National Network for Equitable Library Service

City Hall proclaimed 2006 the Year of Creativity. ‘Live With Culture’ banners flap over the city. And across the city, donors are ponying up millions for the ROM and the AGO. Culture’s never had it so good. Right? The State of the Arts explores the Toronto arts scene from every angle, applauding, assailing and arguing about art in our fair burg. The essays consider the big-ticket and the ticket-free, from the Opera House and the CNE to the subconscious art of graffiti eradication and underground hip-hop.

Steve Reinke is one of the most intriguing artists we've got; his scope is enormous, his imagination absolutely singular. His video art — The Hundred Videos, Anthology of American Folk Song, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss — practically define the genre. Reinke tells us, in 'Kitchener–Berlin,' his appreciation of Philip Hoffman's film of that title, that experimental video is centred around voice — a decidedly peculiar and literary notion. It makes good sense, then, that this experimental video artist is also an accomplished prose writer.

Beside me, on the stone steps of this quiet courtyard, there is a lame man – the sweeper. He is so thin that the end of his belt comes back around to its buckle. He’s trying to feed a puppy the rest of his lunch. He reminds me that we all need something to need us, and that maybe that’s why we Westerners, who are so independent, mostly fail to understand family in this way, and need to come up with things like ‘quality time’ to justify such a base need. Everyone here asks if my family is in Sri Lanka, if that’s why I’ve come here. When I say no, they’re back in Canada, this confuses them.

Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is a city dominated by water. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto’s water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city’s surface water. In HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, thirty-four contributors examine the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and call into question the city’s past, present and future engagement with water.

This year's Best American Magazine Writing features outstanding writing on contentious issues including incarceration, policing, sexual assault, labor, technology, and environmental catastrophe. Selections include Paul Ford's ambitious "What Is Code'" (Bloomberg Businessweek), an innovative explanation of how programming works, and "The Really Big One," by Kathryn Schulz (The New Yorker), which exposes just how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is for a major earthquake.

A collection of personal essays written between 1976 and 1983 for The Dallas Times Herald. They have a universality and a timelessness that makes them suitable for a much wider audience than the population of one urban area of Texas. What jumps out in these essays is not so much the actions within, so much as Bryan Woolley's reactions to these actions and events.

A new collection of "true Texas stories" to stand alongside his earlier collection, The Edge of the West and Other Texas Stories, including such portrayals of Texas and Texans as: -The title story on his own family scandal about his uncle being charged with the murder of his new bride; -The quest for the $65,000 prize fish in the Lake Texoma Crappiethon; and 17 other stories.

This third collection of true stories from award-winning journalist and novelist Bryan Woolley with an introduction by author John Nichols includes the deeply moving title story "Generations," as well as his features and personality profiles from The Dallas Morning News. In this volume of twenty-seven pieces, including the winner of a 1995 Missouri Lifestyles Journalism Award, "Poets Lariat," Woolley explores Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco and recalls the lost golden age of Mineral Wells, Texas.

Published in 1981, Bachelorhood was Lopate's personal experiences as an unmarried man in the big city. Specifically he explores four themes of bachelor life: relationships with women and love; the observer; friendship-with those both married and single; and the artist and thinking man. Entertaining, though provoking and occasionally even heartbreaking, Bachelorhood is a fantastic collection of essays.

Vancouver news icon and co-host of CTV's "The Last Word," Mike McCardell is the crafter of human-interest stories that counteract the doom and gloom of conventional news programming. With his unerring instinct for teasing out the powerful "hook" of human connection from the most innocuous (or bizarre) events, McCardell's unique perspective has endeared him to hundreds of thousands of fans.