Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet—sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, l...

Shortlisted for the 2010 Danuta Gleed Award for Short Fiction!Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. Along the way, these characters don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a melancholic man has a one-night stand with a whale ...

In his second collection of stories, author and filmmaker R.W. Gray (Crisp) once again finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet—sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality. A lovestruck man discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a massage artist finds that she can alleviate her clients’ pain in more ways than one; a beautiful man invites ...

While The Sun Is Above Us takes readers deep into the extraordinary world of Sudan through the intertwined narratives of two women. In the midst of a bloody civil war, Adut is brutally captured and held as a slave for eight years. Sandra, fleeing her life in Canada, travels to South Sudan as an aid worker but soon finds herself unwittingly embroiled in a violent local conflict. When chance brings Adut and Sandra together in a brief but profound moment, their lives change forever. In captiv...

An oil spill on the West Coast coincides with a loved one's death. An enigmatic young musician experiences the rise and fall of his career, as told through videos posted to YouTube. Sometimes romantic, sometimes elegiac, Alex Leslie's coastal stories take place in ocean inlets and city streets. Haunted as much by technology as by their own ghosts, Leslie's characters face the disappearance of sanity, love, and landscape. An electric, poetic debut.

"Toil and Peaceful Life" is the axiom that lies at the heart of Doukobor spiritual, personal, and community values. These values have always been, and continue to be, integral to the people who belong to this historically rich and vibrant community. During particular periods of their history, certain groups of Doukobors seemed to have carved a path that allowed them to embody and live these ideals in their daily lives and interactions. However, as the history of the Doukobor people demonst...

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape th...

“Three weeks it’s been raining, but no puddles…”Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where water will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself obsessively writing and rewriting her own story in order to gain some sense of control over her life.Reading like John Barth by way of Lena Dunham, Shallow Enough to Walk...

Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR.Psychic Anna Gareau and public relations expert Collie Kostyna keep things quiet for local magicians and for their biggest client, an underground supernatural society known as the Embassy.In Grayling Cross, an investigator arrives in town on the trail of a missing teenage psychic, and hires Anna and Collie to be his liaisons to the local magic community. Troublingly, though, he turns out to have a kn...

Emma Phillips is a 35-year-old divorcée with an undemanding job, a rustic old house, and a friend who provides all the benefits she needs. She’s comfortable, complacent, and accustomed to getting her own way—until she is shipwrecked during a violent storm in the Queen Charlotte Strait off Vancouver Island and is forced to assume temporary guardianship of three traumatized, newly orphaned children.From the author of The Goat Lady’s Daughter comes a moving new story, set aga...

In these powerful stories, the “verandah people” are Jonathan Bennett’s own compatriots: Australians for whom the ever-present verandah is both stage and shelter, a retreat from hostile bushland or city street and a seductive barrier to participation in the wider world.

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother—although she does understand how to take care of her peculiar kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left ...