Coach House Books

The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie games” – with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world.

Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett.

The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which you’re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after they’ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insider’s look at one of our most popular art forms.

Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs.

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.

Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?

“A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.

Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?

A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form.

Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination.

‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail

‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)

Aesop meets Anaïs Nin in these absurdist stories of very unexpected redemption

Getting to the Shamrock Motel isn’t easy. It’s just off Concession #18, but you can’t get there through a sequence of lefts and rights. To find the Shamrock you have to be lost – not just on the map, but in your heart and soul.

The Shamrock Motel does not accept reservations. The only way to get a room is by walking into the office and asking Rosemary, the owner/operator for one. Try not to stare at her hair.

Fair warning: no one spends the night, or even an hour at the Shamrock without experiencing some form of transformation. Whether it’s accidentally sleeping with a bear, turning yourself into a river, or getting entirely too intimate with the sun, time spent at the Shamrock will make you wiser, stronger, sexier, and more yourself. Even if that’s the last thing you want.

These linked stories explore the intersection of personality and desire, love and lust, the joy and sadness of being alive and in love. Heated pool, cable TV, and a shot at redemption: the Shamrock Motel offers it all. Credit cards are accepted, but cash is preferred.

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region)

A Globe and Mail Top Five First Fiction Title of 2009

Nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh has an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. He knows that if you wet a dog's food with your saliva and he refuses to eat it then he's top dog, and he knows that dolphins can sleep half a brain at a time. What he doesn't know, though, is why his grandfather died, or why waste-of-flesh Lyle always picks on him. Or why his parents can't live together - after all, when other mate-for-life animals have a fight, it's not like one of them just packshis bags and leaves the country.

To make it to-infinity worse, he's worried sick about what humans are doing to the planet, and his mother is worried sick about him. But shouldn't everyone be losing sleep over the fact that a quarter of all Earth's mammals are on the Red List of Threatened Species? So, when a White's tree frog ends up in an aquarium in his fourth-grade classroom, it's the last straw, and he and his best friend, Bird, are spurred to action.

"Carla Gunn's prose crackleswith energy in this illuminating, heart-gripping novel. A hilarious, brilliant, loveable, exasperating child, Phin and his mesmerizing voice need listening to. The powerful, authentic narrator brings to mind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but Gunn's an original, and draws us deeply into Phin's many and varied worlds. A compassionate tale balancing light and dark, this is a must-read book.' —Sheree Fitch, author of Kiss the Joy As It Flies

"I'm thrilled to promote Amphibian as our number one summer reading suggestion to customers of all ages, many of whom have returned to say how much they enjoyed it. It really has all the elements of a classic in the making. In nine-year-old Phineas Walsh, Carla Gunn has created a narrator that is perceptive, hilarious and frustrating, as he grapples with humanity's seeming indifference to the rapid destruction of our animals and our planet. The issues are urgent, yet the author maintains a light tone throughout that isbreathtakingly delightful, heartfelt and ultimately hopeful. It's fresh, timely and very hard to find fault with. I was thrilledto read it and shed light on this gem of a book that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. It's what independent bookselling is all about." —Andrew Peck, Singing Pebble Books, Ottawa

A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.

In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.

Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.

This is a call to climate-justice action.

Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.

Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia

With art by Kevin Adonis Browne, Sacha Archer, Adam Gunn,Eshrat Erfanian, Jessica Houston, Gaye Jackson, Sarah Mangle, Aude Moreau, Shelley Niro, Sarah Pereux, and Barry Pottle.

