Anvil Press

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough) Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he?s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada?s first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live. In Confessions, he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross?s bimonthly ?Hunkamooga? column in Word: Toronto?s Literary Calendar. Others are written specifically for this collection. Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer: "From big-budget movies to reality television to pre-fab pop music, our culture often celebrates idiots while relegating truly engaging artists to the margins or the poorhouse. Ross is one of those mostly disenfranchised voices, shouting eloquently from the literary attic ... Ross is a chapbook champion because the tiny tracts are 'a slap in the face to Mike Harris and Jean Chr?tien and McDonald?s and Knopf and MuchMusic and Greg Gatenby and cellphones and Republicans and Indigo and all the other stops along the Axis of Evil.' No reformed baby boomer or slumming trust-funder, Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn?t about flowers and meadows, it?s about blood and guts." (Quill & Quire) "Confessions derives from columns Ross wrote for Word, a monthly tabloid that lists events in the Toronto literary counterculture but is itself so hard to find that it's virtually covert if not downright clandestine. He ruminates on the psychology of small-press folk, suggesting common ground with those who 'canvass for a progressive political candidate who has no chance of winning the riding'. He also tells us a lot about the political economy of self-employed poets as well as the personality disorders that result from seeing 'crappier writers than me get more attention'. All writers have such feelings at times. Ross majors in them, with a minor in insulting his betters." (The Georgia Straight) ??this is writing that works because, as with all good confessions, it?s from the heart but comes by way of the brain.? (Vancouver Review)

"Literary escapades enlighten and entertain in this boundary-pushing collection." (Foreword Reviews) "The maestro is at it again" (The Vancouver Sun) Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada's preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can't really tell for sure. Depending on your proclivities, some of them might even seem pretty hot, like the lurid fantasies that illustrate the covers of pulp fiction novels, the ethereal intellectual beauties that emanate from poetic fields of asphodels, or the petit bourgeois housewives that litter Alice Munro stories, these ten characters remind us that for every fetish there's a partner.

Finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars. Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the back of a huge flatbed truck. Seep is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. In the face of the town's erasure, Dwight tries to preserve its stories, and in so doing, comes to question his own. And then his wayward brother, Darcy, arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada. Praise for Seep: "Mark Giles' Seep is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction. Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella and Robert Kroetsch. But Giles' novel brings us firmly into the present era of rampant real estate speculation and the conflicts that ensue when people seek to protect what they value about a locale." (Tom Wayman, author of Dirty Snow and My Father's Cup)

Rose Dubois and Julie O'Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer's day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering. As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the same man, Charles. Their mutual desire creates an arms race of artificial beauty and debasement; they have a common obsession for plastic surgery and strive to be avatars of the perfect female. As they compete for the love and attention of Charles, both women come to realize that to accept being nothing more than an object, to kneel and grovel before your persecutor, you ultimately become his executioner. In the end, Charles' own obsessions and desires-which he loathes-are ultimately his undoing and downfall. Praise for Breakneck: "... With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan's novels in translation. ...Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer." (The Times Literary Supplement) "Breakneck is above all else an anxious novel, swimming in an excess of intoxicants and physical extremes, bouncing back and forth between personal improvement and destruction. It is 'troubling and filled with pleasure'-a phrase one of the women uses to describe her developing romance with Charles. Arcan's frenetic, even disturbing prose- here in translation by Jacob Homel-mimics the book's title, strong-arming its reader into an intense philosophical examination of vanity and excess. What risks coming across as a shallow narrative benefits from the incredibly thoughtful introspection that has come to define Arcan's unique world. The late Quebec writer readily understood the all-consuming depths of what we often wrongly deem as superficial." (Quill & Quire) "Breakneck, Nelly Arcan's newly translated third novel (originally published in 2007 in French as À ciel ouvert), secures the late author's singular place in Canadian letters as a writer who punctures the platitudes of sex. Composed in Arcan's trademark fiery style, Breakneck sets up a struggle between Rose and Julie, two successful, artistic women who want the same man. Breakneck is an unflinching, often outlandish look at female extremity in the matters of the heart, exposing how female rivals often share the same flaws. This is sisterhood, in Arcan's formation, 'at the bottom of the barrel.'" (The National Post) One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated Fiction Titles, 2015

Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest (2013) Joshua Chapman Green is searching for answers. He is combing through boxes in the attic of his recently deceased mother's home and uncovering childhood memories, mysterious letters, and perplexing photos of people he does not know. They appear to be circus performers, members of a travelling freak show, or Victorian era sideshow performers. Then he finds a crumbling copy of Moss-Haired Girl: Confessions of a Circus Performer by Zara Zalinzi . . . the clasp falls away and the pages open revealing a family story that may or may not be fiction . . . In this ambitious short novel, R.H. Slansky weaves a complex narrative about the very nature of narrative: it is an annotated re-issue of a fictional autobiography that casts a questioning eye on the reliability of family lore. Praise for Moss-Haired Girl: "Ever wonder if the mad-dash products of speed-writing contests can be any good? With Moss-Haired Girl, winner of the 2013 Three-Day Novel Contest, R.H. Slanksy answers in the affirmative and offers some guidance by example to would-be contestants: Start with a great premise and bite off only so much as you can chew. ... At 72 pages, it's a slight but extremely fun read. Let's see what Slansky can do with a few more days." (The Globe and Mail) "Moss-Haired Girl is an enjoyable, light read with stylistic flair. ... the elements of Slansky's writing and the novella's presentation offer the reader plenty to reflect upon." (The Peak) "Moss-Haired Girl is wonderful stuff, punchy and clever and engaging." (San Francisco Book Review)

Rose Dubois and Julie O'Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer's day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering. As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the same man, Charles. Their mutual desire creates an arms race of artificial beauty and debasement; they have a common obsession for plastic surgery and strive to be avatars of the perfect female. As they compete for the love and attention of Charles, both women come to realize that to accept being nothing more than an object, to kneel and grovel before your persecutor, you ultimately become his executioner. In the end, Charles' own obsessions and desires-which he loathes-are ultimately his undoing and downfall. Praise for Breakneck: "... With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan's novels in translation. ...Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer." (The Times Literary Supplement) "Breakneck is above all else an anxious novel, swimming in an excess of intoxicants and physical extremes, bouncing back and forth between personal improvement and destruction. It is 'troubling and filled with pleasure'-a phrase one of the women uses to describe her developing romance with Charles. Arcan's frenetic, even disturbing prose- here in translation by Jacob Homel-mimics the book's title, strong-arming its reader into an intense philosophical examination of vanity and excess. What risks coming across as a shallow narrative benefits from the incredibly thoughtful introspection that has come to define Arcan's unique world. The late Quebec writer readily understood the all-consuming depths of what we often wrongly deem as superficial." (Quill & Quire) "Breakneck, Nelly Arcan's newly translated third novel (originally published in 2007 in French as À ciel ouvert), secures the late author's singular place in Canadian letters as a writer who punctures the platitudes of sex. Composed in Arcan's trademark fiery style, Breakneck sets up a struggle between Rose and Julie, two successful, artistic women who want the same man. Breakneck is an unflinching, often outlandish look at female extremity in the matters of the heart, exposing how female rivals often share the same flaws. This is sisterhood, in Arcan's formation, 'at the bottom of the barrel.'" (The National Post) One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated Fiction Titles, 2015

ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015 Winner, Type Books Award In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn. When the writer's aunt read her tarot cards, no predictions for her future ever appeared. This tale, an astounding feat of literary realism, shares the story of a woman who loses her identity in a man in hopes of finding love. Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Nelly Arcan manages to answer the challenges she set down for herself in her previous books. Praise for Hysteric: "She writes from a place that is both deeply embodied and highly intellectual-if someone's womb really did end up on their brain, and that person then wrote a book, it might read something like Hysteric. English readers are lucky to have access to more of Arcan's brains and guts, and this translation is hopefully a herald of growing appreciation for a uniquely talented and brutally brave writer." (Montreal Review of Books) "Hysteric is a raw stroke of wild love that explores desire and memory, fear and love, a novel that leaves the lights on for its readers, hurts as much as it haunts, and brings a much-needed philosophy to the genre of urban literary fiction." (The Georgia Straight) One of the Telegraph Journal's Most Anticipated Books of 2014 Praise for Nelly Arcan: "... With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan's novels in translation. ... Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer." (The Times Literary Supplement)

Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Awards Grand Prize and the New Horizons Award, honourable mention in the Grand Prize category! After an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, everything in fifteen-year-old Jesse's life deep in rural Louisiana is derailed. His father, Emmett, a rig worker who survived the blast, but carries a terrible secret about a colleague who did not, unravels. He moves the family to Nowheresville, drinks himself to despair, and hounds Jesse about being a man. When Emmet finally abandons the family, Jesse takes up the burden of being the man of the house: it takes almost no time for him to fail. His mother is sexually assaulted. His firecracker of a sister boldly explores her sexuality, where Jesse falters in his own attempts at romance. Taking his father's lessons to heart, Jesse lashes out, getting into fistfights, chasing sex, and finding iffy ways to earn money. When he sets in motion a chain of events that leads his family into danger, Jesse must finally decide if he can save his loved ones by being true to his gentle nature, or if proving himself means adopting the cruelty of his father and his surroundings. After We Drowned is a tragic coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass, feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.

Winner of the 45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest In a future hotter than today, people meet their needs through tailored forms of intelligence. From the cyborg security at the food mart to the ever-learning, ever-loving forms that can effectively, and acceptably, be a life partner. The processing nous of an AI spouse is all the more valuable in a world where everything's a game. An actual game. So We Blush Less When The Phone Rings presents a world where differences hinge on whether we're organic or customised, whether we're physical creatures or a controlled visualisation. This is a world where power dynamics are hazy and the old uncertainties of romance mean nothing in the face of reliable engineering. But no society can be all winners. In this world, "scarcity value" haunts everything and staying wholly natural is the only sure way to lose. Who benefits and who goes without is determined by iron rules, while commodities are acquired via an ongoing bidding game. The purpose of this society is to hold a bright blanket around chronic scarcity. The world is too hot to do anything more. And even a respectable happy married couple, once they step outside the game, find themselves talking to bullets.

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. "Hey Joe" was written sometime in the early 1960s by a man named Billy Roberts, an obscure singer and guitarist from South Carolina who moved to New York City, drawn by the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village. It was a time when new, original material was scarce, leading other singers to quickly adapt songs of quality in the spirit of folk music's oral traditions. Thus began the long journey of "Hey Joe" from New York coffeehouses to the bars on L.A.'s Sunset Strip to the ears of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who launched his career with his radical, electrified interpretation. Extensively researched, That Gun In Your Hand also presents previously unpublished information about the life of Billy Roberts, a shadowy figure whose 2017 death went unreported by all news outlets. With a Foreword by Lenny Kaye.

Winner of the Annual 3-Day Novel Contest! In Gone to Pieces an entire family's lives are consumed by a single story: a tall tale about a forest fire and the horses who fled into a lake of ice to escape the flames. Everything they do, everything they watch, and everything they speak about revolves around the story of that fire and those horses and their father's deep belief that it is real. Curzi grew up feeling both resentful and beholden to her father's story. Something that causes her to flee her family when she is young, but also, upon learning that her father is on his deathbed, makes her determined to wade through the tale just as he would have wanted. But Gone to Pieces is a story about more than just this one thing: it's about the habits we form, the complexities of family, and the complicated histories that we escape and revisit. The story spans decades and continents, from Curzi's father's birthplace in Italy to the butcher-shop-filled Chicago of her childhood, on to her estranged brother's home in Stockholm and the Russian Lake Lagoda with its fabled story of the "ice horses" from Italian writer, Curzio Malaparte's 1944 novel, Kaputt.

