat?s characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate. It matters little whether the characters take action or refuse to act; life acts for them. The reader is left to wonder: When does ?meaning? cease to have meaning?