With writing by Jordan Abel, Kazim Ali, Hari Alluri, Sacha Archer, Rae Armantrout, Joanne Arnott, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sâkihitowin Awâsis, Chris Bailey, Carleigh Baker, Jonathan Ball, Manahil Bandukwala, Gary Barwin, Yvonne Blomer, Nicole Brossard, Kevin Adonis Browne, Jenna Butler, Jody Chan, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Ching-In Chen, Margaret Christakos, Allison Cobb, CAConrad, Dani Couture, Francine Cunningham, Jen Currin, Simone Dalton, Ruth Daniell, Adrian De Leon, Trynne Delaney, Adam Dickinson, Marcella Durand, Mercedes Eng, Eshrat Erfanian, Whitney French, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Armand Garnet, Andrew McEwan, Sue Goyette, Laurie D. Graham, Adam Gunn, Branda Hillman, Jessica Houston, Gaye Jackson, Sheniz Janmohamed, Kaie Kellough, Kirby, Jónína Kirton, Cory Lavender, Jessica Le, Curtis LeBlanc, Christine Leclerc, Karen Lee, Carrianne Leung, Natalie Lim, Jessica Magonet, Sarah Mangle, Terese Mason Pierre, Kathleen McCracken, Yohani Mendis, Aude Moreau, Tiffany Morris, Erín Moure, Shelley Niro, Kunjana Parashar, Sarah Pereux, Barry Pottle, Jana Prikryl, Nikki Reimer, Ira Reinhart-Smith, Waubgeshig Rice, Erin Robinsong, Krishnakumar Sankaran, Emily Schultz, Jane Shi, Evie Shockley, Sue Sinclair, Adam Sol, Pablo Strauss, Anna Swanson, Christiane Vadnais, Isabella Wang, Rita Wong, and Jacob Wren. 

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE

Ways of Seeing meets Mary Ruefle in these visual-art-inflected poems

Though they started from Sheryda Warrener’s impulse to see herself more clearly, the poems in Test Piece ended up becoming more expansive meditations on seeing and vision. They engage with the process and practice of art-making, and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Ruth Asawa, and Agnes Martin.

Not-seeing/not-knowing is a motif, as is weave, grid, pattern, rhythm of interiors, domestic life. These poems are informed by collage, by the act of bringing images and lines together. With their echoes and reverberations (hand, mirror, body, clear, form, face), a greater complexity is revealed.

"In conversation with visual art, mirrors, and the traces of self we assemble through encounter, Sheryda Warrener’s Test Piece holds an expansive place to dwell with the phenomenological. Interacting with event and object, reflection and parataxis, the writing asks us to consider contingent spaces and the matter of matter and meaning making. The poems adhere as arrangement, as a consideration of relationality. 'What does she whimper in the dog’s ear? / How earthly we behave, believing we’re alone.'" – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

"Sheryda Warrener's newest poetry collection unspools as a complex weave of repeated motifs, ritualistic gestures, and deeply embodied observations. I’m especially struck by the influence of twentieth-century women artists within the collection: meditations on Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, and Sherrie Levine’s works structure much of Test Piece. Palimpsests of photographed interiors, where living and writing collide lyrically and randomly, combine with floating textual cut-ups of variegating transparency. This concretizes, perhaps, how the poems bloom forth from experimental assemblage: 'her body holds/the long blue sentence of it…'" – Marina Roy, artist and author of Queuejumping

A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.

On Occasion is a collection rooted in the tradition of the poem as an act of love, an act of protest, an act of visionary incantation, of remembrance, of a call to arms, and a much-needed balm. 

The traditional ‘occasional poem’ has a bad rap: a tedious rhyming poem at a wedding or a dreary verse at a funeral. This is not that. These are poems for a tumultuous and complicated world, for occasions that may be celebrations or mournings, or anything in between; from life cycles, to earth cycles, to social cycles, editor Sina Queyras brings together a collection of poetry that speaks to moments of upheaval, revolution, and challenge. Poetry that people can turn to.

Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flâneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenth-­century English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian inner­-city worldview, the poems in Night Became Years unfold as separate entities while at the same time forming a larger narrative on the possibilities of poetry today and the nature of mixed­-blood identity.

What happens when an English teacher goes into labor during a high school lockdown?

High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant and trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha’s suicide attempt. Maria, the school’s counsellor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in.

