Coach House Books

We live in an "adultitarian" state, where the rules are based on very adult priorities and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and powerless; they understand they're subject to an authoritarian regime, whether they buy into it or not. But their unique perspectives also offer incredible potential for engagement and innovation.

Cultural planner and performance director Darren O'Donnell has been collaborating with children for years through his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex; their most well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (exactly what it sounds like) has been performed internationally. O'Donnell suggests that that working with children in the cultural industries in a manner that maintains a large space for their participation can be understood as a pilot for a vision of a very different role for young people in the world – one that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child considers a "new social contract."

Haircuts by Children is a practical proposal for the inclusion of children in as many realms as possible, not only as an expression of their rights, but as a way to intervene in the world and to disrupt the stark economic inequalities perpetuated by the status quo. Deeply practical and wildly whimsical, Haircuts by Children might actually make total sense.

Darren O'Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, director, designer, performer, and the artistic director of the Mammalian Diving Reflex theater company. O'Donnell currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch.

More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can’t stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twenty­-four-­hour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation?

Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we’ve created, predicting a cultural collision — will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done? — and wondering about the cause-­and-­effect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it’s an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists — does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the long­term cultural consequences of this increasing sacri?ce for the ever­elusive goal of ‘total productivity’?

‘RM Vaughan ... [is] easily amongst the top ?ve art critics working today. I’ve seen Vaughan turn phrases that have the forcefulness of Christian Viveros Faune, the plainspoken insight of Dave Hickey, and the lyricism of Peter Schjeldahl. Vaughan should never have to do anything but write. ’— Paddy Johnson, editorial director, Art F City New York

RM Vaughan is a Canadian writer and video artist who lives in Berlin and Toronto. Vaughan is the author of nine books and a contributor to over 50 anthologies. His videos and filmed performances play in galleries and festivals around the world.

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Drama

Penelope Douglas is an ex–forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a western boomtown grown three sizes too crazy. But then a television writer offs himself in her sleek bathroom and her oil-wife friend pronounces Penelope her baby's godmother. Will she be able to find heart in this wild and soulless landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to "cowboy up"? Drama, a new play by the master of edgy dark humor, has all the answers.

Karen Hines is the author of Hello . . . Hello (A Romantic Satire) and The Pochsy Plays. A Second City alumna, Hines has appeared in numerous television and film productions and is the director of cult horror clowns Mump & Smoot.

'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or "plot" as such ... Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.' - Paul Thompson

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)

If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge the gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming.

She made hyphens and made me use them.
From her back she pulled brackets. Saying:
"These in your throat and these around your neck."

Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities.

It was love at first scene: the West Coast's innovative Theatre SKAM and Sean Dixon were a match made in heaven. AWOL offers up for the first time three of the fruits of their three-year-and-counting union.

In Aerwacol, a couple flees personal tragedy on a manual railroad car headed across the prairies, meeting odd characters along the way. Billy Nothin' is an existentialist cowboy play in which horse trainer Billy None loses the 'cowboy way' so entirely that his best friends don't even recognize him any more. And dystopian romance District of Centuries tells the story of a suburban type seeking his long-lost brother in a downtown housing project designed to crumble so fast that inhabitants come to believe they're hundreds of years old.

An old man in a military uniform is dumped at the police station—he won't speak English but has a lawyer's card in his pocket. A seemingly innocuous encounter gets stranger and stranger as we gradually realize no one is who they seem and the Balkan wars' traumas continue to play out. The "It Kid" of Canadian theater, award-winning playwright Nicolas Billon, returns with a devastating parable.

Nicolas Billon's plays and translations have been produced at the Stratford Festival, Soulpepper Theatre, and Canadian Stage. Fault Lines won the Governor General's Award, and his first play, The Elephant Song, is being developed into a film starring Catherine Keener.

Published in 1994, Crystallography was a gem of a book, an instant hit that was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.

'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.

Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.

Toronto is a concrete city. From international landmarks to civic buildings to cultural institutions to metropolitan infrastructure and the single-family home, reminders of the era of 'brutalist' architecture surround Torontonians. But for how long? As architectural fashion has shifted to the glass-and-steel neomodernism of today, these concrete structures have been increasingly ignored – and in some cases, demolished.

