National Network for Equitable Library Service

Black Teeth is a compelling collection of linked stories that explore growing up in Winnipeg's famously multicultural North End through its 1960s Golden Age and beyond, examining the strange dual legacy of that experience. While urban ethnic mixes and immigrant populations shift over time and place, every city has its foreign part, that transition zone where strangers, freaks, and outsiders -- the Other -- reside.

Brilliant is a collection of short stories set in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, a polyglot city where cultures collide and converge, where money -- and sometimes justice -- is no object, where in less than two generations towers have replaced tents. In these stories, a cast of characters -- an Egyptian pastry chef, a Filipina nanny, a Canadian nurse, a lusty French urban planner, a newly destitute British couple, and a cross-dressing Emirati -- navigate this land of sudden plenty, discovering the limits of freedom, money, tolerance and their own good sense.

A movement in the sonata form traditionally comprises thee sections -- exposition, development and recapitulation -- which explore two themes according to set key relationships. In the 1920s dancer/choreographer Martha Graham and her musical collaborator Louis Horst developed a modern dance structure based on the sonata form and the inevitable change that comes from confrontation.

The stories in Night Watch, a new collection from Susan Zettell, delve deep into dark waters. Zettell looks unflinchingly at life's bountiful sorrows: the loss felt by abandoned children, the sudden intrusion of sickness or death, the fierce love suffered by the mother of a troubled child, the journey away from home and the shining, difficult path of return. These are stories about rising to the surface, about bravely striking out and beginning again after loss.

This debut short-story collection showcases Mary Hagey's uncanny ability to capture the essence of being human. These richly satisfying stories, told with wry humour, intelligence, and verve take us into fictional territory that is at once utterly original and as real as the world around us. These are people we know. Some of them might have fared better in life if they'd had different parents perhaps, or married someone else, or worked at pleasing themselves instead of others, or if unforeseen circumstances hadn't tripped them up and held them back.

A small-town Bill Clinton look-alike agonizes over whether to accept a tempting offer from the CIA; an obese young woman finds love in a prairie cafe; a lonely child encounters a supernatural being; a teenage girl struggles with a sexual predator as she hitchhikes on the autobahn; a newly divorced man tries to return his adopted children; two brothers and a sister take their father's ashes back to the North, trying to make it over the ice road before break-up. These are just a few of the stories from Margaret Macpherson's remarkable debut collection, Perilous Departures.

Holy Days of Obligation is a collection of short stories which weaves together the family history of a working-class Catholic family. Set in industrial Ontario, the stories are narrated by Bertie, who is the oldest of nine children. Bertie uneasily straddles two worlds: that of her parents, Frank and Elizabeth, who have too many children and not enough money, and that of her siblings, with whom Bertie shares the confidences and frustrations and adventures of growing up.

Christian McPherson's second collection of short stories serves up a boozy menu of mixed cocktails. Whether it be funny twisted tales of suburban marriages on the rocks, glue sniffing felons looking to win a radio contest, or Humpty Dumpty drinking the greatest cup of coffee in the world, these stories will have you reading and laughing to the last drop. There is also a serious side to Going Fly, in which we examine loss and what we do to carry on in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province's most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound.

Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and returned to Nova Scotia. Determined to tell the stories of the brave soldiers who served, Bird became one of the most prolific authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works. For nearly two decades following the war, Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have now gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity-until now.