As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she’s going into labour. And she’ll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can.

This isn't your typical lockdown story. With clear-eyed empathy, Born explores the many pitfalls and utopian possibilities of the school system, motherhood, and caregiving, and the sometimes fraught, sometimes transcendent nature of the student-teacher relationship.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOKS OF 2021

CBC BOOKS THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2021

A fresh take on the romance novel from the Giller Prize–winning author of Fifteen Dogs

From their first meeting, it was clear that Gwen and Tancred were meant to be together. But, as we know, the course of true love never did run smooth.

Gwen’s mother, intuiting that her daughter is in love, gives her a magic ring that has been passed down through endless generations of mothers and daughters. This ring grants its wearer the opportunity to change three things about her beloved. Like all blessings, this may also be a curse.

Ring turns the literary romance upside down and shakes out its pockets. It’s a playful meditation on the past, on magic, on race, on honour, on faith, and, yes, on love.

Following on the heels of Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, and Days by Moonlight, Ring completes Alexis’s Quincunx, a group of five genre-bending, philosophically sophisticated, and utterly delightful novels.

Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project in this very grown-up tale of a camping trip gone horribly awry.

Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive. The Laws of the Skies tells the harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness and accidents, and a murderous child.

Part fairy tale, part horror film, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.

“Excellent...crystalline." – New York Times, Summer Reads

Can messiness make our cities more liveable, lively, and inclusive?

Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamour, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?

Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything argues that spontaneity and urban workarounds are not liabilities but essential elements in all thriving cities.

Forty-three essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.

With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.

A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit

Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speaker’s world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and “searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.”

Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out.

"These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner's Heady Bloom is that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility." —Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights

"Among other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speaker’s ambivalent relationship—a kind of “bromance”—with Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgänger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints’ archangelic protectors. Faulkner’s imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. " —Geoffrey Nutter

How is a lyric poem like a polygraph machine? A personal, poetic examination of the technology of truth-telling.

Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess delves into the complexities of truth-telling in poetry, and the history of technologies designed to produce truth from willing and unwilling subjects, considering what it means to use a device – poetry or polygraph – to draw out one’s most profound feelings and emotions.

Exploring the intersection of power, technology, and language, I Confess meditates on lie detection and its history, including trials by ordeal and pseudoscientific technologies. The poet then turns to his own personal experiences working with a lie detector and polygraph analyst. Taking himself as the central subject of the book, Schmaltz puts his subjectivity and positionality under scrutiny.

The answers to questions such as What does family mean to you? and Can you describe a time when you felt your best? inspire a range of forms from conventional lyrical verse to list poems to palindromes to visual poems. With an afterword by Orchid Tierney, I Confess is a personal, poetic document of truth’s performance under duress.

Annie Ernaux meets Annie Dillard in this sultry story of a woman’s obsession with a painter — and a river. 

A woman is on an artists’ retreat on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, taking time away from her partner and her daughter to write. There she encounters a painter who spends his days with his easel set up on the shore trying to capture the blue of the water. They are drawn to each other, and their desire builds, through conversations about art and the colour blue, into a passionate extramarital affair, both deep and fleeting.

Savage in its beauty, this new work from Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a novel of resilience and longing, staking out the territory of female desire, exploring how it’s been regarded through the ages and how it’s reflected in art and nature.

Following the bestselling Suzanne and To the Forest, this latest offering in a series of novels about women by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette captures the power and beauty of desire set against the power and beauty of nature. An accomplished filmmaker, Barbeau-Lavalette writes with a visual flair, embodying both the calm and the turbulence of the river that runs through the story.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being.

A superstar boxer who rarely won a fight, Grim distinguished himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment.

In this wild and expansive novel, Michael Winkler moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908–09 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative.

Pain is often said to defy the limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain – physical and mental – is also the most familiar and universal human condition; and, perhaps, the secret source of our impulse to tell stories.

“A powerful blast of literary ingenuity and originality.” – Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip

"Grimmish meets a need I didn't even know I had. I lurched between bursts of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler’s verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable flow of his images, the bizarre wit of the language of pugilism—and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness." – Helen Garner

‍“All the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching.” – Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW

A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present.

"I am leaving for the winter – I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers – to write, read, think, all the most important things in the world but which are thought the least important, the most expendable."

Thus begins the Indian winter of our narrator, a queer writer and translator much like the author, a winter that includes a meandering journey through India, trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family's inability to accept his queerness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can't help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023

Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.

This is a book of slow hours, days, and years – how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.

Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism.

"The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away.  'The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.' Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts." – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

"T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting." – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus

"It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it." – Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine

"'For everything I was, I am now something else.' Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem’s work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream." – Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

"T. Liem's Slows: Twice is a fascinating exercise in revision and remaking, each repetition of its text accomplishing the arduous task of stretching time and geopolitical fixity. 'asking and repeating/ we are made' declares Liem, and that utterance produces the book's essential maxim, 'language is change/ changed by prosody.' In between these cracks of time, language becomes a miracle suture for love and connection where the hard reality of one's circumstances may produce infinite ruptures. This is a book that peers into the fissure, holding these moments of fracture as still and clearly as possible--a future of proximates." – Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm

Overthinking simple actions leads to overwhelming poems about what one can lean on if promised help doesn’t help

I Will Get Up Off Of is a book about trying to leave a chair. How does anyone ever leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate. What is there to lean on when avenues promising help don’t help? I Will Get Up Off Of explores the role art plays in survival and the hope that underlies any creative impulse.

"The voice of these poems moves like a magical fish trapped in a small square bowl, dazzlingly alive inside an almost annihilating constriction. These poems play a serious game in a tight space, caught in the looping limbo between intention — “I will…”, “I will…”, “I will…”— and action. Simina Banu’s skill and humour animate every line and gesture within this inventive drama that begins “(I will get up off of) this monobloc but I’ve been sentenced….” Sentenced to form and to language, Banu gives us a mind thinking its way toward freedom." – Damian Rogers, author of Dear Leader

From one of Sweden's most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food, translated by Saskia Vogel.

Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding, from pancakes meant to make up for a mother’s absence to perfectly sliced tomatoes winning, at last, a distant father’s approval; it explores how food can fill an emptiness but also consume you. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.

In this radiant memoir, one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers considers the complex relationships between the women in her family as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, and how those relationships replicate themselves in fraught and obsessive relationships with food. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist’s authorship.

'If Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist.' – Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore

'Karolina Ramqvist’s writing is straight-talking scripture, a spiritual text in memoir form. Food isn’t just love or its opposite; food marks time for the mortal body. Food is how people remember the people who no longer exist to make and eat food. Ramqvist's mind is transgressively pragmatic, and a constant source of enlightenment. Instead of saying, 'Look at what you didn’t know,” her book says, “Look at what you thought you didn’t know, but always did.' – Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself

'Swedish novelist Ramqvist’s highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with love…The term “food memoir” doesn't quite encompass her profound autobiographical journey…her story, with its lush and evocative prose, will speak to many readers.' – Booklist

"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review

An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. 

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.

Menopause: so many symptoms, so few remedies, so many years, so few heads-ups. 

In Steamy, you’ll find forty-five of the ever-expanding list of things people can encounter when going through The Change, including challenges (such as #4 Night Sweats and #21 Anxiety) and boons (such as #41 Individuation and #45 Fewer Shits). 

In this raucous memoir, Susan Holbrook opens up an experience still constrained by cultural silences and myths. Steamy is honest, vulnerable, gross, and might just be the funniest book you’ve ever read about menopause, or anything else (see #37 Bloating). 

If, at a certain stage of life, you find yourself sucker-punched by a sweaty fistful of symptoms you can’t believe no one told you about, Steamy is for you – and for all the other hot-and-bothereds out there.

WINNER OF THE 2025 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD

CBC BOOKS 'CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN 2024'

CBC BOOKS 'BOOKS TO READ IN HONOUR OF THE NATIONAL DAY FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION'

The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!

This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.

This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It’s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.

Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems – angry, funny, sad – demand a new world for Indigenous women.

THE TORONTO STAR'S  "30 BOOKS WE CAN'T WAIT TO READ THIS SPRING"

The updated edition of a Toronto favourite meanders around some of the city’s unique neighborhoods and considers what makes a city walkable

What is the 'Toronto look'? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.

Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for decades. His psychogeographic reportages situate Toronto's buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.

Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.

"Shawn Micallef offers an alternative perspective on the shape of neighbourhoods with an updated edition of Stroll, which originally appeared fifteen years ago. His “psychogeographic walking tours” take us through what he calls the Middle, Westish, Northish, Eastish, and Eastest areas of Toronto, showing us the known and sometimes obscure buildings and features that define Canada’s largest city." – Pamela Divinsky, Literary Review of Canada

"When I moved to Toronto in 2011, Stroll was the first book I added to my library and course reading lists. My students and I get lost in the PATH, sneak into lobbies, and visit the archives with this book as our guide. Micallef’s friendly voice invites us to slow down and notice not just a few landmark buildings but the city’s built fabric as a whole. This updated version offers our collective memory a much-needed affectionate yet critical view of recent changes to the city." – Erica Allen-Kim, Author of Building Little Saigon

"Stroll is a delightful and eccentric guidebook, full of clever writing, amusing stories and charming maps that will make you want to strap on your walking shoes and head into the streets of Toronto." – Carol Off, Author/Broadcaster

"Shawn Micallef is the unofficial mayor of Toronto, the genial ambassador the city needs and deserves. As he strolls Toronto’s broad avenues and its little streets, he finds hidden pockets of delight – and weirdness, too. Join him and fall in love with the city again." – Liz Renzetti, author of Bury the Lead

"Shawn Micallef looks at the city in a way we all should more often – he sees it as a living book that is alive with stories just waiting to be told to the attentive observer. In Stroll, he gives us an introduction to just how interesting and surprisingly dramatic those stories are, and how exciting our city is when we hear them." – David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto

"A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish." – Douglas Coupland

This new edition updates things in the city that have changed and includes several new walks.

HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD NOMINEE

From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion.

“The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport – team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected.

"I couldn’t stop reading Perry King’s Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto – and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto – and to the power of local recreation in any major city." —David Miller, former mayor of Toronto

An award-winning and haunting meditation on aging and self-determination.

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection! Finalist for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women. The first is a photographer searching for survivors of a series of catastrophic fires nearly a century earlier; the second is an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution. The little hideaway in the woods will never be the same. Originally published in French, And the Birds Rained Down, the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the Prix de Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, is a haunting meditation on aging and self-determination.

'Nostalgic and beautifully grotesque, this novel is delightfully baroque and, although short, so striking it will simply never leave you.' —The Coast

White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreat.

Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the intrepid imposters eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings of self-help guru Brad Beard, and Professor Sayer's uncomfortably erotic couples counselling.

But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial.

In All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire.

"Smart, hilarious, original, All You Can Kill is a feverish, one-of-a-kind, unhinged journey into the absurd shams of modern life. No one writes satire, or anything else, like Pasha Malla." – Iain Reid, author of We Spread

"Malla is a fabulously gifted writer." – Publishers Weekly

"I don’t really know how Malla gets away with what he does … but it is astounding to watch him do it." – The Rumpus

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD

Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet’s Chinese-Mauritian family ties

Fire Cider Rain is about the limits to which shared cultural and geographic histories can hold a family together. It follows the lives of three Chinese-Mauritian women on the course of dispersing, settling, and rooting over northern landscapes, and the brittle family bonds that tie them to one another and to their home country. Told from the perspective of the youngest of the three women, the book follows the events leading up to and following the death of her grandmother, an ex-lighthouse keeper and matriarch whose fractured relationship with her own daughter haunts the narrator’s life in soft, painful aftershocks. As she navigates the cold cities and waterways of Southern Ontario, our narrator struggles with conflicting desires to run toward and flee from her island identity, which grows ever distant, ever more difficult to find her way back to.

