Search results for ""Biblioasis""

World-renowned illustrator Seth returns with three new Christmas ghost stories for 2020.Intrigued by a travel guide’s mention of tales of hauntings, Selby Pyle, an “Amateur Psychic Investigator,” sets out for a village deep in the Welsh mountains—where the moss-covered walls of an unfinished Shangri La left behind by a deceased entrepreneur is far from the strangest thing he encounters.

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"A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener." “What is a best poem?” asks Best Canadian Poetry 2020 guest editor Marilyn Dumont, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of four poetry collections. “A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener. The work required to complete a poem takes risk, skill, and practice, and the poems selected for this anthology all exhibit such attributes.” In precise language that exposes the attitudes inherent in English, innovative forms that illuminate their content, and mastery of music akin to a composer’s score, the fifty poems collected here fulfill their promises and, in doing so, demonstrate the country’s rich diversity and talent for invention—and the promises it might fulfill as well. Featuring introductions by series editor Anita Lahey and advisory editor Amanda Jernigan, and poems by: Kazim Ali • Amber Dawn • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Brandi Bird • Selina Boan • Margret Bollerup • Rita Bouvier • Tim Bowling • Frances Boyle • Di Brandt • Rob Budde • Mugabi Byenkya • Dell Catherall • Margaret Christakos Ivan Coyote • Barry Dempster • Kyle Flemmer • Susan Haldane • Louise Bernice Halfe–Sky Dancer • Jane Eaton Hamilton • Maureen Scott Harris • Dallas Hunt • Ashley Hynd • Babo Kamel • Conor Kerr • Don Kerr • Fiona Tinwei Lam • Natalie Lim • Tanis MacDonald • Nyla Matuk • Sadie McCarney • Tara McGowan-Ross • Erín Moure • Roger Nash • Samantha Nock • Erin Noteboom • Abby Paige • Geoff Pevlin • Alycia Pirmohamed • Jana Prikryl • Jason Purcell • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Rebecca Salazar • Robyn Sarah • Erin Soros • Kevin Spenst • John Elizabeth Stintzi • Andrea Thompson • Sanna Wani • Adele Wiseman

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Gathering the best twenty stories from Cynthia Flood’s career, these spare, stylistically inventive stories explore subjects ranging from the domestic to the political.In this collection, Flood navigates a wide range of subject matter with a writing style which gradually becomes more intense, tighter, and sometimes experimental with each story. Most themes are familiar—love, hate, children, the natural world, parents, failure, despair, anger, regret. Other stories are more unusual, dealing with topics such as far-left political activity. Containing what may be some of Flood’s most poignant work, You Are Here is a sharp and engaging exploration of the world today.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BOOK FOR 2020 • A CBC BEST FICTION BOOK FOR 2020 • "His third appearance on the Giller shortlist ... affirms Bergen among Canada's most powerful writers. His pages light up; all around falls into darkness."—2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury • “David Bergen’s command is breathtaking … His work belongs to the world, and to all time. He is one of our living greats.”—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves From the streets of Danang, Vietnam, where a boy falls in with a young American missionary, to fishermen lost off the islands of Honduras, to the Canadian prairies, where a teenage boy’s infatuation reveals his naiveté and an aging rancher finds himself smitten, the short stories in Here the Dark explore the spaces between doubt and belief, evil and good, obscurity and light. Following men and boys bewildered by their circumstances and swayed by desire, surprised by love and by their capacity for both tenderness and violence, and featuring a novella about a young woman who rejects the laws of her cloistered Mennonite community, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner David Bergen’s latest deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost—and how we might be found.

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In a nameless Hungarian town, teenagers on a competitive swim team occupy their after-training hours with hard drinking and fast cars, hash cigarettes and marathons of Grand Theft Auto, the meaningless sex and late-night exploits of a world defined by self-gratification and all its attendant recklessness. Invisible to their parents and subject to the whims of an abusive coach, the crucible of competition pushes them again and again into dangerous choices. When a deadly accident leaves them second-guessing one another, they’re driven even deeper into violence. Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and an unforgettable story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.