The best Canadian fiction of 2024. From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom and Possessed comes Monster, a mesmerizing, brave new work of autofiction. Monster is a shattering, feminist manifesto exploring sexual awakening, motherhood, immigrant trauma, and the power of female rage. Yoveeta is angry. But her rage is quiet, internal, festering inside and forming a mysterious creation that she refers to as "Monster," something that began as longing when she lost her first home, country, and language, and that kept on growing as she experienced sexual and romantic trauma. Her quest for home led her into a toxic relationship with Voytek, an older, former professor and accomplished Polish writer who fathered her daughter, Ruby, and who gave her a house that finally made her feel as if she landed somewhere safe. But their marriage was anything but safe, with Voytek's penchant for infidelity and unrelenting gaslighting. On the eve of launching her memoir about overcoming her eating disorder, Yoveeta meets a fascinating man her age, activating the dormant Monster who is viciously hungry for food, sex, and revenge, but most of all, Yoveeta's own awakening. As her relationship with her husband crumbles into separation, Yoveeta develops a new, motivating force to fight for her home and future. The invigorating new love gives her the courage to leave her toxic situation and devise an ultimate and drastic solution, carried out with the help of her new accomplice. "Monster is a genre-busting work that takes a sledgehammer to the patriarchy while stretching boundaries into a world of toxic femininity." (The Winnipeg Free Press)

Recommended in The New York Times.Our Lady of Mile End is a neighbourhood of stories about gentrification and displacement in a once affordable area that is feeling the squeeze of social and cultural transformation. The overlapping lives of girls and women, tenants and landlords, neighbours and strangers, the old generation and the next chart the tensions and affections among people living in a community that has turned into a destination. Artists clean the homes of more affluent neighbours to make ends meet; a college professor bumps up against trigger warnings, cancel culture and privilege. As children confront the dark corners of the adult world, another generation reckons with their home turf shifting under their feet. This is an era of uncertainty, and sometimes menace, where the lack of privacy evokes village life. Yet when everything seems precarious, a neighbour who's paying attention may make all the difference, reminding us that connection is still possible. "Sarah Gilbert writes of an old neighbourhood that is disappearing and being born anew. Her stories are as vibrant and intimate as drinking a cup of coffee on a stoop while gossiping with a neighbour in their housecoat." (Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads)

45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest Winner! In the city of Vancouver, even dirt costs. In The Tenants three of its residents are struggling with their homes, whether that's grappling with real estate prices, simmering resentments, or an uneasy co-living arrangement with the local wildlife. Scott and Dave are an odd couple. Scott is single-minded in his goal of buying a house, leading to too-long work hours and an oppressive budgeting system. Dave hides artisanal beard products in the trunk of his car and tries to prioritize his comfort in the rental he's happily lived in for years. For Maeve, their new "neighbour" in the tweed suit, her goals are much more simple: safety, shelter, and attempting to live peacefully with the local raccoons. For all the things these folks lack, communication, shared goals, a home address, their differing motivations form an uneasy picture of the reality of living in a city that is inhospitable to many of its citizens. Stark, observational, darkly comic, and deeply human, The Tenants is a view inside the homes of some of Vancouver's most vulnerable inhabitants as their lives intersect and diverge atop its shifting soil.

History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don't: a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge. Billy has been in an alcoholic haze since a failed attempt to escape notoriety by faking his own death. By 1915, his fame has only increased, and when word of a possible ruse leaks out, Billy finds himself once again on the run. He agrees to follow his elder brother Joseph north from New Mexico Territory, to possible sanctuary in Canada. Billy and Joseph encounter Turner Wing, a young woman with a fierce sense of self-determination and the skills with a gun to back it up, and her father, a man with a past and a burlap sack over his head due to a significant facial disfiguration. They are in desperate search of Turner's sister, who has been abducted by a pair of marauding thieves. Billy and Joseph know the truth about the girl's fate and, following their own code of honour, form an uneasy alliance with the Wings to avenge her death.

Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it's also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb. The story begins with a crash, and throughout the story, we bear witness to many more - both literal and metaphorical - as cars wrap around lamp posts and jump medians, and as the humans inside them are unknotted from smouldering metal and the entanglements of their choices. "He" is a nameless, indiscriminate addict. A fuck-up without a driver's license, who has caused forty-two car crashes in eight years, and makes his living by picking through the shattered belongings and lives he leaves behind. "She" is Lola, and Lola is unsure where she's going, just that it's far from there. Disorienting as an acid trip, the story winds through the aftermath, watching as he collides with recovery, women, and his own imperfect recollections while searching for the elusive girl in the yellow sundress.

