National Network for Equitable Library Service

Meet the 'fast zombie' citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style 'likes' replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here.

He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died.

When Deni B'chard learned of the last living bonobos the matriarchal great apes who are, alongside chimpanzees, our closest relatives he began exploring ways to reverse their alarming decline. Upon arriving in war-ravaged Congo, B'chard connected with the Bonobo Conservation Institute (BCI), a small organization that has done more to save bonobos than any of its larger counterparts.

John Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained defies expectations and strict definition. Part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism -- wholly Metcalf -- it is thoughtful, engaged, contentious and often very funny. It offers a full does of Metcalfian wisdom and wit, and provides ample evidence that neither age nor indifference nor attack have withered him: he remains as sharp, critical, constructive and insightful as ever. Indeed, this may just be his most important and engaged book. Certainly it will be among his most controversial.

Clark Blaise is a North American treasure, one of a handful of the truly important short story writers in the last 50 years. His Selected Essays brings together for the first time another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre, belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

An illustrated history of bootlegging along the Great Lakes, Rumrunners gives us a sense of Prohibition and the larger-than-life rumrunners and bootleggers who thrived during it in a way that no document before or after has managed. This revised and enlarged 30th Anniversary edition brings back the original book with new stories and over 180 photographs and illustrations.

The River is Paul Vasey's tribute to Windsor, a place he discovered by accident and loved over a lifetime. Chatty, anecdotal, personal and passionate, by the celebrated CBC broadcaster, this grass-roots memoir brings to life a new kind of border city: a town that fired Vasey's imagination, stole his heart, and eventually became the place he calls home.

In this essay collection, Henighan ranges across continents, centuries and linguistic traditions to examine how literary culture and our perception of history are changing as the world grows smaller. He weaves together daring literary criticism with front-line reporting on events such as the end of the Cold War in Poland and African reactions to the G8 Summit.

Marius Kociejowski follows up his now classic 'The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool' with 'The Pigeon Wars of Damascus'. A metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, Kociejowski discovers once again at the periphery of Damascene society for the outcast is often made of the very thing that rejects him a way to understand the challenges and changes refashioning post-9/11 Syria and the Middle East, reminding us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.

In the game of bocce, no matter how intensely you study the world's surface, there is always a chance an unseen pebble will knock your ball in an unexpected direction. In these essays, poet, antiquarian bookseller, and celebrated travel writer Marius Kociejowski chronicles serendipitous encounters with authors, manuscripts, and eccentrics, in which 'the curious workings of fate' and 'art's unbidden swerve' intervene to shift the course of fortune.