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“If you really want to journey into the heart of darkness, you'd be advised to travel with Vancouver writer Keath Fraser, a man of extraordinary talents.” —Bronwyn Drainie An icon of Canadian short fiction, Keath Fraser has exerted a wide and trenchant influence since the publication of his first collection Taking Cover in 1982. Damages: Selected Stories 1982–2012 gathers the finest of his work across decades. Combining the craftsmanship of the form’s greatest masters with the idiosyncratic voices and music of our contemporary moment, the stories selected here travel from the richly peopled worlds of Fraser’s Vancouver to the Gulf of Thailand, a Phnom Penh bone-house embassy, and the Rajasthan desert, and demonstrate remarkable diversity of character and effortless storytelling across a range of modes. Featuring an introduction by John Metcalf, and including the novella “Foreign Affairs,” called by the Oxford Companion of Canadian Literature “one of the masterpieces of Canadian short fiction,” Damages showcases Keath Fraser as one of the best and most enduring story writers of the last fifty years.

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Snow, canoes, frozen ponds, lonely conifers… Dark Woods takes the motifs and landscape of a Canadian childhood and examines their place in a world of smartphones and overflowing inboxes. The result, Sanger's first book in 16 years, is a striking new collection full of mysteries and reassessments, wordplay, slang, and sonnets, meditations on parenthood and the "cracks in the granite": those urges that won't go away, and the people who have.

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Fantastical, magnetic, and harsh—these are the women in Paige Cooper's debut short story collection Zolitude. They are women who built time machines when they were nine, who buy plane tickets for lovers who won't arrive. They are sisters writhing with dreams, blasé about sex but beggared by love—while the police horses have talons and vengeance is wrought by eagles the size of airplanes. Broken-down motorbikes and housebroken tyrannosaurs, cheap cigarettes and mail bombs—Cooper finds the beautiful and the disturbing in both the surreal and the everyday.Troubling, carnal, and haunting, these stories are otherworldly travelogues through banal, eco-fabulist dystopias. Zolitude is a gorgeous, sad, and sexy work of slipstream and an atlas of fantastic isolation. The monstrous is human here, and tender.

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A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote—and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 “the worst … ever.” Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn’t one big event, but a long series of smaller ones? In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it’s not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues—reason, logic, science, evidence—has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?

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The Toll-House has a long and terrible history as a place of death. But Jack Barnes doesn't believe in spirits. His travelling companions, Messrs. Meagle, Lester, and White, wager that he might be convinced otherwise if they all spend a night together in the house. Four men go in, but will four come out?W. W. Jacobs was an English author, well-known for his story "The Monkey's Paw."

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The three sequences of Groundwork comprise a sophisticated reworking of European myth on the order of Yeats's The Tower. The first is situated by an archaeological dig in modern-day Tunisia, the second by the Garden of Eden, the third by the waters and islands of Homer's Odyssey. Together they form a devastating critique of contemporary aesthetics. Few poets today are versed in the archetypes that inform the European tradition, and even fewer can manipulate them with the grace of Amanda Jernigan. With rivers of exquisite prosody and a panoramic intellectual scope, her Groundwork has recharted the poetic landscape -- and by doing so, has changed it forever. PRAISE FOR AMANDA JERNIGAN "Amanda Jernigan possesses daunting formal skill ...her lines have an emotional intensity that is no less memorable for being understated. And she has a light, perfecting touch." - David Orr, NPR.org "For years now, Amanda Jernigan's name has been traded between poets like stories of mythical beast sightings; whispers of a poet who could arrive on the scene any day to shame us all with her preternatural craft, heart, and mind. With Groundwork, Jernigan arrives not as a wide-eyed first-timer, but as a wide-eyed master. You hold in your hands a collector's item of the future. Mark my words: you'll say, I was there when." -- George Murray "What a delight to read such superbly crafted poems which at the same time transcend their craft so decisively. They are light and song-like but they are also profound. She has the lovely singing line, though the poems bite too; that strengthens the melody." - Eric Ormsby

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Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts - from the lyrical to the rhetorical, from the public and collective to the personal and private - the poems in Pause for Breath are a meditation on the times and on time itself, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.

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Twenty-five years ago and counting, Louisa, my true, essential, always-there-for-everything friend, died. We were 22. When Anita Lahey opens her binder in grade nine French and gasps over an unsigned form, the girl with the burst of red hair in front of her whispers, Forge it! Thus begins an intense, joyful friendship, one of those powerful bonds forged in youth that shapes a person’s identity and changes the course of a life. Anita and Louisa navigate the wilds of 1980s suburban adolescence against the backdrop of dramatic world events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. They make carpe diem their manifesto and hatch ambitious plans. But when Louisa’s life takes a shocking turn, into hospital wards, medical tests, and treatments, a new possibility confronts them, one that alters, with devastating finality, the prospect of the future for them both. Equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, The Last Goldfish is a poignant memoir of youth, friendship, and the impermanence of life.

