In light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the remarkable personal story that comprises Fear Itself becomes a cautionary tale.Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Candida Lawrence has lived courageously with its effects throughout her life. Fear Itself traces her years struggling to have a child and her slow waking to the secrets that governments and institutions withheld from the women of her generation. The task for her-and...

The fourth of Candida Lawrence’s stand-alonememoirs, the collection of pieces that is Vanishingreveals a life-long awareness of human fragility andthe constant proximity of alienation and separation.A survivor in the truest sense and a woman withthe greatest personal resilience, Candida Lawrencerecalls what it is to make each day an assertion ofindependence. Her deeply felt remembrancesalways grant us an honest account of what it is

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to a...

Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid , Paul Vermeersch's second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media's perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He'll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must concea...

The Year's Best Crime & Mystery Stories contains the best crime and mystery stories that were originally published in 2015 in either print or electronic format as selected by editors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and John Helfers.Reading through thousands of titles and carefully narrowing their favorite reads down to the ultimate list that is presented in this volume, the editors chose their top picks of notable works from hundreds of anthologie...

* INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *“Stunning…heartrending…this year’s When Breath Becomes Air.” —Nora Krug, The Washington Post“Beautiful and haunting.” —Matt McCarthy, MD, USA TODAY“Vivid, immediate.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston GlobeThe New York Times bestseller by poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct...

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with mat...

Urban Fantasy meets Future NoirOnce people have messed with a man's DNA, what can he do but become a private eye? And when a gorgeous thing like Elizabeth Savoy comes gliding into his office and blinks her big baby blues, what can PI Mike Heller do but say sure—even though he sees just what she is, and knows what a bad idea it could be? Not that Heller has a clue just how bad. But by the time he suspects that Lizzie's troubles might bring the end of life as he knows it, he's already...

What Endures is a story of powerful love. It is a story that will break your heart. Inspired by true events, it tells of the incredible bond between a mother and daughter, and with gut-wrenching poignancy reminds us of the little things that make life worth living.“Holdstock’s writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed … sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great wor...

At the heart of Zsuzsi Gartner's exuberant prose is a cri de coeur for personal responsibility as the sun sets on a century in which the media was omnipresent and everyone felt like a victim. There are no innocent bystanders here, though. A woman calls in fake bomb threats from the nineteenth floor of a bank tower as revenge against her ex-lover. The mother of a girl killed by a teenage urban guerrilla thrives spectacularly in her industrious grief, transforming herself into a forgiveness ...

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland’s balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Surviv...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...