Snackers / Janina Hornosty

In these stories and sketches, Janina Hornosty captures the alienation from traditional middle-class values of early generation X'ers, and turns a wistful satiric eye on the excesses of the 1980s middle-class "me" set. In prose as honest and sharp as it is comic and compelling, Hornosty reveals the sense of dislocation in late 70s and early 80s young people—men and women on the verge of inheriting responsibility, yet uncertain about whether or not they want it; confident in their abilities to function in the mainstream, but fearful of the routines and certain cliches that await them there.

What Men Know About Women / Ron Smith

In What Men Know About Women, Ron Smith explores the unspoken complications men and women experience in their most intimate relationships. As the space between them ebbs and flows, his couples struggle to maintain a balance between love and alienation, understanding and confusion, tenderness and a fear of vulnerability. Whether surreal or realistic, these stories are always spare and elegant. They are about the circumstances of everyday life, told with compassion.

Dark forms Gliding / Mildred Trembley

In her stories, Mildred Tremblay explores relationships between men and women—particularly married men and women. Angered by any oppression of the human spirit, Tremblay is certainly a feminist, yet her work is universal in scope. Her motifs are the significant truths about human nature. Humorous, ironic, bizarre, and disturbing, these tales of the dark side always capture and hold the imagination.

For Mildred Tremblay, writing is a "letting-go" process in which she is aided by her long practise of transcendental meditation as well as a more recent practise and study of Kundalini. In this way she gains access to what she calls "a deep inner well of gods and goddesses," or what Carl Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Tremblay's world, then, is the world of myth and folklore: it is animistic and totemistic. Magic and transformation are commonplace there.

NO MORE WORTHY / William Chalmers

Boyd James, wild and uncertain and a long way from home, bursts into the Okanagan Valley at a time when change thunders through the region like the newly constructed Kettle Valley Railway. Rumours suggest that Boyd is a descendant of the infamous Jesse James. Whatever his heritage, he leaves a wake of violence behind him.

When Frank Wilson, on the run from his own past, unwittingly falls in with Boyd, his life changes forever. In the aftermath of a murder aboard the SS Okanagan, Frank is driven to the fringe of society and to the edge of his own certainties. Here Frank lives with the Professor and a strangely captivating young woman. And here Frank must determine for himself the price of loyalty.

A June Night n the Late Cenozoic / Robert Allen

In this first collection of stories, acclaimed poet and novelist Robert Allen explores a world in which "the rules"—the expectations that guide us day-to-d—are suspect, non-existent, or transitory. In this world, a man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip under construction in his back yard; astronauts fall into a black hole and chase a strangely literate "line" across the universe; and a young man uses digital technology to reconstruct butterflies. It is a strange world, but also a world strangely like ours. Robert Allen's stories confront us with our own world and force us to question the assumptions that we have come to live by.

"At times he borders on being a brilliant hoodlum." Patrick White