Social justice is at the core of these award-winning stories exploring the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, racism, disenfranchisement, and mistreatment.

Includes explanatory notes and textual notes.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

CRIME & MYSTERY. A strange mixture of power, tension, and torment, Waste No Tears is a shocking expose of social evils with a forceful message for both sexes. Ignored by some critics, dismissed by others, this novel about the abortion racket is the stuff of legend: Hugh Garner claimed that it had been written in 10 days as part of a struggle to ward off incipient starvation; he was paid $400 for his efforts. Dark and disturbing, the story is a kind of memoir penned by Tom Matterson, a Cabbagetown son who spends 20 years making the 10-block journey from the street of his birth to skid row. Told from the perspective of its male narrator, the novel contains lurid descriptions of rapacious sex and harrowing depictions of death, boozing, brawling, blackmail, and back alley abortions. In Waste No Tears , the men are always tight and the women loose, and it is this downward spiral of sexual incontinence and drunken regret that propels the novel toward its morality-play conclusion.

V is for Vulnerable by Seth Godin is a full-color ABC book for grown-ups, with a powerful message about doing great work. V is for Vulnerable looks and feels like a classic picture book. But it's not for kids, it's for hardworking adults. It highlights twenty-six of Seth Godin's principles about treating your work as a form of art, with illustrations by acclaimed cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. A sample: A is for Anxiety, which is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better. F is for Feedback, which can be either a crutch or a weapon. Use it to make your work smaller, safer, and more likely to please everyone (and fail in the long run). Or use it as a lever to further push you to embrace what you fear and what you're capable of. This is unlike any previous Godin book and makes a great gift, both for loyal fans and those who've never read him before. Seth Godin is the author of thirteen international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about marketing, the ways ideas spread, leadership and change including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, The Dip and Tribes. He is the CEO of Squidoo.com and a very popular lecturer. His blog, www.sethgodin.typepad.com, is the most influential business blog in the world, and consistently one of the 100 most popular blogs on any subject.

A comprehensive portrait of the great French political thinker explores his life, work, travels in the United States, and writing of "Democracy in America."

Toronto's Cabbagetown in the Depression...North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum. Ken Tilling leaves school to face the bleak prospects of the dirty thirties-where do you go, what do you do, how do you make a life for yourself when all the world offers in unemployment, poverty and uncertainty? "As a social document, Cabbagetown is as important and revealing as either The Tin Flute or The Grapes of Wrath. Stern realism has also projected upon the pages of a whole gallery of types, lifelike and convincing. He is well fitted to hold the mirror up to human nature." Globe and Mail. Cabbagetown was first published in an abbreviated paperback edition in 1950 and was published in its entirety in 1968. This, the first quality paperback edition, contains the full unexpurgated text of Cabbagetown.

This stunning collection of stories demonstrates once again why Alice Munro is celebrated as a pre-eminent master of the short story. While some of the stories are traditional, set in “Alice Munro Country” in Ontario or in B.C., dealing with ordinary women’s lives, others have a new, sharper edge. They involve child murders, strange sex, and a terrifying home invasion. By way of astonishing variety, the title story, set in Victorian Europe, follows the last journey from France to Sweden of a famous Russian mathematician. This daring, superb collection proves that Alice Munro will always surprise you.

In this second volume of diaries from one of Australia’s greatest writers, we see Garner in love; asking herself questions about relationships, individuality, morality and contentment. For readers of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, and avid Garner fans, this volume illuminates the inner life of a writer with all its turmoil and joy.