A resilient and witty story of fate, free will and superstition by an award-winning author. As the daughter of Southern Italian immigrants joined by an arranged marriage, Fantetti grew up witnessing and weathering the devastating consequences of her mother's schizophrenia. Moving to the other side of the country to escape the constant turmoil, Fantetti casts a canny eye on her painful childhood through writing and performing stand-up comedy. When her dad develops depression, a host of long-buried ancestral beliefs spring forward--like the three witches of the Macbeth-- Mal'occhio, Maledictions and Stregheria -- Fantetti blends old customs with new traditions in an ancient and modern pot to heal a fractured self; studying the sky for planetary alignment; consulting her trusty tarot deck for guidance and visiting her dad's psychic healer for a prescription for prescience. Throughout her journey the enduring father-daughter bond shines through the wisecracks, with great love, determination, and grace.

A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures. The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection—with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd—the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form.

"For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush. The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A mammoth Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic. Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda's memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father will not allow her to speak of. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly and so radically that she hardly knows what has happened. As Miranda says, change is clear after it happens."--

On an island teeming with masters of the short story, Mary Lavin's distinct voice and devoted following set her apart. Before her death in 1996, this Irish writer had received many honors and prizes not only for her luminous short stories but also for several highly regarded novels. William Trevor praised Lavin's ability to "make moments timeless, to illuminate people and places, words and things, by touching them with the magic of the rarely-gifted storyteller." In a Cafe makes available for the first time in the United States a collection of her most beloved pieces as compiled by her daughter. In masterworks such as the title story, an unsettling portrayal of widowhood, and "The Will, " which Layin considered the finest expression of her art, the justice in Trevor's declaration we recognize that "the short story of today owes her a very great debt."