Coach House Books

Visual artist John Scott is perhaps best known for his Trans Am of the Apocalypse, a car with the entire Book of Revelation scratched onto it, which is on display at the National Gallery of Canada. As Ann MacDonald discovered when she began working with him, Scott's personal life is no less compelling. So she sat down with Scott, a tape recorder and a stack of napkins for him to draw on – Shiva's Really Scary Gifts is the result.

From catching a baseball bat in the teeth to harbouring the FBI's most-wanted fugitive in his Queen Street studio, John Scott has, it seems, done it all. Join him as he, in words and drawings, terrifies a pair of robbers, loses a parent, and struggles to get a gun permit for an art installation – John Scott's intriguing stories and the hundred accompanying drawings will help you get to know the man behind the Am.

Common Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks towards what comes next.

‘Watch for the places where Pinder goes for the imperative: like the book as a whole, these commands are generous, beautiful, and difficult lifelines thrown from a fellow survivor of the present.’

– Jennifer Nelson, author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife

‘Common Place feels like the logbook of a survivor, one that shows how the intimate and the idiosyncratic persist within the post-capitalist technosphere. A tattered record keeping, Common Place is friend of the abject landscape, “home of the lesser, lowercase subject.” Grasp its compassionate disposition, and this fragmentary poem reveals the affective centre of its ingeniously dissociative fabric.’

– Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves

Described by Variety as ‘Yukon Gothic,’ Claudia Dey’s acclaimed play Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the play’s opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned – a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters.

Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love.

Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.

The collected works of poet and bon vivant Fred Gaysek are now available in this massive trade edition. Includes lovecrushed, The Young Man and the Dog, First Scratches No Blood Eye Down and more.

The word "magyarázni" (pronounced MUG-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-five folk-art visual poems each paired with a written poem, Hajnoczky reveals the beauty and tension of first-generation cultural identity.

‘Because translation between cultures is always fraught – and yet somehow translate we must – Magyarázni explores language and cultural identity in the permeable space fomenting between family and society, word and image initiating us into a new alphabet of lived meaning. In reading we wonder along with Magyarázni’s wandering “you,” we care and get entangled in the “brambles of your cursive,” we too are “made Hungarian.”’
– Oana Avasilichioaei

‘Familiar but out of reach, Magyarázni reforms the language of home on the tip of your tongue, a language of knotted cursive and bubbled syntax; folksong and stovetop. Each letter blossoms as a hand-drawn flower and a sputtering drone of spits and pith. Magyarázni punctuates every I with a poppy seed, every C with the splinter­ed foil of a solemn treat. Mournful and personal, Magyarázni calls out for the language of family.’
– Derek Beaulieu

'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy.

Where Timon of Athens meets Shania Twain, that's where you'll find Sitcom. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. In between, you'll find Auden, Arthur Carlson, oper, Girls Gone Wild and the lead from Suddenly Susan's turn as a creative writing student.

Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode.

Brian Lembeck – ‘Pulpy’ – takes life slow and steady. He likes his office job, and he likes his gentle, figurine-collecting boss, Al. He even likes the bitter receptionist, though he’s the only one who does. He likes his wife, Midge, too, and their ice-dancing lessons. Midge works as a candle-party hostess – she quit her office job when Al’s dog ate her pet pigeon and Al promised Pulpy a promotion.

But when Al retires and the tyrannical Dan takes over, the promotion vanishes. And then Dan’s oversexed wife, Beatrice, takes a shine to Pulpy, and Dan starts to think Midge is one hot tamale. Soon, the receptionist is smitten with Pulpy, Midge can’t get rid of Dan and Beatrice, and Pulpy’s job is in jeopardy. For once, Pulpy just might have to take a stand.

Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is dominated by water. Like most cities, though, Toronto has mismanaged its water, from the decades-long transformation of the city’s creeks into sewersheds to the alteration of Toronto’s waterfront. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto’s water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city’s surface water. In HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, 30 contributors examine the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and call into question the city’s past, present and future engagement with water.

