These are the stories of that frozen river.And so opens one of the most breathtaking and original works being published this season. The Frozen Thames contains forty vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the river froze between 1142 and 1895. Like a photograph captures a moment, etching it forever on the consciousness, so does Humphreys’ achingly beautiful prose. She deftly draws us into these intimate moments, transporting us through time so that we believe ourselves observers of the events portrayed. Whether it’s Queen Matilda trying to escape her besieged castle in a snowstorm, or lovers meeting on the frozen river in the plague years; whether it’s a simple farmer persuading his oxen the ice is safe, or Queen Bess discovering the rare privacy afforded by the ice-covered Thames, the moments are fleeting and transformative for the characters — and for us, too.Stunningly designed and illustrated throughout with full-colour period art, The Frozen Thames is a triumph.

    He is homeless, stuck in a city where he is forgotten.On Thanksgiving, a small miracle happens. An unusual man named Scott McKenzie offers him a ride to a place in Oregon called the Oasis.The Oasis is in Middle Falls. Miracles happen in Middle Falls.The Final Christmas of Robert Burke was originally released to Shawn Inmon's newsletter subscribers. It is now being released in ebook and audiobook form for the first time. Like all Middle Falls stories, it is a standalone story and can be read at any point in the series.

    But as the festive season draws closer, Laurel begins to wonder if Christmas on Skopelos can ever live up to the cosy Yorkshire Christmases she spent with her beloved grandmother, Marnie. And with a travel writer arriving to review the Villa, Laurel needs a touch of festive sparkle - and a little help from some old friends... With critics to impress, Greek feasts to cook, and an ABBA-themed winter wedding on the horizon, can Laurel throw the perfect Christmas for everyone? And will she find her own romance underneath the mistletoe...? Escape to Greece this Christmas for this joyous sequel to My Mamma Mia Summer.

    It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" — the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate — warts and all.

    You watch three seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in two days. You get a pet turtle. You absent-mindedly paint what ends up looking like your high school’s football coach, but naked. You go backpacking in Australia for a few months. You try speaking with a New York accent in public, just to see if people like that version of you better. The comment still haunts you. An “indoor kind of girl.” You feel like you’re that person, but you’re not that person. In Frankie Barnet’s exquisite and funny debut collection of stories, characters stumble through their daily existence, frequently feeling confused, rejected, bored, disillusioned or misunderstood. Metatron is proud to present these five stunningly imaginative tales, which signal the arrival of a gifted writer. Frankie Barnet is a Montreal- based writer. Her work has appeared in publications such as Joyland, Lemonhound and Papirmasse, and she is the author of the 2012 chapbook Something Disgusting Happening. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Concordia University.“An Indoor Kind Of Girl veers from fading friendships to scheming call centres with an occasional sense of absurdity and also a kind of hyper-real real. Barnet’s narrators have a sharp eye for all that goes around them and they judge their own actions and others’ with a combination of ruthless honesty and vulnerability.”– MELISSA BULL, AUTHOR OF RUE “As I read, everything hit me at once; the quick prose and real characters, the humour of it, and this sort of sadness, loneliness.”– SOLILOQUIES ANTHOLOGY “A very powerful writer”– THE LINK

    In stylistic brilliance, he renders their conditions with grace and compassion, and redeems and transports their tragedy with wicked humor.In the much-anthologized "The Birds for Christmas," two hospitalized boys beg a night nurse to let them watch Hitchcock's classic thriller film on television, believing it will relieve their Yuletide loneliness. "Gentleman's Agreement" is a classic father-son story of fear and the violence of love. In "Memorial Day," a bayou boy learns the lessons of living from Death himself, a fortune cookie-eating phantom who claims to be "a people person." From charity ward to outrageous beach bungalow, Richard visits the overlooked corners of America, making them unforgettably visible.Richard has been rightly compared to Faulkner for his language and to Flannery O'Connor for his stark moral vision, but his force and sensibility remain his own. Charity is a powerful reading experience, a true accomplishment in an already stunning literary career.

    A mysterious lump on her throat is making it hard. Handsome Dr. Jeremy Nelson is making it harder.

    From My Mother's Garden, the parable of an old woman who refuses to accept the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, to The Young People of Moscow, which describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling antiquated Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar, these intricately woven narratives provide unforgettable slices of a Russia that is at once both exotic and disconcertingly familiar.

    

    These are stories about friendships and relationships confused by unsettling tensions bubbling beneath the surface. A woman who plans to conceive ends up in the arms of her husband's best friend; a man who baby-sits a neglected four-year-old ends up questioning his own dysfunctional relationship; a chance encounter at a gala event causes a woman to remember when she volunteered for a nightmarish drug-testing clinic; another woman discovers that her best friend who is about to get married has just had an affair; a young teenager tries to escape from her controlling father and finds an unexpected lover on a bus ride home; a wife tries to overcome her dying mother-in-law's resistance to her marriage by revealing to her own strange aural stigmata; a friend tries to talk another friend out of dating her cheating ex-boyfriend; and a superstitious candle-maker confesses to a tempestuous relationship that implodes spectacularly. Sarah Selecky is a talented young writer who evokes a generation teetering on the shoals of consumerism and ambiguous mores. Reminiscent of early Atwood, with echoes of Lisa Moore and Barbara Gowdy, these absorbing stories are about love and longing, stories that touch us in a myriad of subtle and affecting ways."

    But is it a mistake, where does the money come from, and can Kitkat get through New Year's Day without its owner asking for the money back?This is a 7,000-word short story.

    Francesca, Kelly, and Kelly's teenage sister Amanda are only meant to spend several hours at the pool together, while their professor parents finish up an afternoon of work at their lush, Oregon college. The younger girls are caught up in hair braiding and Marco Polo, but Amanda is poised on the cusp of an adult realm bursting with cruel secrets. When the girls run into a beautiful, anxious woman and her toddler, Amanda starts to act in ways that may well transform an unremarkable day into a dark turning point in all their lives. By turns enchanting and terrifying, and always bursting with vivid emotion, “Frito Lay” brings us deep into our own childhood memories, reminding us that the dark and sinister were never quite as far away as we might have believed.

    As he questions God's existence in one of the darkest corners of the world, Gabriel creates a file where he stores any evidence of the divine--no matter how unseemly.

    Each story is accompanied by a ghastly illustration from the mind of Andy Sciazko... the kind of illustrations that will disturb you in the best way possible.

    Wishing to provide entertainment at the College's Gaudy Night, the annual Christmas party, Professor Davies created a "spooky story," which he read aloud to the gathering. That story, "Revelation from a Smoky Fire," is the first in this wonderful, haunting collection. A tradition quickly became established and, for eighteen years, Davies delighted and amused the Gaudy Night guests with his tales of the supernatural. Here, gathered together in one volume, are those eighteen stories, just as Davies first read them.