National Network for Equitable Library Service

A new short story from 2012 Scotiabank-Giller Prize finalist Russell Wangersky. In his first published short story since his critically acclaimed collection, Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky returns with a story about a lonely, ill old man, who is living alone in his house. Sick in bed for three days, Arthur Simmons ponders life, living and the sometimes difficult relationships he has with family members. The last of his generation, Simmons is both stubborn and desperate -- a quietly explosive mix.

The stories in Specimen are a unique exploration of science and the human heart; the place where physical reality collides with our spiritual and emotional lives. In “The Blood Keeper,” a young academic travels to North Korea to work on her dissertation and embarks on a dangerous affair. In “Mamochka,” which was nominated for the 2012 Journey Prize, an archivist at the Institute for Physics in Minsk, must come to terms with her daughter’s marriage to a Chinese man in Vancouver. In “Peptide P,” scientists study a disease that seems to affect children after they eat hotdogs.

The A List edition of Leo McKay’s superb collection. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Like This takes you inside small-town Nova Scotia to expose the troubles that lie at its heart. Set in a fictional town called Albion Mines, (the old name for author Leo McKay's home town of Stellarton), Like This offers a gripping, and at times frightening, look at small-town Nova Scotia life. These superb stories are startling and often disturbing, filled with complexity and power. McKay portrays characters with astonishing depth and dead-on emotional rightness.

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist. Intensely imaginative and darkly emotional, the weird and wonderful stories in Double Dutch deftly alternate between fantasy and reality, transporting readers into strange worlds that are at once both familiar and uncanny — where animals are more human, and people more mysterious, than they first appear.

“What else is there?” — Alice Munro, on why so much of her work deals with the twin themes of sex and death. The drive for life — for survival and reproduction — and the drive for death — for violence and self-destruction — are the two dominant, instinctive urges of human behaviour. These conflicting compulsions, characterized by Freud as Eros and Thanatos, are also the central themes of great literature.

After the death of a favourite aunt with a decadent and intriguing past, a young woman travels back to Montreal for the funeral and reconsiders her own deteriorating life as a failing fashion school student in New York City.

Featuring a preview of Carrie Snyder’s highly anticipated debut novel, Girl Runner. Anansi Digital brings you Carrie Snyder’s debut collection, Hair Hat, “a potent work of original imagination.” (Edmonton Journal). In these mysterious and wondrous stories, eleven disparate people — some of them related, some of them neighbours, glancing acquaintances, or even complete strangers — are transformed by a man with hair shaped like a hat. The lives depicted here are familiar, observed in all their ordinary detail.

A new collection of short fiction from the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Greg Hollingshead. Act Normal is a collection of sharp, new comic stories about sex, art, and the daily risk of having accidents. Highly original, occasionally dark, but always endearing, these stories are filled with characters who are forced to confront strange behaviour in both themselves and others. In “The Amazing Insult,” a blow to the head in a boating accident increases a woman’s intelligence and alters her sexual orientation.

Spanning the late 1970s to the late 1980s, Nadia Bozak’s thirteen stories are narrated from the perspective of Shell, the only child of bohemian artisans determined to live off their handicrafts and uphold a left-wing lifestyle. At the age of five, Shell’s world is transformed when the family moves into a new house, where she grows up. Over time, she gradually trades her unconventional upbringing for junk food, rock music, and boys. All the while, Shell quietly watches her parents’ loveless marriage fall apart and learns to survive divorce, weight gain, heartache, and first love.

Linked short stories follow the interconnected lives of children living in one apartment building as they shelter in place during the pandemic.