National Network for Equitable Library Service

For fans of Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs and Murata Sayaka's Earthlings, this Japanese bestseller from renowned anime director Makoto Shinkai features four inspirational and heartwarming vignettes following women and their cats in their quests for love and connection. Lying alone on the edge of the sidewalk in an abandoned cardboard box, a nameless narrator contemplates the indifferent world around him. With his mother long gone, his only company is the sound of the nearby train.

The SFWA Grand Master’s award-winning collection “combines a richly textured multicultural background with incisive storytelling” (Library Journal). In Skin Folk, with works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, Nalo Hopkinson is at her award-winning best, spinning tales like “Precious,” in which the narrator spews valuable coins and gems from her mouth whenever she attempts to talk or sing.

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian, and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color. Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre "speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves." It's an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

From the National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown, comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories. A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day?

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told.

From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth. "Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation." — Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times. "I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back..." It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone.

A magical collection of stories, both new and old, spanning across all of Anne Bishop’s most beloved fantasy worlds. Here, together for the first time, the shorter works of New York Times bestselling fantasy author Anne Bishop are compiled in one dazzling volume.

New York Times bestseller. In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, futurist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation—queerness, race, gender plurality, and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape... and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms. Whoever controls our memories controls the future.

From a writer whom the New York Times dubbed Canada’s “Generation X laureate” comes a quartet of haunting, unforgettable tales of young people stuck in the inescapable prison of family. A New York Times Notable Book and winner of Britain’s prestigious Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, Traplines is the book that introduced the world to Canadian author Eden Robinson. In three stories and a novella, Robinson explodes the idea of family as a nurturing safe haven through a progression of domestic horrors experienced by her young, often helpless protagonists.

National bestseller. An intimate and personal debut collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers. The stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon explore the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.