National Network for Equitable Library Service

It is 1984. The latest recession is said to be over, and in the steel city of Hamilton, things are picking up. For Paul, however, an ex-rock guitarist and current art gallery attendant, life has slowed to the pace of a still life on a wall. He badly needs a jolt -- and he gets one. Soon after the arrival of an exhibition of Surrealist art, puzzles start to multiply around him.

First published in 1969, Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada remains as refreshing, innovative and important today as it has in every previous incarnation. Sophisticated, playful, crafted, sly, self-referential and extremely funny, it marks the beginning of a long and important, if unfortunately under appreciated, career by one of Canada's best humourists and innovative story-tellers.

What has to die before you force yourself to change? That's the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver's East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen's debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Yet in this joint-smoking urban underground, we also glimpse the families, communities, friends and strangers from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air.

Rose LeClair has everything she ever wanted: a successful career as a box office starlet, a handsome, successful Hollywood husband, more fans and money than she could have hoped for, her face on the cover of every check-out magazine. And she is about to take her own life. At the last moment, however, she recoils from the act, and tries to imagine a future of even greater possibility.

When Brenda Bray, better known to the world as Rae Brand, author of the popular Elsinor Grey mystery series, returns home to Hamilton, she is set upon by vivid memories of the fall of 1962 when she struck up an intense relationship with a classmate, and together they sought to track and catch an escaped serial killer believed to be hiding out on the escarpment. Brenda and Jori search for this elusive murderer, their friendship twisting as the weeks pass, becoming tautly fantastic and pre-adolescently sexual, eventually resulting in real tragedy.

In this sparkling collection of stories drawn from the surreal edge of life, playful irony vies with more poignant evocations of solitude, mortality, and the dawn of sexual awareness - all bodied forth in a language that is precise, elegant, and immediate.

What are boys and men thinking? That's what the wry, observant, heartbroken and hilarious girls and women in these stories want to know. What are they thinking when they warn women against adventure, gulp ale in moonlit truck wrecks, steal their fingers down their nurses' thighs, tell their little girls fairy tales? What are insane boys the most exquisite, and where have the musical geniuses flown without our love? What is Jerome Hepditch doing in a loincloth, and how will his wives acquire escape vehicles?

In the Cote-de-Negre area of Montreal, the first stop for many new immigrants, live people of more than 100 nationalities, Marcelo, the sensitive son of Chilean refugees, and Cleo, a shy boy from Haiti, find friendship on the track, winning a major relay race together. Years later, in the same streets, two violent gangs, the Latino Power and the Bad Boys, confront each other, and their leaders must decide whether they will be united by their childhood friendship, or divided by race...

At Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher, people are struggling to do more than their jobs. They struggle to fall in love. They struggle to stay that way. They struggle to be good parents, and to be good children. They struggle to have friends, to eat lunch, to be happy, and to answer the phone. And all that struggle can be pretty interesting especially when it happens on company time. In The Big Dream, acclaimed short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum documents a new generation discovering itself in the workplace, and gives us an In Our Time for the present age.

Now in its 47th year, 'Best Canadian Stories' has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many of the writers, throughout their respective careers, who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon.