National Network for Equitable Library Service

Arachne Manteia is a road rider, a traveling sales rep who drives a classic Mercedes and peddles women's underwear for a living. From her working class childhood to her comfortable adult life, Arachne refuses the conventional and embraces whatever adventure fate throws in her path. A rogue sales rep with a man in every town, she lures each into her web of desire. All of them she claims as part of her never-ending journey, which promises fulfillment but offers no map for her longing.

Opening night of the season at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Centre is a glittering event on the city’s arts calendar, and this October, there is real drama happening offstage. Gerald Blaise, the company’s well-loved Artistic Director has failed to show up. When Gerald’s body is found in the trunk of his car abandoned outside the city limits, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP finds herself investigating the death.

Linked short stories based in the imaginary city of Fontainebleau, on the banks of the Detroit River. There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. Then there are abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives.

The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests.

Nothing exciting ever happens on Darby’s Island, Newfoundland. That is until one summer afternoon in 1975 when a Chevy towing a trailer drives off the ferry. The Great Prospero, Hypnotist and Magician is printed in large red letters across the side. People on the island are thrilled that the renowned Prospero is going to perform at the community hall. However, after the hypnotist suggests his subjects are seagulls, Jake Pickford, with arms flapping, leaves the building and does not return to the stage. That same evening, the archbishop is found stabbed to death on the beach.

I move around the side of the house. There is a thick mass of shrubs on the north-east side. Juniper, and caragana gone wild. Without thinking, I pluck a flower and put it into my mouth, savouring the delicate yellowness of its flavour. Now when did I learn to do that? Who first put a caragana blossom on my tongue? Emma G. Weaver easily loses herself in history. She's much more comfortable imagining the lives of the dead than getting involved with the living.

A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride. A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld.

A grossly inaccurate "memoir" about Canadian folk legends. Henry Adam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene-and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, including honest accounts of the folklorist's myriad trials and tribulations.

Andrew and his fiancée, Hannah, are on board a whale-watching boat in the Bay of Fundy when the vessel is hit by a rogue wave. Thirty-eight people are rescued by the coast guard, but Hannah is not one of them, and she is subsequently presumed to have drowned. Some weeks later, however, a friend sends Andrew a link to a wedding video shot in southern Mexico, and who is there but Hannah, sitting next to a man her friends do not recognize.