National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceaușescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us.

Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes - perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until meaning settles in a hundred different ways. Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Oldrick must come to terms with his ex-girlfriend's new lover and a belligerent barista in the midst of a smelly garbage strike.

From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted ... Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there's a ghost in the old mill they're stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown. It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality -- if anything, that is.

These stories are diary shreds of young women who are in school but things happen anyway. Girls with their hears open like agar petri dishes. The setting could be Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, a Gothic castle or a bathtub. What people say matters. The girl might finally find someone she can talk to but falls asleep too soon. She will fall down taking the scenery with her. Stars are brought down into sugar containers and stirred into coffee. A couch is thrown out on the grass and you're invited to have a seat.

Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book! An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal, stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Such are the speakers and stars of a collection of stories that explode the conventions of short fiction.

Gravity Changes is a collection of fantastical, off-beat stories that view the quotidian world through the lens of the absurd. Set in a surreal fictional world that is populated by strange characters-children who defy gravity, a man who marries a light-bulb, the Devil and his miracle-worker wife-these stories take wide steps outside of reality, finding new ways to illuminate truth.

"The Woods is the cure-all to Perfect Island Getaway nostalgia. It's a story of everyday domestic survival, peopled by both loveable eccentrics and possibly murdersome cranks, foregrounding the little-known history of violence on Protection Island.

This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of 14 writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, age, and political perspectives.

New writings-on rooms, buildings, and the spaces and structures that surround us-from Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Scott, and more. From huts to houses to high-rises, childhood bedrooms to churches, the spaces we occupy and pass through shape our memories and perceptions, often without our conscious awareness.

Tales of spooks and spirits that have taught generations of readers what it means to be afraid of the dark-by authors from H.G. Wells to Willa Cather. Before movies, television, and teams of high-tech "ghost hunters" running around darkened houses, there was only one sure-fire way to scare people: ghost stories. Some of the greatest names in literature have expertly crafted haunting tales that put the reader in a whole other world in which every shadow holds a new fear-where the lines between the living and the dead are erased and the spirits are always willing.