Glenn Gould captured the imagination of a worldwide audience, becoming an instant celebrity with his eccentric performance style and his definitive renderings of Bach. David Young has used Gould's early and late recordings of The Goldberg Variations as a structural template for the acclaimed Glenn, his dramatic exploration of the music, ideas, and remarkable life of this iconoclastic and celebrated pianist, arguably the most important artist Canada has ever produced.

I learned the secret of serenity
by waterboarding daffodils.
My Buddha is landfill.
My mantra choked

from a bluebird’s neck.
It’s ruthless, the pursuit
of happiness. Eighteen
seconds have elapsed.

This collection is a universe where minimalism and maximalism work in harmony. Ethics, economics, glamour and alternative physics are just a few of the vehicles Besner uses in her jaundiced pursuit of knowledge and joy. At the collection’s core is a series of brilliantly illuminated poems patterned on a scientific study of synaesthesia and Fisher Price refrigerator magnets. Besner’s courageous comparisons and musicality provide the critical happiness we all need.

‘Besner’s imagination doesn’t appear to have an upper or outer limit … Reading her poems is a bad trip and a transformational experience.’

– Ken Babstock

‘Besner is one of the funniest poets writing in this country.’

– National Post

Linda Besner's first book of poetry, The Id Kid, was published in 2011 by Véhicule Press and named as one of the National Post's Best Poetry Books of the Year. She is the former poetry editor of Hazlitt. She lives in Montreal.

A Painted Elephant tells a tale of love – unrequited, of course, like all the best stories. Our Juliet? A lonely Indian elephant, newly arrived at the Calgary Zoo from Holland, with a penchant for moonlight escapes. Her Romeo? The wooden Maytag Man statue on Calgary's 9th Street, with his sad eyes, his oaken thighs, his aloofness.

This book, the first from Jill Hartman, is a tragi-comic narrative poem about pachyderm passion. Nina Simone, Pig Latin, German opera and a chorus of Canadian poets play in the background. Incense, speculaas cookies and cheap flowers scent the air. And goddesses, myrmidons and shipwrecks appear with some frequency.

With fractured, playful language, the smart and funny Painted Elephant trumpets an important new voice in Canadian poetry.

In the early nineties, Beck sang 'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?' and changed everything. Suddenly, it wasn't so bad to be a nerd or an oddball; loser chic had begun.

Ten years later, after all the computer nerds have had the last laugh, Jon Paul Fiorentino turns to Thorstein Veblen's seminal social science text from 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen's book introduced to our culture the terms 'conspicuous consumption' and 'nouveau riche'; it identified a new demographic, the leisure class, and demarcated its position in culture. The Theory of the Loser Class, then, is an art manifesto for the aesthetics and ethics of loser culture.

If the Anthony Michael Hall character in The Breakfast Club wrote poems (and, deep down, you know that he did), they’d probably read a lot like The Theory of the Loser Class. Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking The Theory of the Leisure Class to Star Wars (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this carefully crafted suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of everyone’s inner geek. Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburban Winnipeg, where a landscape of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video-game consoles serves as a mirror to the inner states of urban ennui among the socially inept and the culturally vexed.

By turns compassionate, funny and filled with selfloathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is never without the possibility of redemption; ‘And if a loser falls,’ says the narrator of ‘Right in the Spine,’ ‘I feel it.’ The Theory of the Loser Class is the perfect soundtrack for the alienated and the hopeless.

In 1934, Gertrude Stein asked "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose." Throaty Wipes answers this question and many more! How does broadband work? Does "chuffed" mean pleased or displeased? What if the generations of Adam had mothers? Through her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism, Holbrook delivers what we've been waiting for.

Susan Holbrook is the author of three poetry books, including Joy Is So Exhausting and Reading (and Writing About) Poetry (Broadview Press, 2015). She lives in Leamington, Ontario, and teaches at the University of Windsor.

Desire and deceit, love and loathing – The Nightingales is a novel about best friends.

It's summer 1989, and as an insufferable heat stalks the city of Toronto, Julie and Alex fall madly in friendship. Alex wants nothing more than languorous nights of gin, pool-hall confidences and loyalty, but Julie wants something else - love. Enter Luc.

Sexy misadventures and labyrinthine passions scorch the night as Julie looks for life in all the wrong places. Entangled in Alex's affections and jealousies, Julie's innocence becomes a luxury she can't afford. Sensual and textured, The Nightingales hits the jackpot on the ante of the female heart.

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)

'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild, and Michel Foucault. It's a thrilling, brilliant, and really hot place to be.' — Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail

On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him.

When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games.

As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl’s self-consciousness.

Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: “Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole.” Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised he’ll one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata.

After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way.

Stunt is the first novel by one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Dey’s words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.

In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge. The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family's values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.

This remarkable autobiographical play by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll-like play: concentric stories enveloping each other. A writer is told, in confidence, a terrible tale of murder and injustice and he promises never to repeat the story. Goodness is the writer breaking his word.

Recently divorced, Michael Redhill goes to Poland to get away frm his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a 'real' story of evil. Through this reluctant witness, Redhill learns of a genocide. He encounters, through the memory of the storyteller, an alleged war criminal, about to be put on trial. But this is an old man with Alzheimer's who can no longer remember the time his crimes were allegedly committed. Has his guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment? The witness conjures for Redhill the war criminal's passionate and beautiful daughter, who will defend her father at all costs. There is also the prosecuting attorney, who has much in common with the old man whose destruction he seeks. As well as an uncomfortable attraction to his daughter. Each is drawn to the other. All is witnessed by a female prison guard – the one who tells the playwright, years later, what really happened in the quest to give a nation some closure. Everyone's story is compelling, and the ending is as unexpected as it is shocking.

Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? What is our responsibility? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it?

Goodness is a play about what happens in the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.

Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknowst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall in love, fall in science, and fail to make a baby. Their conversation, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love, and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation. Through a series of rapid exchanges, verbal games, and musical numbers, they discover that all their thoughts come from God, all their words come from the devil, and their desire for love is a habit acquired from the cinema. Sound familiar? Don’t be so hard on yourself.

[boxhead]: a bedtime story for your brain.

When Jim Hawkins finds the map to a legendary treasure, he embarks on a perilous voyage to claim it. His journey leads him to uncover a pirate mutiny, a chance meeting with a marooned misfit, and, ultimately, to the discovery of what kind of person he wants to be.

Nicolas Billon's plays have been produced in Stratford, and across Canada, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. His first play, The Elephant Song, was made into a feature film.

If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, food-security concerns, how chefs are trained: how a city nourishes itself might say more than anything else about what kind of city it is.

With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-safety policy, of feeding the poor, and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree.

Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto – and, by extension, every city – sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork.

Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water. As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid America slides into fascism, kids from south of the border collide with kids from north of the border and, over lattes, ruminate on new possibilities. Your Secrets Sleep With Me is a frenetic, ruthlessly hilarious critique of power and politics. Brilliant, absurd, incisive and fun, this caffeinated novel will take you on a doomed search for the place where you end and everything else begins. But you will not be alone. Shhh. Don't worry. Your secrets sleep with us.

Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.

O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere.

Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.

Where does the fragile, robust self reside when 'personal' voice is sent out online into an ironic masquerade ball of alias identity and wanton proxy? What stirs us? Can there be anything authentic about feeling anything anymore?

In What Stirs, Margaret Christakos looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual is both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented in the arrival of virtual identity.

Minor earthquakes every day; that's what they say. Lucy feels the tremors like a needle sensitized to respond to the slightest movement. She feels the push, the blind thrust of the earth's elastic body, pushing out, pulling in, behaving unpredictably. She lies awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of the tectonic plates moving against one another, building up tension, until something has to give.

On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes.

But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle – Vancouver, Montreal, the island – that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family.

Part Egyptian myth, part Alice in Wonderland, How the Blessed Live is an ethereally quiet, unexpected debut from a novelist to be watched.

Middle-aged and short on prospects, Charles Wilson returns to Trempes, the village of his childhood, and discovers the body of his childhood friend, Paul Faber, hanging from a tree in the clearing where they played as boys. Thus begins Wilson’s obsessive quest to exhume the secrets of his past and to understand the reasons for his friend’s death. But memories shift, people change and things are never as they seem. Soon Wilson finds himself caught up in a delusory spiral that threatens his very existence.

This is at once a neo-Gothic metaphysical thriller and a meticulous meditation on the unapologetic betrayal of memory and imagination. Wilson’s story bubbles up from the faults between mystery and fairy tale, brimming with characters haunted and tortured by the past, where truth and deception are wound up in time like the gnarled branches of old, grizzled trees.

Haven is fiercely protective of her little brother, Chase, spiriting him away when their father’s temper is about to flare yet again. She hides the bread away so he’ll have something for lunch, and she teaches him to hide himself. But when that’s no longer enough to keep him safe, she steals the car and takes them both away to their aunt, Mary, who tries her best to love and nurture them.

They try to redeem their harrowing childhood in different ways: Haven, lost and damaged, goes to medical school and teacher’s college, and marries young, hoping to find meaning through her daughter, April. Chase battles his demons through cathartic but doomed performance art. And, always, they try to keep one another afloat.

Chase and Haven is a haunting story – inventively told and deeply felt – of suffering and love, made of thousands of small impressionist facets that refract the quiet spectrum of the beauty and the detritus of two entwined lives.

'All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey

Running Unconscious is the first collection of poetry by Toronto poet and poetry promoter Peter McPhee. 'Never Trust a Polar Bear in Shades,' 'Leaning against a lamppost at the corner of King and Diversity,' and, of course, 'Why the Stegosaurus is my favourite dinosaur' – Running Unconscious assembles all the McPhee classics in one goodlookin' volume.

Everyone falls in love with their therapist at least a little. But what happens when the therapist not only loves you back but also acts upon it? Troubled is the poetic account of the true story of a patient/psychiatrist relationship gone horribly wrong. With his signature mix of scathing self-analysis and volatile wordplay, RM Vaughan brazenly documents how an innocent flirtation with his therapist escalated into dangerous sexual misadventure. But when the clandestine relationship goes awry, the consequences are heart-rending and career-ending.

Troubled is brutally honest and erotically frank, a no-holds-barred confession that is itself distrustful of the language of confession.

A 2015 ReLit finalist

A 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist

Shortlisted for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

'It offers wit, precision of speech, weird connections, odd juxtapositions, jarring images, & a variety of moods in a swirl of sentences that refuse to stay still but argue with each other & with their readers. This School is well worth attending.'—Eclectic Ruckus

"Her poetry is a subversion of the dominant paradigms in this country . . . one ride that will leave you gripping both sides of the canoe."—Lambda Literary Review

At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Jen Currin's sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community.

Jen Currin's books of poetry include Hagiography and The Inquisition Yours, which won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Award.

Two novels, two young women at the frontiers of sex.

Like a series of Penthouse letters penned by Kathy Acker, Lie With Me recounts a woman's sexual escapades, picking up random men in bars for a series of increasingly extreme encounters, hoping to understand love from the far side of sluttiness.

In The Way of the Whore, Mira, an introverted Jewish girl obsessed with Jean Genet, allows herself to be seduced by the sex industry, determined to find meaning in her tormented relationships with cruel men.

