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The Shining by Stanley Kubrick - that strange story in which a writer and his wife and young son with ESP stay in a mysterious hotel in low season - has been fascinating viewers since its release in 1980. Simon Roy first saw the film when he was 10 and was mesmerized by a particular line: "How'd you like some ice cream, Doc?" He has since seen the movie at least 42 times, because "it encompasses the tragic symptoms of a deep-seated defect that has haunted [it] for generations." The painstaking bond he has knitted with this story of evil has enabled him to absorb the disquieting traits of its "macabre lineage" and fully reveal its power over him. This is an unusual and astonishing book. In this truly remarkable debut, Simon Roy has produced a highly original, unsettling, and fascinating account. This essay will appeal not only to Kubrick fans but also to readers who are attuned to life's hardships and mindful of the strength needed to overcome them. Praise for Kubrick Red: "Such is the off-centre, episodic nature of this book that it's hard to find parallels elsewhere in literature." (Vancouver Sun)

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)

Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. Seep is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. And then his brother Darryl arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. In the face of the town's erasure, he tries to preserve its stories; so doing, he comes to question his own. 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 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. 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." (Tom Wayman)

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. Praise for 10 Women: "the maestro is at it again" (The Vancouver Sun) "This is a rarity in [short story] collections; an elegantly structured book with a central theme general enough to let the author run totally amok while maintaining a satisfying sense of unity overall." (BC BookLook) "The contents page is a list of ten names. The personalities that emerge are unforgettable. 10 Women is word punch spiked with an intoxicating brand of comedy, and every woman in it is fortified with dizzying power shots. Memorable phrases linger beyond the morning after."(Foreword Reviews)

Myrtle is not one of those communities with a town historian or a roster of famous residents. Myrtle does, however, have a poultry plant, and looming above the plant are the eagles, massive birds that roost in trees and feast on entrails left by workers, creatures synonymous with power, freedom and might. The story starts with a newspaper photo taken in an obscure Nova Scotia town after the murder of eight bald eagles. The bizarre photo wins a contest and, over time, the unidentified girl in the foreground becomes, like Diane Arbus's Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, infamous. Rita Van Loon decides, after seven painful years, to explain herself and the events surrounding the murders. The Most Heartless Town in Canada looks at media agendas, amateur sport, family dynamics, and the divide between rural and urban Canada. Selected Praise: "... McCluskey's cast of characters 'and it is quite large' is anything but ordinary, especially when it comes to Pammy Pottie, Rita's well-meaning but luckless swim coach, and her motley crew of swimmers. Myrtle is full of oddballs, which is lucky for us, because that, more than anything else, is what gives this novel its quirky charm." (Quill and Quire) "The Most Heartless Town in Canada is explicitly about bearing false witness to a place and what that does to the people there. (It?s also extremely funny.) ..." (The Globe and Mail) "McCluskey's complex small town terrific" (Winnipeg Free Press)

The music scene in the mid-eighties was in transition, just as the entire music business was, unaware that it was all about to change in 1991 when Nirvana's watershed release, Nevermind would unexpectedly hit number one on the Billboard chart. But that explosion didn't happen overnight. It was the product of many things: Toronto's developing music scene, club owners seeking original music, and the communities of musicians, artists, and fans supporting these new bands. No Flash, Please! documents an important period in Toronto's music community. As seen and heard by two journalists covering it for a number of monthly independent magazines, not only did they experience the local bands they knew and loved becoming famous, they also witnessed soon-to-be legends come through those same clubs and concert halls. Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Jesus Lizard, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Henry Rollins, all played Toronto during this period to crowds that varied in size from twenty to five hundred. No Flash, Please! doesn't just focus on the music, it also captures the crowds and the community that spawned one of the richest periods in Toronto's music history.