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"A poet of direct speech and muscular lexicon."--Quill & Quire Nimbly slipping between personae, masks, and moods, the prosody-driven poems of Sum weigh the volatility and mutability of the self against the forces of habit, instinct, and urge. With homages to Hopkins, Graves, Wislawa Szymborska, Paul Muldoon, and more, and in allusion-dappled, playfully sprung stanzas, this third book from poet and critic Zachariah Wells both wears its influences openly and spins a sound texture all its own, in a collection far greater than its parts. Zachariah Wells is the author of two collections of poetry and a book of criticism (Career Limiting Moves, 2014).

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Praise for Judith McCormack and Backspring Nominated for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award "A well-written and smart novel that unfolds many moments of profound and subtle beauty. McCormack's treatment of details and prose are refreshing, confident, and attentive."--The Winnipeg Review "A joy to read."--Nino Ricci "A wonderfully and uniquely gifted storyteller."--Midwest Book Review Eduardo, an architect from Lisbon, has come to Montreal to be with his wife Genevieve. Genevieve researches fungi and likes to catalog her orgasms. But when Eduardo is caught in an explosion and rumors of arson begin to circulate, both his marriage and his fledgling architecture firm verge on collapse. Gorgeous, colorful, and richly described, Backspring is a sensual taxonomy of desire. Judith McCormack, born near Chicago, has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award.

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"Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls and a heart of gold."-Jonathan Evison Peter Bayle-heavy drinker, philosopher, scholar, anemic lover-is in Kansas, writing a feature on middle America's newfound love for hockey. There he meets a morphine-injecting reverend, a reviled reporter, and a drug salesman; obsessed by his self-destructive new friends, Bayle abandons the project and returns home to confront a future and a girlfriend he may no longer want. Ray Robertson is the author of seven novels and two collections of award-nominated nonfiction. His novel David was a Women's National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, 2013.

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BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 JOSE SARAMAGO PRIZE AN AFRICA39/UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2014 TOP AFRICAN WRITER UNDER 40 A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE AFRICAN WRITER, 2012 WINNER OF THE GRINZANE PRIZE FOR BEST YOUNG WRITER, 2010 By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he's willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop's Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret is a charming coming-of-age story from the next rising star in African literature.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION "What the hell kind of great escape is this? No one escapes!" --L.B. Mayer, on the 1963 film He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died. In This Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz tenderly reconstructs the life of a man seen by millions yet recognized by no one, whose history--from childhood flight from Nazism to suspicious death twenty years later--intersects bitterly, ironically, and often movingly with the plot of Sturges's great war film. Splicing together documentary materials with correspondence, diary entries, and Steinmetz's own travel journal, This Great Escape does more than reconstruct the making of a cinema classic: it is a poignant and moving testament to the complexity of human experience, a portrait of a family for whom acting was a matter of survival, and proof that our most anonymous, uncredited, and undocumented moments can brush against the zeitgeist of world history.

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A companion volume to Canadian Odyssey: A Reading of Hugh Hood's The New Age, God's Plenty surveys the short fiction of the writer dubbed Canada's Marcel Proust. Hugh Hood, an unparalleled stylist, was equally accomplished in short forms and long: this straight-talking assessment of Hood's stories is thorough, insightful, readable, and profound. With its story-by-story breakdown and rigorous engagement with Hood's technique, God's Plenty offers an excellent introduction not just to an undersung master, but to the art of short fiction full stop. W.J. Keith is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

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Annabel's combined print/e-book sales of 21,000 does not include her 24,000+ UK sales or 70,000 Canadian sales. Annabel has been translated into 6 languages Previous KW coverage in O, NYTRB, New Yorker, Rumpus &more It was the only book in 2010 to be nominated for all three major Canadian fiction awards, plus the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin the year after Despite the worldwide success of her novel, the short story is where KW really excels: she's funnier, she's quirkier, she's more attentive to both her language (which in Annabel was universally praised for its lyrical quality), and landscapes (called "crystalline"). Here she also maintains her interests in the ambiguities of gender/sexual orientation and the impact of loneliness, which are two of the things that made Annabel—a novel about a hermaphrodite in Newfoundland—so compelling. Stories vary in length & perspective, & they're eccentric, but aren't particularly difficult—a book for the general as well as the literary reader In her words, here are the collection's major themes & issues: Growing up gay in smalltown North America. Self-destructive love affairs with catastrophic people. The pervasive loneliness that fills the modern world despite its proliferation of so-called social media. Gut-ripping inappropriate laughter. The holiness of ordinary life. Family secrets

