A South African copywriter is transplanted to the urban jungle of Manhattan. A recovering rape victim tries to resume a normal life. A Toronto nurse cuts herself to fill her emptiness. Through the short stories of this collection and the distinct resonance of each narrative voice, the private lives of twelve different women are explored with only one question in mind, What is it like to be them? From addiction to abuse, childhood to suicide, and from Johannesburg to downtown Toronto, the prose of the stories is compassionate, provocative, and often funny but always fearless.

In The Big Dream, acclaimed short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum offers a suite of linked stories exploring the working world in all its dark and humorous complexity

Original and effortlessly clever, the stories in I Know Who You Remind Me of capture the sensibility of a generation with no cultural inhibitions to overcome. Naomi K. Lewis's characters bear the battlescars of adolescence and early adulthood - scars left when one classmate impersonates another in Internet pornography; a lover donates his eyeball in the heat of passion; sibling rivalry escalates into a low orbit. For these characters, everything is straight-on, never coy, and often deliciously funny.

Rose Zwi's stories embrace people from different countries and cultures drawn together by a common humanity. Her characters range from a political activist who is house-arrested, to the child of immigrant parents caught between two cultures; from a city-educated woman returning to the arid homeland of her tribal grandfather, to a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shtetl; from a solitary dingo in a small Australian town, pursued to its inevitable end to a farmer obsessed with returning his land to its natural state.

Roger Nash gained international acclaim for his title story "The Camera and the Cobra," which won the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award, and was anthologized by Anchor Books (PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2009) as one of the twenty best short stories published in North America. Nash's short stories explore a theme less familiar in literature but common in life: how the course of our own day-to-day lives can be deeply ambiguous, a sheer mystery to us. He explores the tragedy and humour of this, over a rich variety of lives and situations, sometimes realistically leaving the mystery and loose-ends of life teasingly unresolved for both his characters and readers. He shows how the phrase "mystery writing" can be richly and revealingly extended beyond its more usual application to crimes and their solution, to the weave of everyday life.