National Network for Equitable Library Service

Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told 'round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.G.A.

Following the immense success of his debut collection of horror stories, Midnight Storm, Moonless Sky, Blackfoot storyteller Alex Soop once again scares the wits out of readers while uncovering overlooked social anxieties and racism affecting Indigenous Peoples across North America. Whistle at Night and They Will Come: Indigenous Horror Stories Volume 2 delivers stories ranging from supernatural mythology and the paranormal to post-apocalyptic scenarios, and zombie lockdown-12 tales in all in short story and novella formats.

The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women--immigrants or the descendants of immigrants--who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the horrible cracks in their marriage.

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community. A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese's debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond.

Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred. There’s a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can’t manage to die.

End Times is an astounding debut collection of stories about evangelical culture, ideological polarization, and the messiness and mysteries of humanity. A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant tries to help a rural fundamentalist teen, while her own secular life unravels in Toronto, Davos, and beyond. An atheist doctor attempts to expose a hipster megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite.

Grin Reaping catalogues the foibles of the fictional Boyle family. In a series of fourteen interconnected short stories and musings, Rudy Boyle, a Northern Ontario college English teacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, transforms the strangeness of his everyday life into exaggerated home-movie prose. From the significance of tuna fish and Botox, the threat of coyotes and aliens, to the big-ticket items of mortality, gender, climate change, and Armageddon, Rudy tackles a range of topics with a wry, self-deprecating wit.

A story collection, set in Nigeria, united by the theme of queer male intimacy. The stakes of loving within a society in flux are explored through the eyes of lovers and their families; from childhood through adulthood; on university campuses and in hospitals, central cities, neighborhoods on the outskirts. Deeply intimate portraits of love in danger come together in a compassionate, finely wrought examination of contemporary Nigeria.

In this powerful collection of short stories, children around the world turn eleven and take a step into their futures. Each one is changed in ways both big and small. Annoyed at having to walk his sister's dog on his birthday, Connor heads into an undeveloped subdivision, where he comes across chilling evidence of a stranger's unhappiness. A girl sneaks away from her class camping trip to a local conservation area and experiences, for the first time, the terror and joy of fending for herself for the first time.

Twelve exquisitely written stories depicting the search for human connection and the attempt to fit in far from home. All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto’s Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind.