Search results for ""invisible publishing""

WINNER OF THE 2023 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDSLONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZEFor fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell, the stories in Francine Cunningham’s debut collection God Isn’t Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice. Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunningham’s characters are presented with moments of choice—some for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to God’s office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his truck’s song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own. Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunningham’s stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human nature—and that redemption can arise where we least expect it.

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Shortlisted for the 2022 Kobo Emerging Writer PrizeThe perfect marriage of literary and speculative fiction for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and NK Jemisin. When Freya Tanangco was ten, she dreamed of her mother's death right before it happened. That’s when she realized she was a veker, someone with enhanced mental abilities and who is scorned as a result. Freya's adult life has been spent in hiding: from the troubled literary legacy created by her author father, and from the scrutiny of a society in which vekers often meet with violence. When her prophetic dreams take a dangerous turn, Freya finds herself increasingly forced to sacrifice her own anonymity—and the fragile safety that comes with it—in order to protect those around her. Interwoven with themes of Filipino and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, The Quiet Is Loud is an intergenerational tale of familial love and betrayal, and what happens when we refuse to let others tell our stories for us."Garner wears her spec fic, geek, and SF influences on her sleeve, and The Quiet Is Loud is a warm welcome to the more literary part of that universe."—Understorey Magazine"A deeply thoughtful book about identity and the quest for true acceptance—especially in a world that encourages us to hate, hide, and fear who we are."—Stacey May Fowles

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A visually and lyrically beautiful debut that celebrates the landscapes we take for granted. Harbour Grids is a long poem in four parts that investigates ideas of community and belonging. Beginning as a meditation on the surface of New York Harbor, the poem radiates outward through issues of labour, location, history, belonging, and subjectivity. How do we experience our complex relations to the world we live in? Harbour Grids seeks to answer this question by combining Stephen Ratcliffe’s attention to daily observation and formal repetition, Lyn Hejinian’s investigations of the linguistic structures, Larry Eigner’s textural sense of language and compositional space of the page, and Juliana Spahr’s ethical attention to the ways we inhabit the world.

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Lyrical realism meets family drama meets sparkling global folktale.Joan, a half-Chinese English conversation teacher unmoored in Europe, flees Budapest for a fresh start. Stepping off the train in Bratislava, she meets Milan, a proud Roma teenager, and they strike up a friendship. Milan helps Joan settle into the city, and in turn, Joan introduces him to Adriana, who has traveled to lay the memory of her dead mother to rest. They form an unlikely trio, bound by love and luck into something like family.At the crossroads of youthful hope and the startling magic of coincidence, Where the Silver River Ends delves deep into mixed-race identity, systemic oppression, family reconciliation, and what happens when we gather the courage to slip out of the current and make our own way in the world.

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Flower and flour. Coral and choral. Lashes and luscious. Frost & Pollen is a poetry collection in two acts: "Bloom & Martyr" is a sensuous walk through a menacing garden of flowers and desire, while "Foliage" retells the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the point of view of the Green Knight, the mysterious figure who teases and torments Gawain. By turns earthy and lush, and punctuated by dark and unsettling undercurrents, these poems converge into an engaging yet evasive feminine exploration of nature and sexuality.

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We don't choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past .Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.

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Desire is holy, sex is church, and our bodies are built for pleasure and connection. These are the tenets that Kaleigh Trace lives by and which she explores in these memoirs and essays.Hot, Wet, and Shaking chronicles Trace’s journey from ignorance to bliss, from being a critically uncool teenager to a successful couple’s and sex therapist, all while weaving together themes of feminism, sex positivity, and disability justice. Writing as a queer, disabled, cisgender woman, Trace lays bare the vulnerability inherent in all of our bodies, the healing intimacy that can be found in loving community, and the endless capacity for humour and play that sex can offer us. Trace laughs at her missteps, forgives herself her errors, and reassures the reader that imperfection is perfect.Moving from the delight of learning how to orgasm to the grief of living with terminal cancer, Trace welcomes you into her world, inviting you to consider the freedom available to u

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Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbanite Send Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood. These essays touch on the major milestones of raising children, from giving birth (and having approximately a million hands in your vagina) and taking your beautiful newborn home (and feeling like you’ve stolen your baby from the hospital), to lying to kids about the Tooth Fairy and mastering the subtle art of beating children at board games. Plus the pitfalls of online culture and the #winemom phenomenon, and the unattainable expectations placed on mothers today. Written from the perspective of an always tired, often anxious, and reluctant suburbanite who is doing her damn best, these essays articulate one woman’s experience in order to help mothers of all kinds process the wildly variable, deeply different ways in which being a mom changes our lives. Reading Pepler’s essays is like hanging out with your best mom-friend—the one who puts it all out there, makes you feel normal and has you laughing so hard you pee a bit."—Kim Shiffman, editor-in-chief, Today's Parent "Easily the most validating book you’ll read this year."—Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books

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Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.It’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

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An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism.From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance.Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.

