National Network for Equitable Library Service

The characters in Holy Fools + 2 Stories are humble people who may seem mad. Burdened by delusion. Driven by irrational goals. They take action and are caught up in the web of events, carried to unfamiliar shores that may or may not denote salvation. There is no message. I just wanted to write about the dear human spirit, swimming against a crazy world.

Expulsion & Other Stories consists of two parts: a novella followed by a group of short stories. But the main protagonists have one thing in common: they are all women coming of age in difficult times. In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship's mundane face -- a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play -- or pays the price, that of facing “expulsion”.

Beginning with seductive thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped from the mind of the protagonist who returns and sees his old hometown as it once was. Additionally, there is the suffering caused by migration.

Ranging from the Persian Gulf to the American South, from ancient Greece to pre-Islamic Arabia, Ali Eteraz's stories observe the clash of civilizations through the surrealist's monocle: lovers playing with Koranic numerology; the sorrows of the Minotaur; the innocence of a genie; a woman obsessed with wine and virgins; brothers caught in a national security dragnet. Sensual, fabulist, mystical, gothic, the stories in Falsipedies & Fibsiennes search for love and solidarity within madness and oppression.

Writing Our Way Home is an important contribution to literary studies. “Italian-Canadian writers are not just Canadian writers, but world writers,” states literary critic Elena Lamberti in the introduction to Writing Our Way Home.

Her characters stumble into the light, clutching their existential problems. Their stories float up like dark episodes from the subconscious. Twelve stories so intimately linked that the characters seem to walk the same unsolid geography.

Whether it's Toronto, a French or Italian town, Pierre L'Abbe's stories are rich with a sense of place where the ambiance and characters fuse in a loaded sense of expectation. The characters, much like those in Henry James, challenge the norms of their overbearing societies. Nothing turns out as expected, and the twists often come with a dose of black humour.

Each of these impeccably crafted and sensitive stories is built around the outstanding ordinary individuals, the eccentrics of the rural working class of Mary Bush's native upstate New York. These are gritty depictions of the day-to-day lives of the hardworking poor, carrying with them their secret burdens. At the cores of these wide-ranging narratives are moments of surprise, illuminations that stun the thoughtful central personalities themselves.

Kenneth Scambray's first collection of short stories, set in Southern California, the Central Coast, and the San Joaquin Valley, depict that expansive California landscape also found in John Fante's fiction. In Scambray's stories, California's history and Italian Americans are inextricably intertwined. California is a place of settlement, struggle, and success for Italian Americans. While some of his protagonists must fight for survival, others begin that typical Ameri-can quest for identity in a modern world.

The accomplished stories found in this book take the reader from Cuba to the Yukon, from a parched landscape in Canada to the cool streets of southern Spain, from Toronto to the Rockies, and from the narrowing world of the dying to the wondrous expanse of a child's imagination. Uncannily adept at transporting his audience, Wade Bell's collection offers a satisfying depth of experience.