National Network for Equitable Library Service

All sorts of things can happen, no matter what road you take, and I never forget that. Death in particular can never be forgotten. Since Rudi’s death, I have tried to anticipate and dodge obstacles like an Olympic skier. My agile imagination glides between the little red flags with ease. Philippe’s imagination is both infinite and inflexible. It’s a dangerous combination. He stays planted on the ground while looking down over reality. Between us, we do a good job of filling the realm of the possible.

Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer. WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLÉGIENS Simón turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together. Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometimes America, less often Peru – so many settings, all of which turned into the bedroom, eventually. It's 1862, and Spain is a little rueful about letting Peru have their independence.

Winner of the 2009 ReLit Award! He saw it. Like one dead eye filmed over. Like a tunnel that would kill you. Like a star coming to explode you. He saw it. Closer and closer. It was morning. It was daylight. He shouldn't be thinking this. This was a nighttime thing. Stop. Stop. Stop thinking. He felt it. Like black oil on his spine. Like night inside of him. Chase and Haven only have each other. Their mother is mostly absent; she's tired from working too hard at her motel cleaning job and avoiding their father's fists. He's mostly absent too, usually drunk and often violent.

All Tom's friends really are superheroes. There's the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she's sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she's moving to Vancouver. She'll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With no idea Tom's beside her, she boards an airplane.

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region) Nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh has an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. He knows that if you wet a dog's food with your saliva and he refuses to eat it then he's top dog, and he knows that dolphins can sleep half a brain at a time. What he doesn't know, though, is why his grandfather died, or why waste-of-flesh Lyle always picks on him.

A long drive across Chile's Atacama desert, traversing "the worn-out puzzle" of a broken family-a young man's corrosive intimacy with his mother, the obtrusive cheer of his absentee father, his uncle's unexplained death-occupies the heart of this novel. Camanchaca is a low fog pushing in from the sea, its moisture sustaining a near-barren landscape. Camanchaca is the discretion that makes a lifelong grief possible. Sometimes, the silences are what bind us. Diego ZUNiga (born 1987) is a Chilean author and journalist.

Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the fifteenth century introduced an era of mass communication that permanently altered the structure of society. While publishing has been buffeted by persistent upheaval and transformation ever since, the current combination of technological developments, market pressures, and changing reading habits has led to an unprecedented paradigm shift in the world of books.

"Stories, both my own and those I've taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I've become," Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads-and writes-everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti.

This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of 14 writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, age, and political perspectives.

New writings-on rooms, buildings, and the spaces and structures that surround us-from Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Scott, and more. From huts to houses to high-rises, childhood bedrooms to churches, the spaces we occupy and pass through shape our memories and perceptions, often without our conscious awareness.