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Autumn Bird and the Runaway
By Melanie Florence, Richard Scrimger. 2022
Two kids from different worlds form an unexpected friendship.Cody’s home life is a messy, too-often terrifying story of neglect and…
abuse. Cody himself is a smart kid, a survivor with a wicked sense of humour that helps him see past his circumstances and begin to try to get himself out.Autumn is, quite literally, on the other side of the tracks from him. Her home life is loving and secure, and she is “in” with the popular girls at school, even if she has a secret life as a glasses-wearing, self-professed comic book nerd at home. And even if the pressure to fit in at school requires hours of time spent making herself look “perfect.”Returning home from a movie one evening, Autumn comes across Cody, face down in the laneway behind her house. All Cody knows is that he can’t take another beating from his father like the one he just narrowly escaped. He can’t go home, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go either. Autumn won’t turn her back on him, even if they never really were friends at school. She agrees to let him hide out in her dad’s art studio at night.Over the next couple of days of Autumn sneaking Cody food and bandages, his story comes out. And so does hers.Told in alternating narratives, Autumn Bird and the Runaway is a breathtaking collaboration by two of Canada’s finest writers of books for young readers. Infused with themes of identity, belonging and compassion, it’s a story that reminds us that we are all more than our circumstances, and we are all more connected than we think.A Bucket of Stars
By Suri Rosen. 2023
A story of two kids trying to save the world they know and heal the families they have.It’s the summer…
of 2003 and thirteen-year-old astronomer Noah Cooper has just moved to Queensport, a small town with a vast amateur sky full of stars. There he meets Tara Dhillon, a lonely girl and aspiring filmmaker. When the two team up to produce an astronomy movie and enter a film contest, they discover a secret plan to turn their rural hamlet into a huge subdivision.Noah and Tara must use their unique skills to identify the culprits who plan on paving over the historic county — and try to save the infinite beauty of the stars. As if that’s not enough to have at stake, Noah needs to win the prize money to buy a new telescope for his unemployed father — an ex-astronomer who’s almost given up on the stars, as well as life on earth.Touching on themes of activism, environmental anxiety and mental health, A Bucket of Stars will have readers cheering for Noah, a boy whose head is in the stars, and Tara, a girl who lives in a world of digital images — and their special bond that just might mend the world around them.Sarah and After: Five Women Who Founded a Nation
By Lynne Reid Banks. 1975
The Reading Group: A festive FREE short story (1)
By Della Parker. 2016
'Brims with laughs, love, family and friendship. You will love this heartwarming read!' Trisha Ashley. Meet the Reading Group: six…
women in the seaside village of Little Sanderton come together every month to share their love of reading. No topic is off-limits: books, family, love and loss . . . and don't forget the glass of red!Grace knows that the holiday season is going to be different this year. No turkey, no tinsel, no gorgeously wrapped gifts under the tree . . . how on earth is she going to break it to her little boys that Christmas is effectively cancelled? And can she bear to tell anyone her embarrassing secret? Enter the Reading Group: Grace's life might have turned upside down but there's no problem they can't solve.Glass Grapes: and Other Stories
By Martha Ronk. 2008
Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha…
Ronk. Ronk's work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk's fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.A Day with a Perfect Stranger
By David Gregory. 2006
What if a fascinating stranger knew you better than you know yourself? When her husband comes home with a farfetched…
story about eating dinner with someone he believes to be Jesus, Mattie Cominsky thinks this may signal the end of her shaky marriage. Convinced that Nick is, at best, turning into a religious nut, the self-described agnostic hopes that a quick business trip will give her time to think things through. On board the plane, Mattie strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger. When she discovers their shared scorn for religion, she confides her frustration over her husband’s recent conversion. The stranger suggests that perhaps her husband isn’t seeking religion but true spiritual connection, an idea that prompts her to reflect on her own search for fulfillment. As their conversation turns to issues of spiritual longing and deeper questions about the nature of God, Mattie finds herself increasingly drawn to this insightful stranger. But when the discussion unexpectedly turns personal, touching on things she’s never told anyone, Mattie is startled and disturbed. Who is this man who seems to peer straight into her soul? From the Hardcover edition.Cradle Book
By Craig Morgan Teicher. 2010
Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin.…
With a poet's mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor of Publishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.The Dark
By Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary. 2000
Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, The Dark employs…
Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. The Dark is the most captivating example of Chejfec's unique narrative approach.Divine Stories
By Andy Rotman. 2008
Divine Stories is the inaugural volume in a landmark translation series devoted to making the wealth of classical Indian Buddhism…
accessible to modern readers. The stories here, among the first texts to be inscribed by Buddhists, highlight the moral economy of karma, illustrating how gestures of faith, especially offerings, can bring the reward of future happiness and ultimate liberation. Originally contained in the Divyavadana, an enormous compendium of Sanskrit Buddhist narratives from the early Common Era, the stories in this collection express the moral and ethical impulses of Indian Buddhist thought and are a testament to the historical and social power of narrative. Long believed by followers to be the actual words of the Buddha himself, these divine stories are without a doubt some of the most influential stories in the history of Buddhism.The Obese Christ
By Sheila Fischman, Larry Tremblay. 2014
The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering…
event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her - and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.Nuri Does Not Exist
By Sadru Jetha. 2011
Amid a sea of dystopian world literatures haunted by the fractious claims of identity politics, Nuri Does Not Exist is…
an astonishingly charming collection of linked short stories that engages us with the utterly believable innocence of its Utopian vision. Accompany Nuri from Zanzibar to Canada as he learns how servitude transcends slavery; fealty transcends servitude; and community transcends fealty.Darwin Alone in the Universe
By M.A.C. Farrant. 2003
Mother to Mother
By Sindiwe Magona. 1998
Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who…
remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation's first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor's son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl's mother. The murderer's mother, Mandisi, writes about her life, the life of her child, and the colonized society that not only allowed, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence.Cena con un perfecto desconocido
By David Gregory. 2005
Un misterioso sobre llega al escritorio de Nick Cominsky entre una pila de solicitudes para tarjetas de crédito y envíos…
por correo relacionados al trabajo. Aunque su semana de trabajo de setenta horas ya ha consumido parte perder la oportunidad de ver qué tipo de trampa le han preparado sus colegas.Nick, que por lo general es seguro de sí mismo y cínico, pronto se halla en una situación inquietante, arrastrado hacia una fascinante conversación con un hombre desconcertante que discute la existencia del cielo y el infierno. Y este hombre, que dice ser Jesús de Nazaret, también parece tener una asombrosa cantidad de información sobre la vida privada de Nick.A medida que avanza la noche, la conversación giraalrededor de la vida, Dios, el dolor, la fe y la duda... y parece que tener una Cena con un perfecto desconocido pudiera cambiar para siempre la vida de Nick.From the Hardcover edition.The Scholar of Moab
By Steven L. Peck. 2011
What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout, and a poet abducted by aliens come together in 1970's…
Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the hoary La Sal Mountains.Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum's illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of the murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical?Take a blazing ride with Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, the Lord's Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab. His short rich life spans the borderlands of magical realism where geology, ecology philosophy, and consciousness collide, in Steven L. Peck's rip-snorting tale The Scholar of Moab.Steven L. Peck knows Moab, inside out. An evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, Peck teaches the philosophy of biology. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, Biology & Philosophy. Steven also co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship. His creative works include a novel, The Gift of the King's Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications). His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, Red Rock Review and other magazines. Peck was nominated for the 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award. Other awards include the Meyhew Short Story Contest, First Place at Warp and Weave, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest, and Second Place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest.The Scholar of Moab was award the best novel of 2011 by the Association of Mormon Letters, and was selected as a finalist for the Montaigne Medal (a national award for the most thought-provoking books being considered for the Eric Hoffer Award).Cuentos de Navidad
By Charles Dickens. 2012
En 2012 se cumplen doscientos años del nacimiento de Charles Dickens, el escritor por antonomasia de la Inglaterra victoriana, y…
uno de los autores más grandes de todos los tiempos. Entre sus obras más populares se cita siempre su extraordinaria novela corta Cuento de Navidad, donde retrata a un avaro ricachón, Ebenezer Scrooge, que recibe la visita moralizante de los espíritus de las navidades pasadas, las presentes y las futuras. Pero Dickens es autor de otros muchos relatos relacionados con la época navideña, que se reúnen, por primera vez en castellano, en este volumen. La Navidad es uno de los personajes dickensianos por excelencia, la época del año en la que sus asuntos favoritos, la pobreza, la caridad, la compasión, la ternura, la solidaridad o la esperanza, se dirimen y cobran mayor relevancia.Wigrum
By Daniel Canty, Oana Avasilichioaei. 2011
End of October 1944. Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his London flat. Very little is known about him, except his intense…
curiosity about the world and perhaps his disillusionment in love. The legacy of this man, who lived to collect has left in his wake an inventory of some hundred objects, which shed light on the history of our time.Hometown Tales
By Philip Gulley. 2001
Stories from a Place That Feels Like Home Master storyteller Philip Gulley envelops readers in an almost…
forgotten world of plainspoken and honest small-town values evoking a simpler time when people knew each other by name folks looked out for their neighbors and people were willing to do what was right--no matter the cost When Philip Gulley began writing newsletter essays for the twelve members of his Quaker meeting in Indiana he had no idea one of them would find its way to radio commentator Paul Harvey Jr and be read on the air to 24 million people Fourteen books later with more than a million books in print Gulley still entertains as well as inspires from his small-town front porchAll Saints
By Kathleen Daisy Miller. 2014
In a linked collection that presents the secreted small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves…
into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by borderline-abusive sex; Owen, "The Shitblood Man," who, lost in the woods, loses himself in a fit of rage; a receptionist and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.Praise for All Saints"Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group-parishioners, priest, passersby-but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections. All Saints is a moving and soulful book."-Caroline AddersonThe Strange Truth About Us
By M.A.C. Farrant. 2011
This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as "a brave iconoclast" and whose work the Globe…
& Mail has said "bristles with moral fury ... at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour," offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.A three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world."Annotations About an Absence" is a series of 115 numbered annotations to the day-long ruminations of a retired couple living in a gated community attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future: "We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life. Which is? We are afraid.""Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence" is written as a series of notes to these annotations, providing (in the utterly blank spirit of transparency) a running satiric narrative on the project. Each of these "notes" is written as if it were a description of a late-night TV movie or the content of a wet Jehovah's Witness pamphlet left on a woman's doorstep that has taken hold of her mind."Other Prose Surrounding Absence" comprises twenty-seven prose pieces that take aim at a globalized world bludgeoned by the threat of "end times"-climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics-that seem designed insofar as we are able to retain our status as "individuals."Unique in style and approach, engaging, enigmatic, controversial, and delightful, this book is an attempt to prick the bubble of our complacency in the face of the "awful atrocity" we've made for ourselves.