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April Fool
BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
Nick the Owl Faloon is sitting beside a stone fox by the name of Eve Winters, who is apparently some kind of shrink. They're scoffing up fresh-caught sockeye, sharing a long table with four couples from Topeka, Kansas, who are up here on a wet spring holiday. In spite of all the happy talk, the Owl picks up there is an edge to this dinner, the men regretting they brought their wives along. A fishing extravaganza that put them back a few yards each, and they bring their wives when they'd rather get plotzed and bond.

The Wreckage
BY MICHAEL CRUMMEY
He was never dry. Every day they abandoned field guns mired in mud. The tires and axles of ammunition carts disappeared in sludge and the shells for the guns still with them were carried by hand. Half a dozen men at the front of the column slashed a trail with machetes, the rainforest so densely organic, so humid and rank, it felt as if they were forcing their way through the tissue of a living creature.

The Wave Theory of Angels
BY ALISON MacLEOD
The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.

I am a Red Dress
BY ANNA CAMILLIERI
My mother often said, "When your grandfather dies, I'm going to the funeral in a red dress." Sometimes this declaration was preceded by a long string of curses, sometimes it emerged as a single thought bubble that evaporated as quickly as it came.

Let There be Rock
BY DAVID BIDINI
I'm forty years old as I write this. I hope that sounds old. If it doesn't sound old to you, then you're my peer, my equal, my generational brother or sister. If that's the case, you have no right reading this book. It isn't for you. It's for those who wouldn't be caught dead sitting next to you on the bus. So, if you don't mind? There. Now go busy yourself with some shuffleboard or something

Shack: The Cutland Junction Stories
BY KENNETH J. HARVY
A man from the government stood in the doorway of Ace Winslow's one-room shack. He had arrived on a silver snowmobile and wore a silver helmet and silver zip-up snowsuit that was peculiar to the area. After introducing himself, he stood silent for a few moments, awaiting conversation that was not forthcoming, then said: "We'll be building you a new house in the spring." He explained that Ace need not live in "this place" any longer, that the government had initiated programs to ensure that the people in Cutland Junction lived better lives. Ace had never seen the man before. He nodded regardless and grinned and asked the man in for a mug of tea, but the man said he was busy and had better get going. Many more stops to make before the day was out.

Shades of Black
BY RICHARD SIKLOS
For a man with Conrad Black's sense of place and history, an AT&T teleconference may not have been his choice of venue for his own corporate beheading. Black was at his Park Avenue apartment at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, January 20, 2004, when he phoned into a board meeting of Hollinger International, the Chicago-based newspaper company he had founded, which owned the Telegraph news-paper group in London, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Jerusalem Post.

Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw
BY WILL FERGUSON
It's rare to remember exactly where you were when an idea first occurred to you—or at least, it's rare for me. I usually wander through life gathering notions and hunches the way trouser pockets gather bits of lint; I'm not really sure how they got there, but there they are. In this case, though, I can recall vividly where I was when it dawned on me that Canada is not a country but a collection of outposts: it was while I drove through a night of heavy rain, into the realm of a legendary republic, a sleeping child and drowsy spouse beside me.

There is a Season
BY PATRICK LANE
I stood alone among yellow glacier lilies and the windflowers of spring, the western anemone, their petals frail disks of trembling clotted cream.

Life Mask
BY EMMA DONOGHUE
The Thames was loosening, its thin skin of ice cracked open by thousands of small boats, as if spring were on its way. The carriage with the Derby arms gilded on the side forced its way down Whitehall through a tangle of vehicles and pedestrians. 'The traffic, these days.' The Earl of Derby sighed.

Segue
BY CAROL SHIELDS
Something is always saying to me: Be plain. Be clear. But then something else interferes and unjoints my good intentions.

Standing Stones
BY JOHN METCALF
After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father's obstinately polite grip and after he'd bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn't lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.

My Life
BY BILL CLINTON
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.

Inside the Olympics
BY DICK POUND

Arriving in Greece is a delight. As the plane circles for its approach into the Athens airport, the view is stupendous—a rocky, convoluted coast jutting out into the Mediterranean. A beautiful airport, built by German construction experts, adds to the impression of modern Greece as a country that has arrived.

Dark Age Ahead
BY JANE JACOBS

This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book. The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.