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"Entertaining, moving, informative, intelligently hopeful: I know of few other books like this one to warm the cockles of a booklover's heart." --Alberto Manguel "For anyone who loves books too well--who lusts after them, lives in them, mainlines them--David Mason's memoir will be a fix from heaven. Heartful, cantankerous, droll, his tales of honour and obsession in the trade gratify the very book-love they portray. An irresistible read." --Dennis Lee "An atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books ...Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason's love for books of every variety."--Kirkus Reviews From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he's expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. He'll help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling. Over the course of what is now a legendary international career, Mason shows unerring instincts for the logic of the trade. He makes good money from Canadian editions, both legitimate and pirated (turns out Canadian piracies so incensed Mark Twain that he moved to Montreal for six months to gain copyright protection). He outfoxes the cousins of L.M. Montgomery at auction and blackmails the head of the Royal Ontario Museum. He excoriates the bureaucratic pettiness that obstructs public acquisitions, he trumpets the ingenuity of collectors and scouts, and in archives around the world he appraises history in its unsifted and most moving forms. Above all, however, David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value. Sly, sparkling, and endearingly gruff, The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade--whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come.

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From A Very Small Something: Somewhere past the wrinkled maps, and under another sun, where favourite earrings find new ears and missing marbles run, the hillsides made their marvelous shapes for a town called Covington-- And a great pink factory as long as the breeze weighed truckfuls and truckfuls of bubblegum. Olivia Bezzlebee lives by the sea in a fantastic town with the world's biggest bubblegum factory, where its citizens blow bubbles all day. But Olivia can't blow a single one and feels as if everyone looks down on her. Leaving Covington to find a place where she might belong, she learns the true meanings of family and home. A Very Small Something, beautifully illustrated by Alexander Griggs-Burr, is a story to which all children--and any tuned-in parent--will be able to relate. Blowing bubbles may indeed be a very small something ...but when you are a small child and it's the thing you most want to do, a bubble can mean the whole world. David Hickey is one of the leading young poets in Canada, and the author of two collections, including Open Air Bindery . He has tested his children's poems in schools across the country for the last seven years. He is finishing a PhD at the University of Western in London, Ontario. Alexander Griggs-Burr illustrated the Ontario Library Association Red Maple--nominated Nieve in 2010. He lives and works in Stratford, Ontario.

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"God and whiskey have got me where I am. Too little of the one, too much of the other." —David King, 1895. Born a slave in 1847, but raised as a free man by the Reverend William King, David has rebelled against his emancipator and his predestined future in the church. He’s taken up residence in the nearby town of Chatham, made a living robbing graves, and now presides—in the company of a German ex-prostitute named Loretta—over an illegal after-hours tavern. These days that final, violent confrontation with Reverend King seems like a lifetime ago. The residents of Chatham know David as a God-cursing, liquor-slinging, money-having man-about-town, famously educated and fabulously eccentric. And he seems to be more-or-less happy … that is, until the death of Reverend King brings his past crashing down upon him. Inspired by the Elgin Settlement, which by 1852 housed 75 free black families and was studied by Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe, David is a fiery look at one man’s quest for knowledge and forgiveness, and a moving portrait of life after the Underground Railroad. Ray Robertson is the author of Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live.

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WINNER OF THE QWF FIRST BOOK PRIZE "Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories."--David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent--incredibly satisfying for a reader. -- Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality--and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions. In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen's characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover. Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian prizes and awards. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

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Ellie Lucan's about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She's got a doctorate, her husband's a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at a Montessori. When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her sons to spend the summer in her hometown. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons. As Ellie is drawn back into the community, the strain on her marriage intensifies and she is forced to decide where her loyalties lie. Clare Tacon has an MFA in writing from the University of British Columbia and is a past editor of Prism Magazine. In the Field is her first novel.

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Marius Kociejowski follows up his now classic The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool with The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. A metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, Kociejowski discovers once again at the periphery of Damascene society--for the outcast is often made of the very thing that rejects him--a way to understand the challenges and changes refashioning post-9/11 Syria and the Middle East, reminding us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.

