Essential Prose Series

There are unseen forces in our lives that shape who we are and what we become. How we respond to those forces determines our futures. These stories examine how characters respond to the unexpected. Do we carry our memories of the beautiful moments of life with us into death? And, ultimately, what do we value in life that defines us--from a hat to the shadow of a figure in a window reminding us of what we have lost or need to hold onto?

A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.

Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a quixotic search for the mythical fountain of youth. The protagonists sparkle into fullness as each is depicted in his struggle to remain vital while age slowly steals his significance away.

Meet the Garneau boys, triplets from small-town Ontario. Daniel the "eldest" is gay, and moves to Toronto with his best friend Karen to attend university. Eventually, he meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance artist whose grandfather was a book-burning Nazi. A Boy at the Edge of the World is a rollicking dramedy that explores the compulsive and (ultimately) universal human pursuit of intimacy, sex, and love.

Max has been a freelance reporter dodging bullets in Latin America, a small-time newspaper editor who delights in infuriating his publisher and, finally, a flack for a communications company -- the elephant's graveyard for journalists. But none of this compares with the terrors of assisted living, so instead Max risks everything on something he's kept secret until recently: his increasingly unreliable ability to travel in time. He set out to search the past for his late wife and settle down with her again. In turn satirical and poignant, replete with dark humour, sarcasm, wise-cracking characters and laugh-out-loud funny bits, this is a debut novel that is going to ring some bells and stir some pots.

A heartbreaking arrival in a new country. Thrust too early into adulthood. Will he survive Canada's turbulent streets? Toronto, 1882. Joseph Conlon has never felt more alone. Parentless after his mother dies on the voyage from Ireland, the frightened eight-year-old witnesses his sister's abduction and is abandoned at the train station. But once he's placed in a Catholic orphanage, Joseph discovers a gift for drawing and friends that begin to fill the hole in his heart. Falling for a mercurial girl acrobat, his desire to win her affection drives him to find her after she runs off for a life on the stage. And as he leaves the institution and grows to manhood, the young immigrant endures dangerous work, anti-Irish bigotry, and lying about his faith to survive... only to have his longing for family lead to tragedy. Will Joseph ever reach the place where he belongs? In this poignant and lyrical story, author Robin Blackburn McBride follows one boy's emotional and colorful journey. Deftly depicting a compelling era while exploring the intensely personal challenges of the human experience, McBride's inspirational tale of hope and courage will touch you deeply. The Shining Fragments is a meticulously researched and rendered historical family saga. If you like complex characters, richly authentic settings, and stories of resilience, then you'll love Robin Blackburn McBride's immersive novel. Buy The Shining Fragments to witness the strength of the human spirit today! "Tales about orphans left to find their way in the New World are many, but few are as engaging as this story." -Historical Novel Society North America, Editors' Choice

Mouth of Truth is the unique story of a woman trapped in the vault of family secrets, part of her still a hidden child, some 40 years after the Second World War. Following a crisis, she leaves her home and children in search of the truth about her beloved father, a Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story reveals how unhealed childhood trauma of a parent can be transmitted from one generation to the next, destroying families and other relationships in its wake.

At the age of twenty, Sheyda Porrouya's life is almost over. She was born in Iran on the day staunchly orthodox mullas declared the birth of the Islamic Republic and set about summarily purging the country of all things Western and un-Islamic. To make matters worse, as she matured, Sheyda seemed increasingly unable to distinguish between fairy tale and reality. She began to exhibit disturbing behavior. When Sheyda is accused of killing her mother, she is immediately jailed and sentenced to death by hanging. The narrative jumps back and forth from Sheyda's childhood to her current life in one of Iran's most notorious prisons, where she awaits either release or execution.

Taking place during World War II, Somewhere in the Stars is the story of three young men from San Francisco -- Nick Spataro, his cousin Paolo, and friend Nathan Fein -- and their adventures as members of an American tank battalion chasing the Germans up the Italian peninsula, while Nick's Sicilian dad is interned as an "enemy alien" back in the USA. Despite encountering prejudice both at home and during their tank training, the three show uncanny skill in outmaneuvering and destroying German tanks, until their own tank is blown up. Tragic events both on and off the battlefield, bravery, guilt in the loss of friends, romance, trauma, feelings of regret, daring rescues and eventual re-union with loved ones make for a powerful and explosive mix.

