National Network for Equitable Library Service

"In any skin purple is a heavy tone that penetrates to the core." Paulo da Costa's stories get under your skin, bruise your consciousness with their exploration of the forces that hold us together, not always benignly, and those that pull us apart. A hunter and cougar ponder the positions of predator and prey under the dense canopy of a West Coast forest. A nine-year-old girl tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her.

Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic that will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Barbara Gowdy, and Jonathan Lethem, and readers of both speculative fiction and literary fiction alike. Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, academics researching erotica, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them.

In Prerequisites for Sleep, her first published short story collection, Jennifer L. Stone has created a fictional world rich with dilemmas.

When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the politics so dear to Eleanor, but a life-threatening plot.

Grief cannot abide a mystery. No one understands that better than the Clareys of Halifax, a close and loving family whose lives are transformed one night in 1937 when Edie, their wilful daughter and sister, vanishes, leaving no trace, no clue, as to what happened to her. The lingering question of her disappearance will ricochet through succeeding generations of Clareys.

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.

Everyone at the Pleasant Inn is looking forward to a very merry Christmas. Oh, irascible proprietor Trevor Rudley has his usual complaints about Mrs. Blount's non-traditional floral arrangements. And he's sure he won't like housekeeper Tiffany's new beau, Dan Thornton, a writer, of all things. But it's Christmas. Surely nothing catastrophic could happen. Bad things do happen, of course. When the snow starts falling, it seems it will never stop. Margaret Rudley runs over a man lying in the road during a whiteout. Walter Sawchuck almost chokes when someone doctors his Mrs. Dash.

In the spring of 1964, troubled teenager Cookie Blue is found dead in the Red River. Blue Vengeance follows her younger brother Danny and Cookie's friend Janine through a lazy Winnipeg summer, as they plot to kill the despised teacher they blame for Cookie's death.

NYPD Detective Nicola Cortese, veteran of three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, is demoted and transferred to a desk job in Operations after his PTSD spirals out of control following a drug bust gone bad. When he returns to active duty, his first case, a B&E homicide, leads him to uncover an international conspiracy that is using a genetically engineered seed to take control of the world's wheat.

Tommy Wolfstein escaped from Hungary with his parents when he was eight years old, and while his parents will never forget the persecution they endured as Jews, Tommy's memories of that time are scant. He has become thoroughly Canadianized. However, when his university soccer team is invited to Hungary to play Tommy will learn about his family's difficult past and the ongoing dangers they --and he -- face.