At its core, Fire Cider Rain is a book about parent-child relationships as vessels for cultural identity, and the ways in which expressions of love and non-love within those relationships can rupture sense of place, self, and at times, a collective diaspora. Throughout the book, Ng Cheng Hin explores the geopolitics of island nations, the dilution of family histories over time, and the experience of water as a medium for the cyclical movement of island bodies, stories, and cultures. The Mauritian landscape and waterways of southern Ontario recur through the book as convergence points for its many themes.

"In this stunning debut, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin weaves wondrous verse across geological spaces that extend from Mauritius to Canada. In this poetry, the Indian Ocean converses with northern landscapes to give voice to the (un)settling of diasporic women in search of rootedness. Water becomes a medium, a metaphor, a rhythm, a motif, and a metamorphosing figure through which memory, loss and mourning become bodies. Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin's sweeping poetry is infused with dexterous and lavish verse that makes the reader want to live within the nuances of each line. Fire Cider Rain is a dazzling debut!" – Kama La Mackarel, author of ZOM-FAM

“Mauritian waters of memory migrate through ‘imperial decay’ and ‘calcic dust’ to the cold northern continent where Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s lustrous poetic telemetry manifests a lexical biogeography of uprootedness—her lyrical ‘I’ the connecting thread between past and future, between mother and moth, grandmother and cyclone, selia lover and terra nullius. Fire Cider Rain erupts as ebb and swell, distilling belonging and meaning in postcolonial drift, filling absence with terraqueous inquiry and salvaged wake.” – Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light

"In reading Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s poetry, I became immersed within a deep sense memory of why I came to love poetry in the first place. Her attunement to language and cadence vibrates, or as she writes 'love – or recognition, catches in my throat and stings.' Hers is a voice that can make nerve endings sing and one that speaks with such artful earnestness to the difficulties there are in a personal history. Ng Cheng Hin’s poetry is cousin to the spider's web, which belies a kind of vulnerability through its delicate beauty, yet each of its strands contains an exceptional tensile strength." – Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE QWF MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind

Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they’d turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.

Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virginia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one’s own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.

How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.

"With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolf’s famous ‘room’ with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyras’s memoir testifies to Woolf’s continuing generative power."—Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2011) and author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021)

"In this beautiful, perceptive book, Sina Queyras moves deftly between the words and wake of Virginia Woolf and their own formation as writer, lover, teacher, friend, and person. Rooms is expert in its depiction of personal and literary histories, and firmly aware of its moment of composition. Reading these pages, I was enticed by Queyras’s curiosity and openness, thrilled by the sharp edges of their anger. Tight prose, electric thinking, self-discovery – it’s all here, all abuzz. Rooms is alive." – Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book

"It is impossible not to question the world as we thought we knew it by the end of this book. Sina Queyras painstakingly aims their extraordinary nerve and talent at Virginia Woolf’s idea of a room of one’s own: 'It’s a mistake to consider the room without all of its entanglements.' Taking Woolf’s cue, Queyras explores writing that is not world-building but something far more generous and transformative; as Woolf wrote, 'Literature is open to everybody.'" – CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

Winner of Canada Reads 2017

Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards

Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

"[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read … A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized." – Kirkus Reviews

"This might be the best set-up of the spring." – The Globe & Mail

"André Alexis has established himself as one of our preeminent voices." – Toronto Star

— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.
— I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.

And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.

André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.

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 other previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 book of 2014.

In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie.

An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.

In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream.