Two brothers come to school and do nothing but tell stories. A man goes to a singles dance. A retired man in India tries to collect his pension. A woman tells the story of her husband's death in partition India. An unnamed narrator offers his "notes" on modern-day America, the culture of success. Some of the stories are set in India, some in America. Some stories are fable-like, others more realistic. Some deal with sex, some are "intellectual" stories. But all stories deal, in one way or another, with small, "mediocre" people, people trying to fit into a world of bigness, applause, success.

The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants — spirited people who are prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands to pursue their dreams of a better life. But often times there's a reality check , and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges of cultural shock, paucity of jobs, lack of Canadian work experience, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Though the accounts are fictional they show the determination of new immigrants to survive on alien soil.

It is 1955, and the three Fayette sisters have lived their whole lives in the enchanting French Quarter of New Orleans. Though neglected by their parents, they share a close bond with one another?from afternoons in their small, shared bedroom, to trying to speak with ghosts beneath the sweeping trees in their garden. When the middle sister Constance disappears, the family believes she has run away, as she has done before; it is only the youngest?fourteen-year-old Bonavere (known as Bonnie)?who suspects there is more to it. Met only with grief from her family and resistance from the police, Bonnie embarks on a journey to bring her sister home, venturing through fabled Red Honey Swamp, and the city's vibrant and brutal history. Unravelling the layers of her sister's secret life, Bonnie discovers a pattern of girls found half-mad in the Louisiana swampland, and a connection to the wealthy, notorious Lasalle family. To rescue her sister, she must confront the realities of true violence, and the very nature of ins

When Harper Martin drifts into a sleepy Cape Cod resort with a mysterious investment plan, he unleashes a firestorm involving the F.B.I., the State Department, the government of Nicaragua, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Laura Marello's hilarious new novel features a surreal cast of characters, among them the Souza Family (Provincetown's version of the Kennedys. They were handsome, glamorous, Catholic and doomed"), Voodoo Woman, and a parrot named Sydney Greenstreet. We come to know them all - fishermen, artists, drug dealers, owners of bars both gay and straight - through the lens of a winsome young amnesiac whose own past is shrouded in mystery. Marello's passion for art and film, seen in her earlier work, helps propel the action forward to its riotous conclusion; her love for the glorious foibles of our human nature, rendered with compassion as well as humor, keeps us caring about what happens." Constance Solari, author of Sophie's Fire

Marianne Ackerman's second collection of stories for Guernica, Mankind, puts the focus on women, their ascent to selfhood, the beauty and carnage en route. Picking up from the Gothic shadows of Albert Fine in Holy Fools (2014), she follows the lives of an Ontario farm family marked by a bloody incident they struggle to understand. Literary Montreal is the setting of two stories spun around an alpha poseur, George. Four interlocking stories unpeel the secrets of one man's sister, ex-wife, friend and mother. Sardonic and often funny, these tales follow the byways of aspiration and self-deception, casting a warm light on all.

Fleeing Stalin's advance into Lithuania, shaken by communism and war, four refugees end up in Toronto in 1949. Vytas, a young doctor who gets into medical school by saving a child's life, is haunted by a lost love. Maryte, a seamstress whose affair with a German officer saved her half-witted brother, struggles to take care of him. Justine, a concert pianist raped during the war, strives to regain her ability to make music. Father Geras, an illegitimate child steered into the priesthood by family, finds purpose in guiding his exiled people. Trying to resume normal lives, longing for their country's freedom, they wait to go home.

A flash fiction novel, The Sea-Wave details the aftermath of the kidnapping by an elderly and emotionally damaged man of a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound, unusually bright, depressive 12-year-old girl incapable of speech. The content of the novel consists of the girl's entries in her diary-like memorandum book, entries which relate her own, surprising thoughts on her kidnapping, family, and disabilities, in addition to her verbatim transcriptions of the old man's monologues, which appear to reveal, in fragments, the details of a very specific and unusual period in his life. As the pair can't verbally communicate, the book is free of dialogue in the conventional sense. The emphasis, instead, is on character, and emotional effect.

From Black Hand criminals to stand-up cops, from innocent victims and ordinary people to schemers and dreamers: a novel that chronicles one hundred years in the lives and relationships of those who have lived in New York City's Little Italy. A multi-generational, multi-dimensional tale that digs deep into the minds and hearts of this vibrant neighborhood.

A hijacking in deeper Johannesburg goes horribly wrong. Zoe du Plessis, a paleontologist of Afrikaner origin, is suddenly confronted with her family's secret, seemingly wrapped in an old Xhosa's spell. As she heads for the Kalahari Desert in search of early human fossils, Zoe embarks on an inner journey into the unredeemable sense of guilt haunting her white tribe. She reluctantly seeks salvation in the love of a man scarred by South Africa's darker past.