Tamara Faith Berger's first two novels have been languishing out of print. They were scandalous when they were first published; substantially revised and returned to print, they're just as titillating and troubling now.

"Treading a line between sublime experimentation and unsettling honesty, Little Cat rides a wave of female sexual energy. . . . 'Please, I want you to stay with me till it's over,' the narrator of 'Lie With Me' begs. With writing this good, it's hard not to.' – Quill & Quire

"Berger's writing is significant, poignant and consciously uncomfortable. Her portrait of female sexuality is daring, original and troubling. Berger's language is crass; this isn't missionary-style 'love-making.' This is dirty, animalistic sex. This is pornography rubbing up against the literary establishment." – Telegraph-Journal

Praise for Tamara Faith Berger's Maidenhead (winner of the 2012 Believer Book Award):

"Myra's confusion, her passion, her need for possession and to be possessed, make this novel an incredible read, finding its place, as Sheila Heti (who should know) wrote, 'somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault.'" – Flavorwire

"There are no easy moments, no comfort to be found in the searing prose. . . . When writers get young female sexuality right, stories become a revelation and such is the case with Maidenhead. The writing pulls the reader desperately close." – Roxane Gay, The Rumpus

Tamara Faith Berger was born in Toronto. She wrote porn stories for a living and attempted to make dirty films before publishing her first book, Lie With Me, in 1999. It was made into a film in 2004. In 2001, A Woman Alone at Night was published. Her third book, Maidenhead, won the 2012 Believer Book Award.

Praise for The Search for Heinrich Schlögel:

"Martha Baillie has written a timeless masterpiece. Every page is full of haunting wonderment. Truly, I know of no novel quite like it—it's a blessing. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel has dreamlike locutions, it tells the most unusual tale, and it brings the margins of the world to us with photographic immediacy." —Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder

In If Clara, nobody stands on firm ground. Daisy, a writer confined to her home, her leg in a cast from hip to ankle, receives a parcel containing the manuscript of a novel about a Syrian refugee and is asked to pose as its writer. Julia, the curator at the Kleinzahler Gallery, has no idea that her sister, Clara, has written a novel. However, she does know that Clara suffers from a debilitating mental illness, is unpredictable, and lapses easily into hostility. Maurice's life is changed by an art installation involving a pair of binoculars welded to the wall through which visitors are invited to observe passersby outside. An ultralight aircraft's collision with a quiet lawn brings them all together. If Clara explores the emotional weight of friendship, the complexity of family, and people inextricably entwined.

Martha Baillie's most recent novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (Tin House), received wide acclaim and was an O Magazine editors' pick. She was lives in Toronto.

What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching gig? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive.

Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining?, which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She lives in Montreal, Queceb, where she is working on her PhD in Literature.

Mission Creep began as reworkings of the CIA's Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual. Attempts to torture the text itself—obeying literary constraints, employing audio editing tools, and displacing it with other voices, including Hannah Arendt's and Evel Knievel's—reveal convoluted narratives, transmissions that contemplate whether torture provides useful information. At once a fugue and an absurdist comedy, info-overload and pure tone, Mission Creep comes on with the fire of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on the tongue like the last snowflake of winter.

Joshua Trotter lives in Montreal, Quebec. His first book, All This Could Be Yours, was one of the National Post's top ten poetry books of 2010.

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)

These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. "Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth," he writes, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Matthew Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's seen and what's experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I'm alone.

If it were necessary to tell someone where I am,
I'd say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles.

I'd say I have loved.

Matthew Tierney is the author of the Trillium Award–nominated The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

The Doctor introduces the gang: The Supine Cobbler (wanted), her estranged sister (dead by hanging), her former best friend (missing, presumed dead) and her apprentice (a turncoat). Together they negotiate integrity in a lawless world. The Supine Cobbler is an unsentimental legend and a true story. It is a hero myth for girls.