At the heart of Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area. The impetus for Mike's search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father's, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani's dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams.Another great mystery of Mike's life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians. The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father's life and Boku's uncle (Daniel Sugiura from Terry's previous novel, The Three Pleasures), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off.Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is an imaginative examination of the effects of exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).

Through forty-three personal essays, Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing brings together insights from writers and publishers across Canada on the practices that fuel their work, and invites readers to join the conversation through a series of engaging writing prompts. The essays collected here include strategies for pre-writing, writing and revision, as well as thoughts on the writing life and the world of writing. Resonance is for any writer of fiction, non-fiction or poetry who has ever wanted a helping hand, a quick chat, or a word of encouragement along the lonely road from blank page to published work. Resonance seeks to build community and extend the practice of creativity to writers everywhere. Contributors (in order of appearance): Janet Fretter, Raoul Fernandes, Katherine McManus, Andrew Chesham, Christina Myers, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Reg Johanson, Kayla Czaga, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, Peter Babiak, John Whatley, JJ Lee, Leanne Dunic, Jónína Kirton, K. Ho, Claudia Cornwall, Paul Headrick, Rob Taylor, Joanne Arnott, George Bowering, Madeline Sonik, Joan B. Flood, Candie Tanaka, Maria Reva, Jen Sookfong Lee, Eileen Cook, Joanne Betzler, Janie Chang, Caroline Adderson, Aislinn Hunter, Betsy Warland, Wayde Compton, Claudia Casper, Stella Harvey, Laura Farina, Carleigh Baker, Brian Payton, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Kevin Spenst, Leigh Nash, Brian Kaufman, Andrew Steeves, and Brian Lam.

From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. Whether it's a band coming apart at the ruins of Pompeii, or tours through Napoli's "volcanic dust and volcanic drugs and jackal-headed bedlam" or a nostalgic stroll past the homeless in Victoria's inner harbour while "gentle Tunisian techno" rides the breeze above addicts as weighted as Shakespearean characters ... "lit rock and tiny chalice hidden under his shirt, get it all, draw every wisp of the wreath and heavy is the head that wears the crown, that lights the lighter." Steppenwolf drifts from a car radio as "an ambulance siren and lights fly our street ... a flashing mime show of grief's rocket." Or we're in Iceland, or Denmark, "somewhere seriously lunar and attractive," and the band is spending wheelbarrows of cash the record execs didn't give them. Or it's the Sunset Boulevard, the Viper Room, a bar in Butte, Montana, and Johnny Cash in Tijuana. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect from a Mark Jarman story. And matters of the heart are never far away, weaving through these tales like a knife blade through sand.

Cinematic film, the art form that came into its own in the 20th Century, is not only familiar to all of us, but is likely the form that lodges most clearly in memory. Like music, and the music employed in a film, scenes come back, often carrying emotion as well as remembrance. One such film is Harold and Maude, the 1971 production that brought Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon to what are possibly their most memorable roles, and the film that locked so many Cat Stevens songs in mind. A cockeyed love story that stretches the definition of a May/December romance, it reveals the fact that love can indeed be blind to matters of age or appearance. This book takes us back half a century to when this one-of-a-kind film was released, a time with its own kind of turmoil, but a time as well of a different kind of innocence, one worth exploring again. Fifty years, traditionally a golden anniversary, is surely an appropriate time to celebrate.

For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder, and one of the only women, in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.

Mortician Mylène Andrews spends her days dealing with death, but has never quite figured out how to live. After her estranged mother passes away, adult-orphaned Mylène sets out in her hearse to see the graveyards her mother visited before her death, guided by a collection of unsent postcards and the residual wake of a tragedy long-considered buried. With an aversion to black, a colourful vintage wardrobe, and a caustic sense of humour, Mylène has always subverted expectations of how a funeral director should be. Over the course of her trip this helps her become an unlikely media sensation, as she encounters a smattering of strange characters and settings, including intrepid reporters, pesky rodents, and burial sites requiring scuba gear. Brisk and darkly comic, Unrest is both a road trip story and a touching eulogy on life, death, and what we leave behind.