"S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future." —Douglas Glover

"This poetry collection is fierce, raw and candid. By recounting her mother’s residential school experience in a powerfully poetic narrative, Deerchild expertly illustrates the heartbreaking trauma of that tragic saga and how it complicates relationships over generations." – Waubgeshig Rice, author of Moon of the Crusted Snow

A tenth anniversary bilingual edition in English and Cree of Rosanna Deerchild’s stunning collection about the intergenerational impacts of the Canadian residential school system.

you want me to
share my story

ok then
here it is
here in the unwritten
here in the broken lines
of my body that can never forget

In Calling Down the Sky, poet Rosanna Deerchild viscerally evokes her mother’s experience within the residential school system, the Canadian government’s system of violently removing Indigenous children from their homes, families, and languages in an explicit attempt to destroy Indigenous cultures and identities. With precise and intricate poetry, Deerchild weaves together the story of her mother’s childhood and Deerchild’s memories of her mother: her love of country music, her attempts to talk about what happened to her, how tightly she braided her daughter’s hair on the first day of school. In doing so, Deerchild illustrates the disruptive and devastating impacts of the residential school system on generations of families while also celebrating the life and culture of her mother and other survivors. 

Published for the first time in a bilingual edition of Cree and English, in time for the tenth anniversary of the original publication, Calling Down the Sky is an intimate and gorgeously evoked reckoning with a horrifying part of North American history. 

Feminist autofiction from one of Sweden’s blazing talents.

Blending autofiction and essay, The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary detective work spanning centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite sheltered in a dark cave after her companions have died.

This image soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And the maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable.

Karolina Ramqvist explores what it means to write history—and to live it.

“Karolina Ramqvist writes with frosty precision the kind of literature that is unforgettable. Her portraits of women hit deep into bone and marrow.” – Dorthe Nors, author of A Line in the World

“Ramqvist’s acute rendering of embodied sensual experience combined with her evocation of her double character’s increasingly desperate circumstances create a story of high tension, startling insights, and lasting resonance.” – Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others

“One of my favorite discoveries from this year.” – Samanta Schweblin, author of Little Eyes

“Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” – Shelf Awareness

"The deeply personal journey of a writer, surprising and illuminating, and for me, familiar in the most reassuring way as she loses herself in this compelling story" – Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky

“This book is like a kiss in the afternoon sun." – Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

A tenth anniversary edition of the worldwide cult favorite, now with new material and illustrations.

All Tom's friends really are superheroes. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding she was hypnotized to believe Tom is invisible. Six months later, she's sure Tom has abandoned her. With no idea Tom's beside her, she boards an airplane, determined to leave the heartbreak behind. He has till they land to make her see him.

This tenth anniversary edition adds short stories, illustrations, and a foreword to the cult classic that has been a bestseller in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden.

“Expansive and imaginative.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Irreverent and bursting prose... Fans of Mark Leyner will enjoy Kaufman’s messy string of outrageous scenarios.” —Publishers Weekly

Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria.

One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband's missing heart. In fact, she's so insistent that she replaces Charlie's heart with a bomb. He has twenty-four hours to find Twiggy Miller's heart - and its meaning - or his own will explode.

Tender and brutal, optimistic and despairing, this modern fable by the author of the cult hit All My Friends Are Superheroes takes a fresh look at what it means to fall into, and out of, love.

The first work of ‘living poetry’ in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia.

Christian Bök in Book 1 of The Xenotext outlined his plan to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text durable enough to outlive any apocalypse, surviving until the death of the Sun itself. After more than two decades of effort, Bök has, at last, succeeded at this incredible experiment, and Book 2 of The Xenotext situates his enterprise within the deep time of the cosmos.

Bök rehearses some of the techniques likely to be used in the future to preserve the cultural heritage of our civilization against a potential planetary disaster (be it thermonuclear warfare or astrophysical barrage); moreover, Bök speculates that, buried within the biochemistry of Life itself, there really does exist an innate beauty, if not a hidden poetry – a literal message that we might read, if we deign to seek it.