NNELS Upgrade

It is the mid-seventies, and Shaila has returned to Bombay for her father's sixtieth birthday party. In the linked stories that follow, Shree Gatage renders an India that can only be revealed by first leaving, and then returning again -- in the end, for Shaila, for good.

Lisa Moore's stories are bright, emotionally engaging, tangible. She marks out the precious moments of her characters' lives against deceptively commonplace backdrops — a St. John's hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines; a half-built house "like a rib cage around a lungful of sky" -- and the results linger long in the memory. The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore shows us that love, alongside desire, can sometimes come as a surprise, sometimes an ambush.

Up Up Up heralds the arrival of a writer of astonishing range, compassion, and acuity. In this stunning short story collection, Julie Booker grabs the reins from writers like Lydia Millet and Miranda July and takes off at full speed, and in directions all her own. A pair of plus-sized friends make tracks for a kayaking trip in Alaska. A woman vacations with her parents at a Texas trailer park, wondering why she can’t meet a man. A worldly member of a tour group selects sacrifices from among the most cherished belongings of her fellow travellers.

Winner of the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book and for The Globe's Top 10 Books of 2013. With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us nine unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy.

Literary legend Jim Harrison's collection of novellas, The Farmer's Daughter, finds him writing at the height of his powers, and in fresh and audacious new directions. The three stories in The Farmer's Daughter are as different as they are unforgettable. Written in the voice of a home-schooled fifteen-year-old girl in rural Montana, the title novella is an uncompromising, beautiful tale of an extraordinary character whose youth intersects with unexpected brutality, and the reserves she must draw on to make herself whole.

Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, Sheila Heti’s completely original stories lead you to surprising places. This edition featuring nine new stories. A frog doles out sage advice to a plumber infatuated with a princess, a boy falls hopelessly in love with a monkey, and a man with a hat keeps apocalyptic thoughts at bay by resolving to follow a plan that he admits he won’t stick to.

Shortlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, Barrelling Forward is a brilliantly crafted debut collection from Newfoundland’s newest literary star.Eva Crocker sees life in sharper focus than the rest of us. The objects, rituals, and scenes of everyday life take on an almost mythic quality in these stories, even while remaining intimately recognizable to us all. Crocker peers at the underbelly of poverty and work, ambition and apathy, loneliness and love, to find the sliver of beauty in each spot.

These thirty-five brief stories — and the found photographs that inspired them — are by turns realistic and surreal, bloody and tender, delightful and appalling. Award-winning author Cary Fagan has created a mesmerizing series of narrative tales, giving readers a vivid peek into lives of strangers.A man hangs onto a runaway horse. A woman paints in the nude. A shop window advertising a sale on blankets hides much more behind it. A lone tombstone on a hill speaks of a years-long feud.

With characters ranging from the desperate to the obsessive to the wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs dazzling linguistic verve and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people, he puts us in their skin so that we feel their frailty and courage. No other contemporary Canadian short-story writer slices up the imaginative excitement, cultural hybridity, and Joycean play of language we see in 19 Knives. With one of the stories shortlisted for the U.S.'s prestigious O.

Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions. In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it.