We all know adults who are stranded in the amber of adolescence. Growing older but not necessarily growing up, is the central theme of these stories, featuring characters who, to varying degrees, are stuck in adolescent roles of rebel, outcast, enfant terrible and cool kid. All are linked by losses - of looks, of status, of job security, of health, of confidence - which forces them to life's inevitable turning point. Given that we are living in an age where fifty is the new forty, and forty is the new thirty, and twenty is the new god-knows-what, these stories, with their sometimes painful, sometimes funny and always unflinching truths, resonate.

Starting in the 1950s, Cadillac Road is the story of Sharon Desjardins: from her earliest childhood memories leaving Northern Quebec and a violent father to adventures in Buffalo and Crystal Beach with her mother and younger sister, Gloria, to dreams of escaping claustrophobic poverty in shabby Grenville by going to Toronto and marrying a wealthy lawyer whom she doesn't love, having turned down local boy Clinton McClary because she doesn't think he'll amount to much. In the end, depressed and on pills, Sharon realizes she needs to be true to her heart, abandons her marriage and takes to the road, a road that could very well lead back to her original hometown of Cadillac.

McKinley's Ghost & the Little Tin Truck tells the story of the Millers, a fictional family struggling among the real events of the early 20th century: the end of the Progressive Era, The Great War and influenza pandemic, prohibition, voting rights for women, the conservative take-over, the Red Scare, xenophobic hatred of immigrants and other "inferiors," lynching and race riots, union-busting, the elevation of "business" in government and the resulting unparalleled corruption, a wild stock market, spiraling income disparity, the Great Depression, national despair and the seeds of the next world war.

Grappling with her daughter's fatal accident, Joanna finds solace in the conviction that her daughter lives on in the body of another child. Nancy's decision to lose a kidney in order to save her husband's life jeopardizes her last chance for motherhood. All that Barbara possesses and identifies with, including companionship with a ghost, vanishes overnight. Angie takes a drastic measure to lose weight in order to regain her confidence and self esteem. Rosemary, a renowned "agony aunt," falls apart when her husband leaves her, only to find comfort in the strangest of strangers. Love and the supernatural drive these stories about the intertwining lives of five female cousins, who learn that loss—from misplacing keys to confronting death—is a constant force.

Writer Jack Fingon realizes too late that his life of "intuition and attraction" has produced little to value, and nothing to remember. To settle a piece of unfinished business, Fingon devises a plan to fulfil the testamentary wish of French vagabond poet Blaise Cendrars - to be buried in the Sargasso Sea where "life first burst from the depths of the ocean floor towards the sun".

The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories is a collection of sudden fiction (less than 1,000 words each) that compresses its narrative to deliver a variety of stories that alternate the flavour of a philosophical reflection with the whimsical enchantment of a fable with a twist. The characters emerge from worlds of human domesticity and community interaction as well as from the natural world, lending voice to experiences that, at times, occur outside the accepted norms of consensual reality.

Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros' collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph transformed into a heifer, a young soldier who returns home to discover that his brother is a changeling, an ancient temple uncovered during the construction of a church, a betrayed woman lost in a labyrinth, a wise woman confronting changes to her position when modern technology comes to her village. Some stories show that people still seek refuge in myth and folk beliefs; the ways of the past are not gone. The paving of a village does not destroy the power of the evil eye or the ability to repel it. A temple in honour of the old gods comes again to the surface. An unfinished musical composition for piano magically completes itself whenever it is played.

The near-death experience of an atheist makes him re-evaluate his life. Students are taught how idiotic philosophy can be. Recruits in a boot camp go through tough training exercises to become an elite cadre of readers. A self-made billionaire offers a free course on inner peace. An academic abandons his two kids and meets them as adults. A chef uses his TV cooking show to re-connect with his family. Aspiring writers learn their craft from a ghost. Where Playing To Win was about the joy and agony of competition, Talk About God offers an eclectic variety of stories that are at once thought-provoking and whimsical, with a touch of the incongruous and the absurd.

Dead Voices is a collection of stories that are both seriously realistic and comically whimsical. They have everything from superheroes who get sick on words, to the appearance of dead playwrights, to the visit of saints and sinners from the past, to a hot stove discussion on hockey and love. They're about the modern mind-set and its technological marvels and the older attention to character and virtue.