The Invention of the World (The New Canadian Library)


Jack Hodgins - 1978
    In the course of his search, he founded the Revelations Colony of Truth.Now, Maggie Kyle runs an extraordinary boarding house on the original site of the Colony, and she and her irrepressible boarders search out Keneally’s story as a key to their own roots and even the possibility of love.Originally published in 1977, The Invention of the World is Jack Hodgins’ first novel.

A Handful of Men: The Complete Series


Dave Duncan - 2017
    In these four epic novels of sword and sorcery, discord rages throughout the land of Pandemia and the rightful rulers fight an unjust imperor.  The Cutting Edge: For fifteen years, Queen Inos and King Rap have ruled Krasnegar peacefully, but now darkness encroaches. When a royal family grows tyrannical and armies wage war along the Impire’s borderlands, Rap ignores them—until he learns the Protocol, a treaty controlling the use of magic, is in danger of being destroyed.  Upland Outlaws: The mad dwarf, Xinixo, rules as the imperor, enchanting his subjects and enemies to believe he is Shandie, the rightful ruler. Wielding the combined power of all the sorcerers under his control, he destroys or enslaves any who oppose him. But his greatest enemies, King Rap and the true Shandie, will stop at nothing to end his reign.  The Stricken Field: The sorcerer Xinixo still rules the Impire, but King Rap and Shandie continue to resist his reign, enlisting the help of the remaining free sorcerers of the world to destroy him. Their chances of victory remain slim . . . until a young pixie girl decides to join their cause.  The Living God: The imposter Xinixo continues to rule as war wages in the Impire. The troll sorcerers have joined the resistance and Rap is rallying the elves to his cause. His wife, Queen Inos, and Shandie negotiate with gnomes while the sorcerers of Thume and the pixie girl secretly organize a resistance to Xinixo’s rule. But the odds are against them as the prophesied Longday draws nearer.

The Tale of Tallest Rabbit


Rodrigo D. López - 2016
    Her eagerness to help a mysterious bunny gets her transported to a strange world full of goblin inventors, dog armies, cosmic giants, and even stranger things! Armed with the ancestral weapon of rabbitkind (an old shovel) she must help her animal friends, and get home in time for supper. Along the way she will experience the bravery of folk heroes, the power of ancient gods and the danger of lurking monsters; all while making sure her animal friends are safe. A word book for young readers, The Tale of Tallest Rabbit is a family friendly collection of stories tied together by an overarching narrative of bravery and friendship.

The Fall of Edward Barnard


W. Somerset Maugham
    

21 Essential American Short Stories


Leslie M. Pockell - 2011
    Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” have been long regarded as literary classics, while others, such as Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” and Ellis Parker Butler’s “Pigs Is Pigs,” are lesser known but well worth discovering.The carefully selected stories, each preceded by an illuminating headnote, powerfully illustrate the varied richness of our national literature and history. This beautifully packaged volume, containing the unforgettable classic short stories that evoke our shared American tradition and national identity, makes the perfect gift for the short story aficionado and novice alike.

The Awakening and Selected Stories


Kate Chopin - 1899
    11 stories: The AwakeningBeyond the BayouMa'ame PelagieDesiree's BabyA Respectable WomanThe KissA Pair of Silk StockingsThe LocketA ReflectionAt the 'Cadian BallThe Storm

Cannibals in Love


Mike Roberts - 2016
    The World Trade Center towers have just fallen, the Beltway Sniper terrorizes the nation's capital, and a polarizing president pushes forward a dubious war. Told in eighteen vignettes, Mike's misadventures begin in Washington, D.C., and span Brooklyn, Portland, and Austin as he takes up arms with the overeducated, underemployed millennials who surround him. Nursing writerly ambitions, he works a series of humiliating jobs--counting lampposts, writing spam e-mails, babysitting a teenage boy--while composing a thousand-page novel about cows as an allegory for the invasion of Iraq. And at the center of the book resides a tumultuous, passionate love story that could arise only between two people with nothing to lose.Like a carefully assembled mixtape, Cannibals in Love weaves tender moments and summer idylls with violent late nights and the frustrations of a generation. From delirious off-track betting to a fateful walk across Kansas, Mike Roberts takes us into the guts of masculinity and identity in the age of the Internet, and joins an emerging group of young writers who are redefining the contemporary novel.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry


Fredrik Backman - 2013
    Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus-crazy. She is also Elsa's best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.When Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa's greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother's letters lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and totally ordinary old crones, but also to the truth about fairytales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.

White Fire


Brian Keene - 2018
    Previously out of print and never before available as a stand-alone, this new edition of WHITE FIRE has been revised and expanded, and is considered the Author’s Preferred Version.

Other Voices, Other Rooms


Truman Capote - 1948
    In this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval he seeks.Fueled by a world-weariness that belied Capote’s tender age, this novel tempers its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence with an appreciation for small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.This new edition, featuring an enlightening Introduction by John Berendt, offers readers a fresh look at Capote’s emerging brilliance as a writer of protean power and effortless grace.From the Hardcover edition.

The Bonesetter's Daughter


Amy Tan - 2001
    Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . .In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness.

The Street of Crocodiles


Bruno Schulz - 1933
    Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.

Heart of a Dog


Mikhail Bulgakov - 1925
    This satirical novel tells the story of the surgical transformation of a dog into a man, and is an obvious criticism of Soviet society, especially the new rich that arose after the Bolshevik revolution.

The Cat and The City


Nick Bradley - 2020
    And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways.But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers – from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo’s denizens, drawing them ever closer.

Benaiah


Cliff Graham - 2012
    They were the men who came to your father in his hour of need. They were the men who fought with him. They were men, and that is the highest that can be written of them..."Before he came to David at the caves of Adullam, Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a mercenary in Egypt. In the exotic kingdom of the Nile, where Pharaoh is the reflection of the sun and moon, Benaiah will be tested. Peril and heartache are all around him, and to make things worse, he does not yet know the "covering."A companion piece to the Lion of War series about the wars of King David, "Benaiah" is the first short story in The Hall of the Mighty Men. Narrated by Jehoshaphat, the historian of King Solomon, this collection of origin tales expands the Lion of War literary universe, and contains epic battles and feats of bravery unable to be included in the novels and upcoming movies. Thrilling and passionate, The Hall of the Mighty Men is another chapter in the epic Lion of War series that fans will enjoy for years to come.