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You'd like to believe you're in some tale of sin and redemption. I guess we all like to think we're walking through some grand, redemptive story. Well, we're all going to end up disappointed. Disappointment is one of the two fates that we all must eventually meet. When former Pulitzer Prize--winning combat photographer Lucas Zane washes up drunk, broken, and hallucinatory after covering the worst global conflagrations of the past two decades, he takes a job with a low-budget pornographic impresario, getting accidentally involved with one of his actresses, Melissa. After a horrific assault, Zane hatches a plan to rescue Melissa, his career, and, he hopes, himself.Combat Camera is a restless, tragic, blackly funny, hypnotic novel.

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What Boys Like brings together a motley assemblage of urban misfits and outsiders, and explores their love/hate relationships with their city and one another. Jones's characters grapple with lust, love and loss with an unsentimental eye, while remaining open to the sharp-edged humour caused by the chaotic and random nature of life, and the absurdity of the world around them.

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A critical and commercial success in German, Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings, and their eventual tragic destruction. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, who wishes only to forget his past, this highly original novel recreates a vanished Vienna with salty humour and humanity. In a voice which is appealing without being sentimental, Peter describes his escape from the Nazis through snowy woods, his attempts to start a new life in England and Canada, and his decision to immigrate to Israel. Written by an eminent scholar, himself a survivor of Nazism, Kahn & Engelmann is both an entertaining novel and a major work of Holocaust literature.

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Set in the small German city of Waltherrott, this novel is a madcap excursion from the 1980s back to 1848, the year of revolutions, then back to the time of the Black Death in the late 1340s. A startling comedy, A Night at the Opera is a tour de force in the unexpected, the bizarre, and the serendipitous.

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Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge.Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth century backwoods, The Iconoclast's Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.

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New collection from a writer who has won four major fiction prizes from institutions and magazines across Canada Flood's last book, Red Girl Rat Boy (2014) was a finalist for both the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was selected as a "Best Book / Best Short Fiction" of the year by 4 major media outlets in Canada. Possible blurbs from Nancy Richler, Cary Fagan, Kate Cayley, Meredith Quartermain, Caroline Adderson, Irina Kovalyova Voice-driven stories (compare: Anakana Schofield), highly inflected, with remarkable character range (of age, class, gender) Realist fiction with a considerable variety of length, style, voice, and tone often dealing with the ways in which people deceive themselves about their motives.

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It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used to be, and his sister can’t wait to leave town for good. And everyone along his daily newspaper route looks at him a little differently, this boy who’s come back from the dead, who just might be the only one who understands the miraculous, heart-breaking mystery that is their lives. Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of North America’s hard turn to the right, 1979 offers a smalltown take on the buried lives of those who almost never make the news, and one boy’s attempt to make sense of it all.

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Title story adapted into Academy Award nominated feature film 45 YEARS; screened nation-wide, excellent cross-promotional coverage mentioning author + story Movie tie-in cover art = IFC / Sundance Selects poster image Original trade cloth version sold out of its initial 3,000 copy print run Named among Kirkus Reviews' Best Story Collections of 2015; critically acclaimed by NYTBR, WSJ, PW (starred review), and other major outlets Published alongside North American novel debut (see The Life-Writer) Previously known as a poet and translator, he began publishing fiction later in his career, and his reputation as a masterful short story writer has rocketed in the UK since The Shieling appeared in 2009, then the BBC award in 2010, and the Frank O'Connor in 2013 Pulls together the best material from his 30+ year career

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"Assured and stylistically confident ...Petersen's knowledge of and precise language for subjects such as natural history, the domestic arts, and music add to the classical feel of these stories, set all around the English-speaking Commonwealth. Crisp sentences and slightly old-fashioned vocabulary combine gratifyingly with evocative visual imagery to make this collection a pleasure to read."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Worldly Goods is a multi-faceted diamond: its carbon base is the stuff of life, and its reflective power is dazzling. Petersen can take a small event and in a few pages create an entire world ...a writer this good needs to be read."-Quill & Quire, starred review "What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen's debut collection of short stories ...marked her as a young writer to watch. [This] collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers."--Montreal Review of Books "Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire." --David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World These lyrical, open-eyed stories are set in North America, England, and the author's native New Zealand. With a focus on marriage, family, and the moral complexities that arise from these relationships, Alice Peterson's fiction evokes the best of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro. Alice Petersen's first book, All the Voices Cry, won the QWF Award for Best First Book. Born in New Zealand, she now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

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Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors. Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.

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"John Metcalf comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get."—Alice Munro Set in Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Ottawa, the stories in this collection span the life of writer Robert Ford and his wife Sheila. Playing with various forms of comedy throughout, Metcalf paints a portrait of twentieth-century literary life with levity, satire, and unsuspecting moments of emotional depth. John Metcalf is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow, and Kicking Against the Pricks.