Praise for the productions of The Supine Cobbler:

‘The show is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’

– Theatre Reader

‘Jill Connell … is consistently one of the most innovative playwrights in the country.’

– Vue Weekly

‘The Supine Cobbler is brilliant, subversive and deeply hilarious. The play is about an abortion – but also: waiting, haunting, cheating, hurting, daring and the private cultivation of one’s humanity. It is singular and surprising and epic and lean as Bowie. You cannot help but talk about this play. It is the work of a lover and a rebel. To miss it, would be to miss a master in her early bloom.’

– Claudia Dey, author of Trout Stanley and Stunt

‘I love this absolutely idiosyncratic play. It’s very funny, moving and sharp, and the only work of art about abortion I can think of that doesn’t sentimentalize or simplify the experience, but gets the strangeness and banality of it exactly right.’

– Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest.

Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet. In the process of making his documentary, Jay must try to unravel the threads of Henry's labyrinthine, suicide-obsessed mind with only the poems as tools; he must also contend with two of Henry's sometimes lovers, Luisa, a Mexican violinist, and Dee, a feminist writer now living on a farm in the Annapolis Valley and writing a novel about Catherine the Great.

The Dying Poem will take you through stories within stories in search of the mystery behind Henry's artful suicide. And, in the end, the crossing of paths and the difficulty of speaking about the dead tell us something about the making of art and what art makes of us.

Legendary Canadian filmmaker Frank Cole entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the first man to cross the Sahara on foot. Meticulous, fearless, obsessive, and the maker of at least two bonafide masterpieces, there has never been anything in the cinema like Frank Cole. His murder in Mali left us with a legacy of two features, a pair of award-winning short films and a mystery that may never be solved.

This book is a ravishing odyssey of inner and outer visions, a heaven-sent trove of first-person experiences and critical vantages. It features never-before-seen material from the filmmaker himself, including colour postcards, photographs and excerpts from a journal made during his Sahara crossings. Here, more than a dozen international luminaries weigh in on the Canadian legend, alongside Korbett Matthews' award-winning documentary The Man Who Crossed the Sahara.

The follow-up to the critically acclaimed No. 111, Fidget ruthlessly documents every movement made by Goldsmith's body on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997 from 10 am to 11 pm. Literary critic Marjorie Perloff compares Fidget to 'a Beckett prose text,' and says many witty and intelligent things about it in her afterword.

SHORTLISTED FOR CBC CANADA READS 2019

WINNER OF THE BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD

Eighty-five years of art and history through the eyes of a woman who fled her family – as re-imagined by her granddaughter.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother’s mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne’s life.

Suzanne, winner of the Prix des libraires du Québec and a bestseller in French, is a fictionalized account of Suzanne’s life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum. It takes readers through the Great Depression, Québec's Quiet Revolution, women’s liberation, and the American civil rights movement, offering a portrait of a volatile, fascinating woman on the margins of history. And it’s a granddaughter’s search for a past for herself, for understanding and forgiveness.

‘It’s about a nameless despair, an unbearable sadness. But it’s also a reflection on what it means to be a mother, and an artist. Most of all, it’s a magnificent novel.’– Les Méconnus

The craft of craft, the art of craft – here in Canada we're just starting to really talk about these things. In March 1999, Jean Johnson, who runs Toronto's Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre, organized a wildly successful symposium on the state of craft in Canada. Curators, writers, critics, academics and craftspeople spoke about all aspects of craft: history, practice, theory, criticism. Taken together, these papers create a clear picture of the vibrant crafts scene in Canada.

The symposium was a groundbreaking event, a first in Canada, offering to the crafts community a new depth of consideration. The book, too, is a Canadian first, and it will allow a dialogue about the academic side of the craft movement to continue.

Each of the book's three sections, History, Theory and Critical Writing, contains a keynote paper and essays by experts in each field, including Mark Kingwell writing 'On Style,' Blake Gopnik on 'Reviewing Craft Exhibitions for the Art Pages,' and Robin Metcalfe addressing 'Teacup Readings: Contextualizing Craft in the Art Gallery.'

Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how she’s still a virgin and how she’ll never figure it all out.

And then she meets Nellcott Ragland, a 23-year-old who works at Basement Records and wears black eyeliner, and he asks her on a date.

Alice tries to hide out in the Film Society office. She spies on Nellcott at the record store. She gets advice from Walker, her filmmaking, womanizing friend from Toronto. But sooner or later her parents are going to visit and watch her cry. She won’t admit it to them, but Nellcott has become her darling.

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian

Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization.

Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term.

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Hervé, the friend with AIDS; his lover, Hervé, also afflicted; Hervé the hairdresser; Hervé next door who has defenestrated himself: in A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning the narrator confronts the deaths of so many friends, all named Hervé. But the dead cannot be buried so easily; they live on, spectres haunting her, as the cumulative effect of all her Hervés becomes a multifaced Death that simultaneously angers, saddens, cheers and confuses her. In this unfolding series of encounters between the living and the dead, Mavrikakis draws on Deleuze, Freud, Foucault and novelist Hervé Guibert to make of herself and of this visceral, compelling novel a kind of living mausoleu where those unable to speak may still be heard.

With Canada / US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain’s third book blenderizes ‘pop’ culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border.

From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical ‘History of Canada,’ this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen.

American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Québécois lyrics.

Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they’re your passport to the land of a new political poetry.

New Theatre represents a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that investigate the process of meaning. Coolly cerebral poems about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's later life muse on power and identity, while an intimate autobiographical long poem counterpoints several quieter, equally surprising pieces that spike and bloom.

Autumn.
The sky streaked with silk parachutes
or by tears.
A sparkling epidemic.

I think if the world truly tore in half it would seep blue.

Susan Steudel is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for emerging artist. New Theatre is her first book.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE

Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was also evil, a jail for animals who'd committed no crimes, but he just loved it. The way Pillow figured it, love wasn't about goodness, it wasn't about being right, loving the very best person, having the most ethical fun. Love was about being alone and making some decisions.

Pillow loves animals. Especially the exotic ones. Which is why he chooses the zoo for the drug runs he does as a low-level enforcer for a crime syndicate run by André Breton. He doesn't love his life of crime, but he isn't cut out for much else, what with all the punches to the head he took as a professional boxer. And now that he's accidentally but sort of happily knocked up his neighbor, he wants to get out and go straight. But first there's the matter of some stolen coins, possibly in the possession of George Bataille, which leads Pillow on a bizarre caper that involves kidnapping a morphine-addled Antonin Artaud, some corrupt cops, a heavy dose of Surrealism, and a quest to see some giraffes.

Andrew Battershill is a writer and teacher currently living in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of the University of Toronto's MA in creative writing program, he was the fiction editor and co-founder of Dragnet Magazine.

There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's second day were the ones who could not resist seeing him sooner. Here was the man to whom they would confess the darkest things. It was important to feel him out. Mrs Young, for instance, after she had seen him eat a piece of her macaroni pie, quietly asked what he thought of adultery.

André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral.

For his very first parish, Father Christopher Pennant is sent to the sleepy town of Barrow. With more sheep than people, it's very bucolic—too much Barrow Brew on Barrow Day is the rowdiest it gets. Bu things aren't so idyllic for Liz Denny, whose fiancé doesn't want to decide between Liz and his more worldly mistress Jane, and for Father Pennant himself, who greets some miracles of nature—mayors walking on water, talking sheep—with a profound crisis of faith.

'It’s been clear since his debut novel, Childhood, that Alexis is one of our most distinctive and exacting prose stylists, and at its highest pitch, as in the breathtaking final paragraph, these are sentences that attain the level of the best music.' - Montreal Gazette

Praise for André Alexis's previous books:

"Astonishing . . . an irresistible, one-of-a-kind work."—Quill & Quire

"Alexis [has an] astute understanding of the madly shimmering, beautifully weaving patterns created by what we have agreed to call memory."—Ottawa Citizen

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His books include Asylum and Ingrid and the Wolf.