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A first-rate detective novel that explores media's manipulation of a gullible public. A cult leader announces a miracle will take place and she will rise to heaven. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all of America hums with anticipation. On the appointed day, she disappears and scientist Mortimer Hood, there to verify the miracle, must investigate how—and whether—the whole thing is a hoax, or if the priestess has been murdered. Originally published in 1936, this edition features a new introduction by poet and academic Gregory Betts (editor of The Wrong World: Bertram Brooker's Stories and Essays).

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“I''ve been waiting years for a novel like this! A funny, moving, superbly written coming-of-hooker-age story that holds nothing back."—Casey Plett, author of A Dream of a WomanRaised in a conservative Christian home in the East Coast of Canada, Mag is urged to preserve her purity at all costs. Desperate to secure her place in heaven, she rejects the hyper-sexual youth culture of her small town—until she falls for a magnetic, sophisticated girl while attending a program designed to usher young people into Evangelical Missionary work. Spiraling into shame and regret, Mag breaks away from the Church and launches herself into the world of sex for hire, attempting to shed her repressive past and become an anti-virgin—the antithesis of who she was raised to be.

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Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city''s last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon''s past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of

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"Jay Ritchie''s poem''s veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie''s vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousListening in Many Publics is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous, and held in common. The book expresses this vision in three long poems which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems. Using a circular structure that resists linear capitalist logics, fragmentation that attunes us to sound over sense, and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative, the poems speak to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of rehearsing dif

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A collection that careens from Ancient Greece to the Klondike Gold Rush, for readers of A. S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood.“It is the part that is missing that I am drawn to, that I try to pin down. My gaze is always divided by what is here and what is no longer here. That, for me, is where the deepest pleasure lies, where the sweet overcomes the bitter."A couple coping with a recent loss are tasked with taking stock of a late biology enthusiast’s hoard. A support worker dedicated to rehabilitating young women suffering from, among other things, a certain unexpected effect of the climate apocalypse faces a truth that shatters the illusion separating her work and her personal life. An archaeologist formerly working in Syria struggles with her decision to flee from unrest, while the people she has left behind face an uncertain fate.In Jennifer Falkner’s richly imagined first collection, past and present glancingly converge, making the familiar outlines of myth, history, and everyday life seem suddenly strange. With spare, elegant prose, Falkner introduces the reader to those whose narratives are written in the language of empty space. Above Discovery is a stunning debut collection from an author to watch.

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WINNER OF THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTION A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022 49TH STREET EDITOR'S PICK FOR SEPTEMBER 2022 A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman. Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound now coming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall. With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Müller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.

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A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara. Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of music’s most celebrated sister duos, from their start as Neil Young’s protégés to Canadian indie-rock purveyors and, making their riskiest transformation yet, into mainstream pop breakouts. Coming up as grunge-loving musicians in the late '90s and early 2000s, Tegan and Sara found themselves awkwardly pushed into categories that didn’t quite fit: a novelty twin sister folk act when they wanted to be taken seriously; pop when they wanted to be indie rock; and sellouts when they finally made their bid for mainstream success. As young, queer musicians who didn’t see anyone else like themselves growing up (in a time where Internet access hadn’t yet formed global spaces and communities for LGBTQ+ people), Tegan and Sara’s path to pop stardom was filled with familiar hurdles, but no clear instructions on how to navigate things like homophobic press, niche queer audiences that wanted to claim them, or sexism at every turn. It’s a journey with ups and downs, but Tegan and Sara’s perseverance—alongside a music industry and journalism world that’s had to learn to confront its own biases—has helped create a musical world today that more readily accepts and embraces queer voices. Featuring continuous sonic transformations, Tegan and Sara’s story is essential to Canadian music history.

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A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022AS FEATURED IN TORONTO STAR, ZOOMER MAGAZINE, AND ON CBC'S ONTARIO MORNING AND GLOBAL TVFor readers who love Mark Haddon, Miriam Toews, and Sally Rooney Paisley Ratchford is trying to keep it together, but in eight weeks, the Toronto apartment building she lives in will be demolished. A last-ditch effort to reclaim her abandoned childhood home on Amherst Island plunges Paisley into memories of growing up in the tight-knit community, and into the obsessive compulsive disorder that has only ever offered a semblance of control. Her compulsion to count in sets of eight had little effect on thwarting bullies, her father’s bad luck, and her mother’s mental illness—all of which return to haunt her. When help arrives in the form of Paisley’s old classmate and tormentor Garnet Mulligan, her predicament only worsens. For a shot at a future, Paisley needs to stare down her past, including all the habits that have stopped her from thriving. At Last Count is a wise and often laugh-out-loud funny tale that proves we don’t always need to believe everything our brain tells us.

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