The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening. There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. In this collection of linked stories-part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery-magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations. A girl with mermaid syndrome disappears into a field, a fugitive boy dreams of finding anonymity in Toronto while his abandoned pregnant girlfriend hallucinates his second coming, and a nostalgic chambermaid finds her memories vanish when she puts on a stranger's wig. There's a rash of killings in the city that attract a lovesick police officer. No one knows who's responsible for the crimes, but the city has plenty of candidates, like the crazy son of a judge who murdered a man in Disney World and the grieving vandal who's obsessed with the idea of cutting a woman in half. Then there are the abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives. Are the characters in this oddly probable world masters or victims of their own fate? How do their lives intersect? Is it likely that destruction will ultimately prevail over this desolate land, or will consciousness, like a flaming firebird, lead at least some of the city's inhabitants to self-acceptance, redemption, or escape? (Includes book group and study guide.)

WINNER, 2019 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists. Griffin Prize Judges' Citation: "In Quarrels, Eve Joseph's delightful collection of prose poems, you enter the marvelous and that is the truth! The poet has surrendered herself to the realm of the illogical, trusting that it has a logic of its own, and the outcome is, indeed, a new music. These poems are intriguing spaces and moments defeating the boundaries of the real, but rest assured, Joseph leads you by the hand with warmth, wit and empathy. Perhaps these poems are crystallisations of a deeply human, spiritual knowledge, gathered over decades working in a hospice. Joseph's previous book, the exceptional memoir, In the Slender Margin, renders this experience. Certainly, without gravity, poems wouldn't be able to sing. As distillations of life, these poems, with beauty and charm, hold their own credibility: an omnipresent, merely-in-glimpses-tangible marvelousness, miraculously fastened to the pages of a single slender volume that will fit into most pockets and assure magnificent company on any given journey."

Winner of the 41st International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest Alan is unsure if he is dead or dreaming, he only knows that he is stuck in a loop. He finds himself being forced to walk along a straight path through an unending pine forest where any deviation from the path causes him to black out and begin again. Dipping in and out of an endless purgatorial walk, Alan relives key moments in his life where he missed the opportunity to learn, escape, and change: The death of his mother, an abusive relationship with his father, and the opportunity to connect with his only real friend, a neighbour he never speaks to named Edgar. The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

International 3-Day Novel Contest Winner! The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests. Aging beauty Lilah walks into the narrator's office with a photo of Babe Ruth, a story about a sketchy reincarnation plan, and the hope of finding her husband Glen. Despite misgivings, the narrator takes on her case and soon the two are galloping headfirst into gorgons, contraband blood and villainous brothers, with a sideways trip to the zoo.If faced with reincarnation, would you want to come back as a dog, an eagle, a plant? Most poison ivy is reincarnated ivy. You can see the complexity of second lives, the intrepid narrator-detective declares. For those yet reincarnated, devotion can become muddled. And as the characters in The Second Detective learn, you can't fight the universe and regret is terrible company.There are two things you need to know: Every action is a choice that tells you something more, unless it means nothing at all.

ADel Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she's also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life. Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid. Medved's new novel is a searing critique of a world we all know too well - one of sexual exploitation, manipulation, and the subtle machinations of power that Black Star filters through the lens of academia. It is at once poetic, tragic, disturbing and funny.

Against Death: 35 Essays On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author's "near-deathness," utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what "magical thinking" proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient.

Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining was released in 1980 and has been fascinating viewers ever since. It is a psychological thriller about a writer with writer's block (along with his wife and their young son) who takes a job as caretaker of an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains during the winter off-season. The boy, Danny, is gifted with a "sixth sense" and soon begins receiving disturbing messages about the hotel's mysterious past, and thus begins a cinematic descent into madness and terror. Simon Roy first saw The Shining when he was ten years old and was mesmerized by a particular line in the movie spoken by Dick Hallorann, the chef of the Overlook Hotel, while he is giving the family an orientation tour of the facilities. Hallorann seems to speak directly to Danny (and Simon Roy) while in the middle of enumerating the stock of the hotel's pantry to Danny's mother. He glances at Danny and the words cross telepathically into the boy's mind: "How'd you like some ice cream, Doc?" Roy encountered the scene by chance, while idly flipping through the channels on the television, but the short scene left an indelible mark upon him: "The doubling of Chef Hallorann's voice created in me such powerful unease that I can still feel it, intact, thirty years later. ... I felt like Hallorann had for a moment drawn back from his role as the guide of the Overlook Hotel to establish a direct relationship with me and reveal something hidden." Roy has since seen the movie over forty-two times, and the painstaking bond he has knitted with this story of evil has enabled him to absorb the disquieting traits of his own family's "macabre lineage." Analysis of the film, and the many parallels to his own family's troubled history, have allowed him to gain insight into the nature of domestic violence.

Everything is just a little more difficult for thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. "Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte," her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it's good advice because it's while working at Frank's coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a nyc modern dance company. Margaret is stuck in a jack-in-the-box, and author Mark Wagstaff expertly mans the crank, turning the lever over and over, letting eerie circus music slowly fill your head. Will she find what she's looking for? Is it hiding in the strangely lit aisles of her downstairs grocery store? Maybe it's avoiding her calls, holed up with a new girlfriend, the cognitive psychology graduate, in a condo in Phoenix. Or maybe, just maybe, it's coffee-stained and unexpectedly expected. In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they're attached to even lonelier bodies.

1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The rcmp are rounding up "suspicious" young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC's interior are only months away. Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian newspaper allowed to keep publishing during the war, narrates The Three Pleasures. The story is told through three main characters in the Japanese community: Watanabe Etsuo, Morii Etsuji and Etsu Kaga, the Three Pleasures. Etsu in Japanese means "pleasure"; the term is well-suited to these three. Morii Etsuji, the Black Dragon boss, controls the kind of pleasure men pay for: gambling, drink and prostitution - the pleasures of the flesh. Watanabe Etsuo, Secretary of the Steveston Fishermen's Association, makes a deal with the devil to save his loved ones. In the end, he suffers for it and never regains the pleasures of family. And there is Etsu Kaga, a Ganbariya of the Yamato Damashii Group, a real Emperor worshipper. His obsession becomes destructive to himself and all involved with him. He enjoys the pleasure of patriotism until that patriotism becomes a curse. The Three Pleasures is an intimate and passionate novel concerning an unsightly and painful period in Canada's history.

"To give a feeling of Christopher Gudgeon's new collection, let's turn to the story that gives the book its name. In The Widow Soré, the title character finds among her deceased fiancé Guillermo's papers what appears to be a stack of letters. Titled The Encyclopedia of Lies, the letters recount the romantic, outsized exploits of another Guillermo, or one whom Isabel takes to be another Guillermo, because this must be a work of fiction, unless. Isabel travels to visit another woman who might hold the answer. `Any evidence regarding the true nature of Guillermo – whether he was one man or two, many or all – was not as important as the words each woman used to define their memories of him,' Gudgeon writes. The implication runs through Gudgeon's motley crew: roughly half of these 16 stories contain a recurring cast glanced from multiple angles. We contain multitudes, but our many-or-allness is less important than the stories that define us, even if those stories turn out to be an encyclopedia of lies."(The Globe and Mail)"Here's a writer with real range. ... Some stories are very short, just two pages; several are connected. There are 26 in all, many memorable, most pitch-perfect." (Toronto Star) In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo,takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters. Here is a gay couple who persevere with their marriage plans as the world, literally, crumbles around them, a woman who discovers the mysterious collection of letters that reveals a terrifying truth about her deceased finance, a dutiful son, locked in an life-or-death marathon race with his famous father, and a baby who becomes infested with fruit flies, sending his adoptive parents into a spiral of recrimination and self-doubt. At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection, follow up to Greeting from the Vodka Sea, Gudgeon's short story debut, The Encyclopedia of Lies builds on his growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.