Down to This
BY SHAUGHNESSY BISHOP-STALL

Tent City is not a city and we don't live in tents. We live in shacks and shanties on the edge of Canada's largest metropolis where the river meets the lake. There's a fence dividing these 27 acres from the rest of Toronto, and on this side we've built what dwellings we can with the rubble of a scrapyard, a no-man's landfill caught in confusion between the city and private business. Sometimes it seems like a community and sometimes like chaos. Junk Town would be a better name.

A Complicated Kindness
BY MIRIAM TOEWS

I live with my father, Ray Nickel, in that low brick bungalow out on highway number twelve. Blue shutters, brown door, one shattered window. Nothing great. The furniture keeps disappearing, though. That keeps things interesting.

Paper Fan
BY TERRY GOULD

There is no marker where the Paper Fan's ashes are buried. The Schlipfs, Kosakas, and Holts are remembered with bronze plaques, but the Triad official has only an empty square of fescue to show for his life. "You're sure this is his plot?" I ask Kein Battistone, the Forest Lawn Cemetery's family service counselor.

Air Monopoly
BY KEITH McARTHUR

Watching developments south of the border, Claude Taylor could see that deregulation of the Canadian airline industry was also inevitable. Taylor had started as a passenger ticket agent with Trans-Canada Air Lines in 1949 and worked his way through the ranks until he was appointed president of Air Canada in 1974.

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
BY ESI EDUGYAN

The house had always had a famished look to it. At least in Samuel's imagination, for he had never once seen it. It sat on the outskirts of Aster, a town whose most noted relic was the fellowship between its men. Driving through, one might see a solemn group, patient and thoughtful, sharing a complicit cigarette as the sun set behind the houses. And for a man like Samuel, whose life lacked intimacy, the town seemed the return to the honest era he longed for. But he knew Maud would never move there, and the twins, for the sake of siding with her, would object in their quiet way.

Doctor Bloom's Story
BY DON COLES
There's an image I often have of myself, my ur-self before I began to elaborate and embellish it, an image I retain from the last seconds of sleep or recover in a reliable daydream. I'm sitting in a corner of a remote upper room, casting brief glances about me and then tilting my face downwards as though to meditate on what I've just seen. In fact I have seen nothing because no one else is in the room and there is no furniture. It may be, it can hardly be anywhere else, the unused attic room of my childhood home in Amsterdam, that tall narrow Leidsegracht house -- the attic room where I would go in late March when the weather turned a little warmer, to check on the dead flies at the window ledges. They meant, that random spatter, another winter gone, and in my rudimentary way I was taking note of this sort of thing even then.

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the 21st Century
BY DAN YASHINSKY
II was once telling stories at a downtown arts centre when a restless group of kids stomped in. They were ten-year-olds from a Catholic school in a new housing development, and they came in munching potato chips and blowing bubble gum. One big boy with a cast on his arm had a well-practised burp. I could tell they weren't in a listening mood. Since it was close to Halloween, I lit a candle, turned off the lights and started telling ghost stories.

Midnight At The Dragon Café
BY JUDY FONG BATES
I have kept only three possessions from my childhood. Each one is a book. The first is a coil-bound sketch pad with a cover made of heavy cardboard, a muted olive green. The pages are filled with drawings — of trees and flowers, of animals and soft nudes, but also of fantastic creatures, some beautiful, some hideous, entwined and growing out of one another, out of eyes, bellies, tongues, mouths. As a child I found the drawings magical, yet they unsettled me, pulling me into a world I did not understand. When I look at them now, many years later, they disturb me in a different way; I am left feeling hollow and haunted.

Emma's Hands
BY MARY SWAN
Now that you've been dead for weeks instead of days, I find I'm scanning headlines at the checkout once again. Cures for cancer in every issue and Siamese twins delivering each other's babies. A caveman's skull bears an uncanny resemblance to Elvis, who has recently been spotted in Jessup, Georgia.

The Urge to Splurge
BY LAURA BYRNE PAQUET
Before I dig into the meat of this book — shopping — I'd like to digress briefly into the wonderful world of global exploration, conquest, and warfare. After all, the demands of the marketplace have fueled empires and revolutions for thousands of years. Just consider the Romans.

