to help his sister, Elaine Levine, care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more drama than he would like in their suburban neighbourhood. Meanwhile, a nanny miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn’t fit in at school. A woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. And down the street, a mother and her two daughters prepare for a wedding and transitions they didn’t see coming.Spanning fifteen years in the lives of a multi-generational family and their neighbours, this remarkable collection is an intimate portrait of a suburban Jewish community by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent.

    Now readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields’s short story collections – Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival – in one volume, along with the previously unpublished story, “Segue,” her last.With an eye for the smallest of telling details – a woman applying her lipstick so “the shape of pale raspberry fits perfectly the face she knows by heart” – and a willingness to explore the most fundamental relationships and the wildest of coincidences, Shields illuminates the absurdities and miracles that grace all our lives. From a couple who experiences a world without weather, to the gentle humor of an elderly widow mowing her lawn while looking back on a life of passion, to a young woman abandoned by love and clinging to a “slender handrail of hope,” Shields’s enormous sympathy for her characters permeates her fiction.Playful, charming, acutely observed and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will delight and enchant Carol Shields fans everywhere.Excerpt from The Collected Stories of Carol ShieldsLet me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer — just look into the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”From the Hardcover edition.

    Now it’s her turn and nothing is falling into place. Her daughter is marrying and moving away. Her husband is self-absorbed and callous. Her friends are preoccupied with their lives. This is not what she’s bargained for. Can daydreaming about her sexy Italian co-worker help her escape the disappointment? Walter Baptiste’s job is in jeopardy and he’s bored at home. He’s found an acceptable outlet and she’s half his age and twice as fun. Playing house is the distraction he needs until the reality turns out to be more than he’s bargained for. While Walter’s house of lies crumbles, can Tracy find the courage to follow her instincts and put her life back together?

    But forests are always deeper than anyone can know. Secrets are hidden in the eternal twilight of the trees. Those secrets emerge into light when Brian disappears in the forest, as his father did three decades before. His father, however, came home with no memory of the events in the depths of the forest. What has drawn Brian away? Will he emerge, shuddering and broken, as his father did, or will the forests close around him, as they have done so often before?

    Its ceilings need plastering and some of the toilets leak appallingly, but its residents are far from desperate, though sometimes contentious and unforgiving. In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new.

    These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

    A party girl’s addiction gives birth to a monster within. Man’s best friend must fend off a woman’s greatest nightmare…Scare Street is proud to present eleven chilling tales of the supernatural, in one monstrous volume. Horror authors Ron Ripley, David Longhorn, Sara Clancy, and many more unite to bring you a terrifying collection of short stories, each one guaranteed to haunt your dreams. And each one more chilling than the last.Once you start reading you won’t be able to stop. Because when these authors sink their teeth into you, it’s already too late.The only way to escape from these nightmares… is to wake up screaming.

    There's not a bad story in the lot." --Bud Webster

    Duperre, author of The Fall: The Rift Book I. Also contributing to this collection are the talented Mercedes M. Yardley, David Dalglish, David McAfee, and Daniel Pyle.

    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

    The first volume of this extraordinary new annual anthology series of fantastic literature explodes on the scene with works that sidestep expectations in beautiful and unsettling ways, that surprise with their settings and startle with the manner in which they cross genre boundaries, that aren't afraid to experiment with storytelling techniques, and yet seamlessly blend form with meaningful function. The delectable offerings found within these pages come from some of today's most distinguished contemporary fantasists and brilliant rising newcomers.Whether it's a touch of literary erudition, playful whimsy, extravagant style, or mind-blowing philosophical speculation and insight, the reader will be led into unfamiliar territory, there to find shock and delight.Introducing CLOCKWORK PHOENIX.

    Winston K. Marks (1915-1979) is one such unjustly forgotten author.Included here are 12 science fiction stories, published between 1953 and 1959, representing some of his best work:THE WATER EATER (1953)UNBEGOTTEN CHILD (1953)…SO THEY BAKED A CAKE (1954)BACKLASH (1954)TABBY (1954)BREEDER REACTION (1954)FORSYTE'S RETREAT (1954)MATE IN TWO MOVES (1954)THE TEST COLONY (1954)BROWN JOHN’S BODY (1955)THE MIND DIGGER (1958)THE DEADLY DAUGHTERS (1958)If you enjoy this book, search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see the more than 100 other entries in the series, covering science fiction, modern authors, mysteries, westerns, classics, adventure stories, and much, much more!

    Twelve episodes in the everyday life of the community of Mariposa

     In the near future, humanity builds a colony on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. They tunnel into the ice to explore the dark oceans beneath the moon's surface, searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. What they find will change them forever, setting humanity on a path to the stars. But the old conflicts and hatreds of Earth are not so easily escaped. Will human colonists on distant planets and moons create a paradise or a horrifying dystopia?

    The wizened, bird-like Inspector Cockrill of the Kent police starred in Green for Danger, one of the greatest detective novels to emerge from World War II, but The Spotted Cat is the first collection of all of the short stories about him. Five of the stories have never previously appeared in a Brand volume, and one of them is published here for the first time. The book also includes a genuine find -- a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill.