The African-American football player Chuck Ealey grew up in a segregated neighborhood of Portsmouth, Ohio. Against all odds, he became an incredible quarterback. But despite his unbeaten record in high school and university, he would never play professional football in the United States. Chuck Ealey grew up poor in a racially segregated community that was divided from the rest of town by a set of train tracks, but his mother assured him that he wouldn’t stay in Portsmouth forever. Education was the way out, and a football scholarship was the way to pay for that education. So despite the racist taunts he faced at all the games he played in high school, Chuck maintained a remarkable level of dedication and determination. And when discrimination followed him to university and beyond, Chuck Ealey remained undefeated. This inspirational story is told by Chuck Ealey’s daughter, author and educator Jael Richardson, with striking and powerful illustrations by award-winning illustrator Matt James.

Echos of Frederico García Lorca, Yiannis Ritsons, and Rumi add exoticism to this poet's deceptively simple style. Combining confession with analytical rigor, most of these poems are variations on classic themes, but they are driven by the particulars of politics, love, and family life. As the poems progress, repeated symbols--such as cars, coats, cups, rooms, bees, and roses--begin to hint that the poet has a secret recipe for contentment: home and hearth, travel, warm weather, and a belief in human growth.

The followup to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. "A child surprised that a neon sign / isn't hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one's goals" states the speaker of "Youth Is A Fugitive" and this sentiment is one of the central precepts of Returning the Sword to the Stone. Congealing directly off the page, these are poems that only Mark Leidner could have written.

Ranging widely in subject matter--from a musician's destructive narcissism to the strange effects a persistent Norwegian has on a bachelor's love life--the stories in this collection also vary in style. Both elegantly insightful and highly adventurous, these tales are inventive, deeply comic, sometimes very unsettling, and completely engaging.

Ripe with love, money, and power, the story of 35-year-old Rudolf--set in a fast-paced, urban environment--begs the question Do we only think we exist? Rudolf and his wife work day and night hoping for a better life--he is a philosophy graduate student and the manager of a car dealership. He also keeps up a heart-wrenching relationship with the chic Wanda. Then there is Nina, who studies logic but is secretly a prostitute, and Alfred, owner of a car-leasing company, seemingly upright, but actually an embezzler. Each character conceals something. Be it in Hungary or North America, the craving for existential clarity remains strong.

Brilliant in its stark depiction of trench warfare in World War I, this lost classic was privately printed in a limited edition in 1930. British censors initially suppressed the short novel because of its tough antiwar views and sympathetic portrayals of German soldiers, and even today's readers may be unprepared for its scenes of horrific battlefield carnage and men driven to madness by relentless psychological stress. Providing a new view of an underappreciated Canadian author, the book also stands as a fascinating addition to the comparatively small shelf of literature by writers who fought in the Great War.