The Animal Sciences is like a science fair project. Take a group of friends – the missing Robin, crazy Kookla, jealous Duffer, lost Autumn and Latvian Igor – add baking soda and vinegar, and watch what happens. As the story rockets back and forth between the past and present, the consecutive anecdotes start to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, and we begin to see how the different atoms – the characters – of this particular molecule are interdependent. We come to suspect, too, that just as the laws of nature make that baking-soda volcano inevitable, so too do they rule human relationships, making volcanoes out of some chemical reactions and warmth out of others. Maybe, just maybe, human sciences aren't so different from the animal ones.

What is it that makes us human? Could it be love?

A fifteenth-century portrait painter, grieving the untimely death of his unrequited love, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until the monks assign him the task of copying manuscripts – though he is illiterate. His work heals him and grows the monastery's library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press.

Dominique Fortier is an editor and translator living in Montreal. She is the author of five books, including On the Proper Use of Stars and Wonder.

Rhonda Mullins is an award-winning translator and writer living in Montreal, Quebec.

What is the best way to tell a story?

In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson.

Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter.

Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative.

Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

"After reading Mr. Faulkner's incredible book, something happened. I began to feel bad for the person I was before reading his poems. The poet writes: 'I've placed dynamite around your heart and a bit / in your teeth. How bored you must have been / before you met me.' And he's right. It was so goddamn boring before we met him."—Matthew Dickman

Need Machine clamors through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumor.

Andrew Faulkner co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. This is his first book.

Pressed leaflet variable between the covers of anything brisk. Infused on the brink of staggering conception. Immaculate handle given by the power to define. In Zambia did kinship kindle. Homogeneous assemblage of molecular grace. Leopard print sans serif looming. State determined posture lulling. An ornament or translation singing. The terms of crumpled questions airing. To linearize becoming woman. Inimical custom of counting. Edible empire behooves the darkness swallowing sunshine in various volumes. One more hour capsized by metaphor. Run, she says, the ports are open.

The poems in Parlance thrash against the matrix of their own referential nature using a series of linguistic echoes that reference writers like the 'maternal' Virginia Woolf or the 'paternal' Leonard Cohen. The rebellious child of Zelazo's text splinters its Modernist and Canadian parentage to occupy an uncharted linguistic space somewhere between excess and void.

These poems are painterly, splintered, majestic. An accomplished first book of poetry, Parlance is an act of becoming, and of coming home.

The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness.

With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. You’ll find the hopelessly misunderstood Love the Clown (never goes out without his red wig) and Noni, a forlorn young man who can’t stop crying.

But while sadness plays a starring role, the true hero of the collection is the imagination; its transformative powers warm widows and drunken gods and designated mourners.

You won’t forget The Refrigerator Memory: the icebox cometh to warm your heart.

‘Diana Hartog writes as if she has been prying open a nest of animal dreams – all the beasts in this bestiary have been caught without their shells on. The writing is sly, charming, wicked and funny. Every once in a while, Hartog catches you off guard by injecting an element of pain that leaves you breathless. Stung. This book should not be read while bathing in honey. Read first. Bathe second. The order is imperative. Polite to Bees will tell you why.’ – Timothy Findley

'With grace, compassion, humour, with a deft imagination and exquisite language, Diana Hartog has made a lovely contribution in one of the most delightful literary genres that exists. This bestiary is the work of a master sorceress, and the animals she’s conjured have the capacity to teach us all a lesson or two about the ways of humanity.’ – Bradford Morrow

’Marvellous tact informs these animations, which arise from our natures and compose wild pedagogies of the imagination.’ – Sharon Thesen