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Malcolm, an aging hairdresser, is reclusive and bitter. Alison, a salon apprentice, is dismissed by Malcolm for her embarrassing innocence. When their colleague is murdered by neo-Nazis, however, the two embark on an unplanned pilgrimage to Auschwitz. A moving and sharp-edged novel by the award-winning author of Ellen in Pieces.

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BY THE FINALIST FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE AND THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMOES PRIZE "One of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language."--Philip Graham, The Millions "Subtle and elegant."--The Wall Street Journal "At once deadpan and beguiling."--The Times Literary Supplement "To understand what makes Antonio 'Mia' Emilio Leite Couto special--even extraordinary--we have to loosen our grip on the binary that distinguishes between 'the West' and 'Africa.' Couto is 'white' without not being African, and as an 'African' writer he's one of the most important figures in a global Lusophone literature that stretches across three continents."--The New Inquiry What would Barack Obama's 2004 campaign have looked like if it unfolded in an African nation? What does it mean to be an African writer today? How do writers and poets from all continents teach us to cross the sertao, the savannah, the barren places where we're forced to walk within ourselves? Bringing together the best pieces from his previously untranslated nonfiction collections, alongside new material presented here for the first time in any language, Pensativities offers English readers a taste of Mia Couto as essayist, lecturer, and journalist--with essays on cosmopolitanism, poverty, culture gaps, conservation, and more.

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Nominated for the 2015 Giller Prize. Nominated for the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Among the National Post's 50 Best Books of 2015 One of Quill & Quire's Books of the Year, 2015 Among NOW Toronto's Top 10 Books of 2015 In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind. Russell Smith is the author of Girl Crazy and How Insensitive. Confidence, recently longlisted for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, is his US debut.

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"Engaging, stirring, and hard to put down."-The New York Times Book Review First published in 1979, Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood, a whimsical boy from the Florida backwoods whose shocking sexual awakening propels him into the world of murder and extortion that roils beneath the surface of 1950s America.

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A BOSTON GLOBE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2011 The poems in this collection inhabit several countries or no country at all, but many are concerned with boundaries: between words and silence, one person and another, today and tomorrow, freedom and fear. Although the poems rarely employ traditional forms of rhyme and repetition, their sound is the engine that propels them, while invented visual shapes intensify the experience of reading. All of these experiments are concerned with how art works, what it requires of us, and what it gives back. As the cow in a gallery tells the viewer: "Feed me, please, / your possibilities, / and I will fatten you."

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Bringing together for the first time in English a selection of poems from his two previously published collections, Kapuscinski offers up a thoughtful, philosophical verse, often aphoristic in tone and structure, that is engaged politically, morally, and viscerally with the world around him. Translated from the Polish.

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The poems of David Hickey's first collection, In the Lights of a Midnight Plow, glitter and startle. His is a writing deftly musical, where every detail and image has been carefully weighed, honed with a knife's edge and poet's ear to fit just so. The subjects are diverse, though his aim, always, is true: whether writing about nature, farming or domestic concerns, there is intelligence, beauty, humour and originality. Most importantly, there is language, the sparkle and sheen of it, the rhythm, all of which tells us that a new and important voice is at work here.

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An unnamed speaker navigates a world where God comes in the shape of a cardinal, speaks in the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe, and paints the desert with bones. Driven by sound, heartbreak, and the baffling limits and possibilities of language, a nameless speaker sets out into a dream-like wilderness where lyric and narrative meet, time dissolves, and figures as various as Moses, the apostle Paul, Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal, and Zora Neale Hurston gather in a colloquy. Born from a region of preachers and stuttering prophets, from the gift of tongues and psalms of lament and praise, Pascal’s Fire negotiates the wonder of the unknown and the tension of belief and confronts the vulnerability of speech where it brushes up against death and grief, wind and desert heat, unquenchable thirst and the steady sound of an IV drip.

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Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • An Oprah Daily Best Book of 2023 • One of the Globe and Mail''s Most Anticipated Titles of 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A 49th Shelf  Fall Book To Put On Your List • One of the Globe 100''s Best Books of 2023During the hottest summer on record, Bea''s dangerous new hobby puts everyone''s sense of security to the test.Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former se

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World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2022.Peter Wood enters a charming antiques shop owned by two young women one stormy evening. But after he returns a second time to a strange old man and a far gloomier atmosphere, and leaves with an unusual jade frog, Peter soon discovers that his purchase was worth more than he paid.

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