National Network for Equitable Library Service

A rare glimpse into an artist’s mind, his toolbox, and the world of film animation

The Sweater is one of the most beloved animated films of all time. Based on Roch Carrier’s short story, also known as “The Hockey Sweater,” the film recounts the most horrifying moment of the author’s childhood. Sheldon Cohen adapted the story into animation and created a film that is as much about childhood emotions and the desire to fit in, as it is about hockey, the clash of cultures, and a harkening to bygone times.

A breathtaking mix of observation, prose, natural history, and art. We tend to look at landscape in relation to what it can do for us. Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions? This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this beautiful, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario.

The poems in The Flower of Youth depict the coming of age and into sexual difference of the great writer and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The time of this story is World War II; the place is German-occupied northern Italy. Unlike his younger brother, Guido, who took up arms to fight in the resistance, Pasolini chose to help his mother set up a school for the boys, mostly sons of farmers, too young to fight or be conscripted.

When biologist Brian Harvey saw a thousand fish blundering into a Brazilian dam, he asked the obvious: What's going to happen to them? The End of the River is the story of his long search for an answer. The End of the River is about people and rivers and the misuse of science. Harvey takes readers from a fisheries patrol boat on the Fraser River to the great Tsukiji fish market in Japan, with stops in the Philippines, Thailand, and assorted South American countries.

Neil Peart is an internationally critically acclaimed, bestselling, and award-nominated author, and for more than thirty years has been the legendary drummer and lyricist for Rush, the most successful band in the history of Canadian rock music. Defying categorization, his books have earned a devoted readership by combining elements of memoir, travel writing, and social commentary with a thoughtful, musical sense of self-discovery.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular Glimpse

Quick is George Murray’s second collection of aphorisms — a form that straddles the lines between poetry, philosophy, humour, and prose. He describes these pieces as “poetic essences” — sometimes even as “poems, without all the poetry getting in the way.” Some are deep, some clever, some funny, some all three. The best, he says, should read like common-sense statements that have never actually been expressed.

A collection of bitterly hilarious job application letters.

In November of 2001, Glen Heggstad decided to ride his motorcycle to the tip of South America. His journey was interrupted when he was kidnapped at gunpoint by Colombian rebels and held captive for five weeks. Yet even after his traumatic incarceration, Glen did what few others would--finished his trip. Three years later, frustrated by the climate of fear in a media-saturated world and the resulting stranglehold of self-imposed security in the U.S., Glen decided to look for truth on his own terms--on the back of his motorcycle.

A true story of faith and hope from the late night suicide crisis guy. Midnight, Jesus & Me is an at once heartbreaking, provocative, and inspirational collection of true-life tales from J.M. Blaine, that semi-agnostic, evangelical absurdist, existential Christian, licensed psychiatric guy. He invites readers to listen to the secret lives of saints and sinners falling, as he questions the meaning of it all and determines that there are no easy answers.

An unprecedented take on cancer and recovery. Why does cancer have such a deadly hold over our collective imagination? Why do we fear it above all else, even bankruptcy, crime, and sudden death? And why is our dread intensifying, despite the fact that many types of cancer are less common than ever, more curable, and far better understood? Because cancer has become our malignant metaphor, a billboard for our secret sins. We haven't been eating the right food; we have failed to exercise enough; we have buried too much destructive emotion--in short, we have brought the disease upon ourselves.