Concrete Toronto takes readers on a guided tour of Toronto's concrete architecture. Editors Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart have assembled a diverse group of industry experts – architects, university faculty, local practitioners, city planners, historians and journalists – to examine the unique and important qualities and the past and future of Toronto's concrete buildings in interviews, articles, archival photos, drawings and case studies.

Appealing to both the average reader and the enthusiast, Concrete Toronto provides a refreshing look not only at the neglected buildings, but also at the trends that produced them and the impact and consequences that resulted from their construction.

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Melding the deeply personal and the culturally popular, Li'l Bastard is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar. Written in part as an homage to John Berryman and Robert Lowell, this sequence of sixteen-line poems—"chubby sonnets"—explores the poet's obsessions (food, aging, baseball, beer, and Barnaby Jones) and map his midlife crisis on a wild flight through Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas, and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li'l Bastard will cement David McGimpsey's status as a beloved original.

David McGimpsey is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

"Goldbach's touch is light and his narrative momentum is fierce."—The Globe and Mail

Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, can't stop drinking, smoking, and philosophizing long enough to keep up. Imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton.

John Goldbach is the author of Selected Blackouts, a collection of stories.

Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most celebrated and original filmmakers, the director of such delirious films as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg. Few know, however, that he is just as gifted a writer, and his resolutely purple prose, as eccentric and enchanting as his film work, is a true delight. From the Atelier Tovar gathers, in one volume, the best of Maddin's writing: his journalism (originally published in the Village Voice, Cinema Scope, Film Comment and points beyond), unpublished short stories and film treatments (including the riotous Child Without Qualities), and selections, both lurid and illuminating, from the filmmaker's personal journals. Here are Maddin's feverish musings on hockey, the Osmonds, divas of the Italian silent cinema, Bollywood, his own twisted biography, and much, much more. What emerges finally is both a fragrant potpourri and a treasure trove, a singular portrait of this very unique artist.

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back.

A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in "search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author." Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life. French Kiss: a celebration of the energy of women and language in the face of the male authorities of Montreal politics and the physical authority of the printed (and bound) word.

The Blue Books collects these three long-out-of-print, groundbreaking Brossard titles, in their original Coach House Press English translations (A Book by Larry Shouldice, Turn of a Pang and French Kiss by the acclaimed Patricia Claxton). Don't be blue: these Brossard classics are back!

Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge.

Legris’s fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you’ll never look at nature the same way again. You’ll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you’ll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our most intimate fears.

Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can’t help but laugh as the sky falls.

Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world.

Words of Wisdom from a Man Claiming to be Fred Rogers is a box of 29 blurry polaroids. Muted, dark, indeterminate – they convey a sense of loss, uncertainty, ambivalence, which is heightened by the random fragments of text typed on the back. Written in response to two deaths in Wincenty's familiy, the text alternates between a consideration of the rituals we use to cope with death and random, contextless vignettes. In sum, twenty-nine reasons that it's not such a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.

‘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

A herd of horses frozen in a river. A bargain bridge. Séances. Golden Boy pageants. A demolished hockey arena. St. Mary's Academy for Girls. Spanky the Guide Dog through Time. An epidemic of sleepwalking.

This is the Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world's foremost cinéaste planant, and it's not the Winnipeg you'll find in tourist brochures. When the iconoclastic auteur of The Saddest Music in the World decided to tackle the subject of his hometown, it could only have become a 'docu-fantasia,' a melange of personal history, civic tragedy and mystical hypothesizing. The result is wildly delirious, deeply personal and deliciously entertaining.

Herewith, venture deeper into the mind of Maddin with the text of his narration, wantonly annotated with an avalanche of marginal digressions, stills, outtakes, family photos, emails, essays, deoculations, animations, notebook pages and collages. There's even an X-ray of Spanky the pug and an in-depth interview with Michael Ondaatje.

Natalee Caple made quite a splash with her first two books, The Heart is its Own Reason, a short-story collection from Insomniac Press, and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World, a novel from House of Anansi Press.

With A More Tender Ocean Caple turns her hand to poetry, and the results are no less dazzling. The poems were written using a Surrealist technique called automatic writing – a kind of poetic impressionism after speed-reading. The effect is a kind of dreamlike state – everything isn't quite as it should be, as though it had all been seen through the facet of a diamond. The poems are lyrical, erotic, gentle, happy, sad and strangely beautiful.

A More Tender Ocean is unusual but immensely moving and compelling, tender but not maudlin. 'What goes on seems ordinary,' writes Caple. Rest assured, it is not.