Playing House
BY PATRICIA PEARSON
New life announces itself as a mystery that a mother cannot solve. Something happens, a certain gear-shifting in the body that she notes, but makes no sense of. Especially if she isn't planning to be pregnant. I shall offer myself as an example. I did not have a basal thermometer handy on my bureau, or any recall as to when I last had my period. I was not expecting to read What to Expect When You're Expecting.

If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories
BY J. EDWARD CHAMBERLAIN
Ted Chamberlin grew up, as he says, near a rain forest haunted by memories of human slavery, near a river that carried twice as much water as the Nile, draining a region whose government had outlawed dancing.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
BY M.G. VASSANJI
My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years. I head my country's List of Shame. These and other descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But I do not intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through confession; I simply crave to tell my story.

Understanding Me
BY STEPHANIE MCLUHAN and DAVID STAINES
On March 3, 1959, Marshall McLuhan addressed a gathering of more than a thousand educators in Chicago sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education. The theme of the conference was "The Race Against Time: New Perspectives and Imperatives in Higher Education," and McLuhan's talk was titled "Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media."

The Player
By GEOFFREY STEVENS
First Baptist Church in Oakland, California, was filled to capacity on that August day in 1937. Even the galleries were jammed, and many mourners were forced to stand at the rear. The well of the church, beneath the pulpit, was a wall of flowers. The second son of the great Protestant preacher Harold Brainard Camp — the man who would come to be thought of as the Billy Graham of his day — could smell the heavy scent of the blooms.

The Way the Crow Flies
By ANN-MARIE MACDONALD
The birds saw the murder. Down below in the new grass, the tiny white bell-heads of the lily of the valley. It was a sunny day. Twig-crackling, early spring stirrings, spring soil smell. April. A stream through the nearby woods, so refreshing to the ear — it would be dry by the end of summer, but for now it rippled through the shade. High in the branches of an elm, that is where the birds were, perched among the many buds set to pleat like fresh hankies.

The Island Walkers
By JOHN BEMROSE
One Saturday in the summer of 1965, Joe and Alf Walker climbed onto the roof and spent the better part of the morning stripping the old shingles. By eleven they were busy nailing down the new ones. Joe, who had turned eighteen that July, worked on the slope overlooking the backyard. He sat shirtless, on his duff, and hammered sullenly between his legs, aware of the sun-­baked expanse of tarpaper stretching up the slope behind him. From beyond the peak, his father's hammer thundered without rest. It seemed crazy to try to keep up.

Deafening
By FRANCES ITANI
"Go to my room." Mamo is pointing to the floor above. "Bring the package on my bureau." Grania watches her grandmother's lips. She understands, pushes aside the heavy tapestry curtain that keeps the draught from blowing up the stairs, and runs up to the landing. She pauses long enough to glance through the only window in the house that is shaped like a porthole, even though it's at the back of the house and looks over land, not water.

The Continuation of Love by Other Means
By CLAUDIA CASPER
A seven-year-old boy sat on a roof feeling momentarily safe. He was skinny, all knees and elbows, and his short brown hair smelled like woodsmoke, dirt and sweat. His grey-green eyes were like a stream running over limestone—fresh, lively and cool. A Love Supreme
By KENT NUSSEY
Late in the morning, as Omar sat hunched over his typewriter, the telephone rang. He looked up, uncomprehending, from the page that sprouted from the carriage; the phone chirped again and he turned to stare at it, just out of reach on a small table beneath the window. On the fourth ring he bolted from his chair and snatched up the receiver. Hey Nostradamus!
By DOUGLAS COUPLAND
I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world -- spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley -- is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. The Kite Runner
By KHALED HOSSEINI
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture: Collected Works, Vol. 13
By NORTHROP FRYE
If one translates the terms of conventional theologies into psychological terms, one gets some interesting results. Deism is psychologically the low water-mark of the religious life, with God sound asleep in the soul and the soul carrying on automatically. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By MARK HADDON
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women
By MARILYN FRENCH
The nineteenth century roiled with contradiction. It was the lowest point in women's history: a male historian has pointed out that nineteenth-century British women had fewer rights than Babylonian women possessed when Hammurabi's Code was written. From Free Trade to Force Trade
By PETER URMETZER
Why trade? At one level, there are many obvious benefits to be gleaned from this activity. In Canada, a sometimes harsh climate means that food production is interrupted for a significant portion of the year. Only because of imports are we able to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables all year.