Nathaniel G. Moore follows up his 2014 ReLit Award win for Savage with a diverse collection of short fiction, his first, Jettison, featuring stories which dangle somewhere between horror and romance. "Jaws" explores a father's desire to over-share the erotic origins of his children's "Aunt" Louise; "Blade Runner" uncovers the darkest and most hilarious aspects of dating by delineating the psych ward politics surrounding a male mental patient with five girlfriends who takes apart his bed when they visit; in "A Higher Power," readers are introduced to a brave woman in recovery who shares a story about a time when all she could think about was Prime Minister Paul Martin and would do anything to crash charity dance-a-thons he might be attending; in "Son of Zodiac," Moore captures the ache of a life-spanning meltdown in the painfully polite confessions of a man who believes his father was the Zodiac Killer. Be grateful as you witness a portrait of vulgar torment when a young woman is given an English professor action figure for Christmas ("Professor Buggles"). Each of these stories is an all-inclusive getaway to hilarity and emotional atonement. Jettison is an all-you-can-eat buffet of literary invention: you'll be so glad you got an invite. Praise for Jettison: "wickedly fun to read" (Winnipeg Free Press)

As If is a collection of stories that, as its title suggests, points at an indubitable truth: all literature is speculative. Goulden's, however, extends past the boundaries of conventional fiction into areas traditionally occupied by fantasy and magic realism. These stories rail against the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon its characters to take action, to reach beyond the repetitive anxiety of being a cog in the wheel of mechanical environmental destruction. Sound too ethereal and abstract? It isn't. These stories are grounded in the physical reality of Vancouver and the Prairies of Canada, and they are grounded in the people who live there, whose successes and failures are kick-started by abrupt changes in their physical world. How the characters react to those challenges initiates a multitude of potential results. As if. Some say that writing is a tool to tell ourselves stories about who and why we think we are. The characters in As If encounter physical laws that challenge conventional mindsets, and they create reality models whose assumptions don't always play out in expected ways. They are then compelled to revise their understanding of themselves and their world. Forced evolution? Maybe. These stories invite the reader to look down the highway, see what might be coming, and see what they might be able to do. Praise for As If: "From the little lies in 'Joy' to sud- den loss in 'As If,' to Mr. Jimmy in 'The Painted Hand,' Goulden looks at all the ways one's world can collapse. Each story works to steal the floor out from under its protagonist, with little or no warning, giving the overall impression that there's no such thing as sure footing in this world." (BC Bookworld)

Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards) The stories in Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands mostly take place in hot weather, where dust and sweat envelop everyone and everything. A teenage boy spends a summer with his hard-livin', hard-drinkin', messed up uncle and has to fight for a position in his new, temporary "family." A recent widower gets swept up in the world of the local swingers' scene. A band of misfits struggles to survive at a makeshift commune. An eccentric woman with OCD has a strange fetish that involves the prescription delivery boy. For no particular reason, a fossil-collecting, poetry-reading loner decides to turn sniper and shoot up the town - selecting only non-human targets. Asphyxia games with a sexy transvestite go seriously awry. A distraught man enlists his friendly neighbour in a nighttime river search for his lost daughter. Bored and desperate couples in a trailer park find unique ways to work out their kinks. The plans of a primed-for-action threesome are suddenly derailed when a badly beaten dog is spotted tied up to a parking meter. Fossils and prehistoric sleeping creatures, cattle, rivers, dusty highway gas stations, truck stop diners, guys in small towns with dead-end jobs and unfulfilled dreams, the smell of sage and the sound of cicadas in the air, and redemption is nowhere to be found ... This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown. Praise for Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands: "[I]n Martin West's impressive debut short story collection ... readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah."(Foreword Magazine) "the 11 tales in Martin West's debut collection ... often surprise with strange, startling images." (Alberta Views)

Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards) In Garage Criticism Peter Babiak eviscerates and deflates some of the cultural sacred cows of our time. From Fifty Shades of Grey ("Hot for Teacher: What Fifty Shades of Grey Taught Me About Salacious Grammar, Sexy Women and the Scandalous Conflation of Cultural and Literary Culture") to the disintegration of the "deep read" ("F You Professor: Tumblr, Triggers and the Allergies of Reading") to the Hunger Games ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - But It Might Be Carnivalized 'N' Shit") and Twilight ("Really Dumb Students"), through to student/professor relationships, inappropriate office visits, and a shared "voluptuous appetite for Nabokov." Babiak deconstructs our fascination with internet culture, takes on the inanities of youthful, ungrammatical irises, devolves the rhetorical hallucinations of economics and marketing, and reasserts the supremacy of linguistic thinking in everyday cultural affairs. Babiak's is a new and timely voice in the arena of cultural criticism and critical theory. Praise for Garage Criticism: "... Somewhere, a transition takes place and the garage critic is replaced by the father, lover, the middle-aged man searching for some meaning in a silly world. The wisdom of this book doesn't come from its dismantling of vacuous modern culture, but from its subtle examination of fatherhood, the follies of man, the inevitable fray of husbandry, and the tribulation of losing the ones you love. These are messages that are left nearly unsaid, unseen, but like stars resting beneath a sunrise, achingly they remain long after the book is closed." (Cascade, UFV)

Assdeep in Wonder is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. Selected Praise: "Gudgeon's first poetry collection is a quirky valentine to irreverent readers, full of stark and pretty imagery, wry quips, and glorious bursts of vulgarity. ..." (Foreword Reviews)

A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion and all our forms of becoming. Praise for Ignite: "... with a fearless layering of voice, Ignite is upfront and unswerving. A novel-esque torrent tracing a troubling history of illness, part confrontation and part chronicle, this collection is daring with its dark narrative. Here is a willingness for, and enviable strength in, extending poetic range. Ignite heals and ascends. There are books that need to be written and this is one of them. This is a collection which gives more and more with every read." (Sandra Ridley, judge, Alfred G. Bailey prize) "An outstanding follow-up to Spenst's excellent first collection. (Winnipeg Free Press)" A selection of poems from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.

"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response. The blade melts ice via friction and pressure. I drifted away from skating but the language is imprinted in me, too, a tracing, a line extending beyond the margins." (from Serpentine Loop) These are engaging and poignant poems about life on and off the ice.

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 fiancée, 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 builds on Gudgeon's growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best. "Gudgeon is . . . a major new talent in Canadian literature." (The Quill and Quire on Greetings from the Vodka Sea) "a remarkable first novel." (The Victoria Times-Colonist on Song of Kosovo)

Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest. Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis's published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis's long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous. Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human.

Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest "You" and L, a mysterious third gender runaway, hit the road on a mission to find the meaning of life. Traveling by plane, bus and car, You run into trouble with the cops, mourn a family tragedy, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, attend a retirement party, come to terms with a broken heart, and discover that all roads lead back to where You started - in the flowers drawn by two little girls in coloured chalk on the sidewalk. Selected Praise: The book's central conceit, that modern society is injurious to human relationships and honest communication, is well expressed. The use of chalk drawing as a motif for the difficulties of emotional honesty is effective, especially at the very end of the work, where rain threatens to blur and erase any attempt at expression through the drawings. Pulling the reader in, the immediacy of Diaczuk's narrative is compelling and stands out alongside some of his stylistic inventions as the best thing about this book, gritty realism running against the desire for connection, the failure to understand and communicate at odds with the need for self-expression." (Vancouver Sun)

You Are Not Needed Now is a brilliant new collection of stories from Annette Lapointe, author of the Giller-nominated novel Stolen. Often set within the small towns of the Canadian prairies, the stories in You Are Not Needed Now dissect and examine the illusion of appearances, the myth of normalcy, and the allure of artifice. Lapointe presents characters who are extraordinarily real. They are often strange, vulgar, or messy: collecting blood-stained cotton pads and hairs from shower drains, slicing through skin to get more urgent medical treatment for testosterone withdrawal, storing the heart of a dead infant in a glass jar, kneeling on the dirty wet floors of a bathroom stall to perform oral sex. Despite the diversity, strangeness, and complexity of her characters, Lapointe illustrates a remarkable understanding of each one. She knows them so intimately, and gives her reader the gift of knowing them, too. Lapointe is adept at looking closely, and exposes her characters' faults and vulnerabilities, humiliations and vanities, in illuminating and surprising ways. Trapped in this inescapable place-life-her characters linger somewhere between apathy and obsession, compassion and disregard, conflict and avoidance. This is a bold collection of stories, rich with nuance, originality, and depth.

Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize Finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire and willfully prods the veil at the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to push the boundaries; she is also easily bored. Her disdain for all that is conventional and "vanilla" launches her on a journey of personal discovery: first via the local swingers' scene, then through the world of clandestine S&M clubs, and on to more adventurous and dangerous "private" diversions. She eventually pushes the envelope so far that she attracts the attention of alien beings she refers to only as the "Woodenheads." They do strange things to her, alchemic things, as she is slowly transformed into wood and steel and electricity. You won't soon forget Nonni; she won't let you. Praise for Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands: "[I]n Martin West's impressive debut short story collection ... readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah." (Foreword Magazine) "the 11 tales in Martin West's debut collection ... often surprise with strange, startling images." (Alberta Views)

2017 Foreword INDIES Finalist (Historical, Adult Fiction). 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. "Terry Watada's literary tour de force, The Three Pleasures, lifts the Japanese Canadian internment experience beyond passive victimization by giving life to a host of historical figures heroes, villians and tragic characters in a fascinating yet little-known resistance movement within the camps. An absolute page-turner and worthy read." (jim wong-chu)

da Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary. There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenly observing each moment and event that constitutes being human. Whether it's following the "wounded insomniac" through the "desert lushness of sage and creosote" or hot lovers who "flicker bare back beneath the full moon, panting" or drifting, moribund couples on empty streets moving like "dead meat or heavy traffic" under leaves of an "electric yellow" Creary's language is potent, lush, playful and witty, demanding of attention. Sharp with insights that cut, lancet-like, to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City like the people who inhabit them are ecstatically alive. Advance Praise for Escape from Wreck City: "John Creary's poems growl, roar, whisper, chortle, purr and shout. He's a writer stoned on words, constantly surprised by what they can and can't do. Language's energy-clean, dirty, pulsing, spiking, minimalist-vibrates through Escape from Wreck City." - Tom Wayman, author of The Order in Which We Do Things

Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino's seventh collection of poetry and tenth book-a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world. But this is no ordinary tour-we take a sharp turn and go online as Fiorentino mines the peculiar linguistic resources of a new world of doxxing, swatting, snarking, trolling, catfishing, and shaming. While addressing the disconnect between the way we treat each other online and the way we treat each other IRL, Leaving Mile End provides a new framework for understanding what it means to be home in 2017. Praise for Fiorentino's poetry: "[Fiorentino's poetry] is the embodiment of an imagination so wild, a wit so sharp and a sense of humour so dark." (Montreal Gazette) "There is no mistaking Fiorentino's sharp wit and precise vocabulary, which are entirely individual-something far too few writers can claim." (Quill & Quire)

A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because "There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen... . In that sense, all art is fake... " The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of articles paeans, really - to Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, Nellie McClung, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, and others. Here, as friend and editor Karl Siegler states in his Foreword, "we encounter memory-not as a form of nostalgia for a bygone golden age of a romanticised pastoral arcadia ... but as an historical record of who did what when, and to what end, throughout the counterculture revolution that shaped the lives of Jamie Reid and his companions over the past six decades."

Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food will bring to the table some of Canada's best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver's literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfort, praise, entice, or invite reconciliation, all while illuminating our living history through the lens of food. Sustenance is also a community response to the needs of new arrivals or low-income families in our city. Writers will be donating their honoraria to the Farmers Market Nutrition Coupon Program. A portion of sales from every book will to towards providing a refugee or low-income family with fresh, locally grown produce, and at the same time will support BC farmers, fishers, beekeepers, and gardeners. Award-winning chefs, poets and writers in Sustenance include: Frank Pabst (Chef, Blue Water Café), Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Mark Winston, Susan Musgrave, Lorna Crozier, Thomas Haas (artisan chocolatier), Meeru Dhalwalla (Chef, Vij's and Rangoli), Ayelet Tsabari, and Adèle Barclay.

For over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario's deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright's most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded "Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner," the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright's work by scholar Alessandro Porco.

Everything is just a little more difficult for poor 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.

Winner, the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award. Del 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. PRAISE FOR BLACK STAR: "A "hideous narrative" about bad behaviour, Black Star elicits frequent guffaws. Philosopher-fools, what's not to like?" (Toronto Star) "The scholarly life has lent itself to fiction and satire for decades now (centuries, if you want to go back to Chaucer). ... Delorosa Hanks, the chaotic narrator of Black Star, is the latest heir in this line. By the second sentence of the scalding new novel by Vancouver author Maureen Medved, Hanks is referring to her academic rival as 'a lesion of carcinogenic proportions capable of rotting and destroying departments'. It just gets darker, funnier, and more acidic from there." (The Georgia Straight) "Maureen Medved masterfully explores her protagonists in all their spangled, fallible glory. Black Star plunges the reader into frantic academic rivalry. Is it paranoia or master manipulation? Every twist and turn will lead you down Medved's darkly compelling rabbit hole." (Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster) "This wild novel is a powerful exploration of imposter syndrome taken to extremes and a story of how the sadistic, competitive world of academia intersects with one woman's unraveling sense of self. Suspenseful and beautifully written." (Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People, Giller Prize Finalist) "You can read this slender swift novel as a comedy of manners, or a sly take on the corrosions of academe, but on its lower frequencies Maureen Medved's brilliant new book is about the death of dreams and our lost hold on truth and reality, an often funny but finally harrowing look at a dystopia that's come to reside in each of our souls." (Charles D'Ambrosio, author of Loitering)

Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction. Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althusser, who escaped prosecution for strangling his wife in France on an insanity plea. Althusser is heading to a Saskatchewan hospital for LSD therapy. Pursuing them is Jean Claude Piche, a veteran of the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, contracted to execute Althusser for the unpunished murder. The 1950s were Greenberg's decade. Yet by 1962, everywhere Greenberg looks he is bedevilled by Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, just as everywhere Althusser looks he sees capitalist decay. Jean Claude catches Greenberg and Althusser at Niagara Falls. The enigmatic arch patriot Swen catches all three in North Dakota. Convinced that they are communist subversives, Swen imprisons and interrogates them even as, hour by hour, minute by minute, Khrushchev and Kennedy threaten to launch World War III. An absurdist romp, Atomic Road charts its own course between historical veracity, fictional invention, and the unfettered egotism of two mad intellectuals.

IPPY Gold Medal (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Domestic satire meets gripping suspense in Straight Circles, the final, explosive chapter of The Lizzy Trilogy. The original and eccentric cast of characters return in this genre-bending thriller, but not everyone's getting out alive. Newly pregnant Lizzy arrives to revisit old haunts in the bleak Scottish town that she escaped years ago as a teenage runaway. Along with a yearning to rediscover her roots, she wants to confront her harrowing past and learn what happened to her mother, whose disappearance has remained unsolved. Instead, she comes face to face with her estranged father, whose violent side soon emerges with devastating consequences. But someone else is watching, and Lizzy's father will pay. Oliver is back, and this time there will be no waiting, no savouring, and no patience for the small-time victims and criminals in his way. He's ready to claim his little bird' - and to show her exactly what happened to her mother. What Oliver doesn't know is that someone is tracking him, and will do anything to poach his most elusive prize. In Straight Circles, Lizzy returns to the heart of the story, where the stakes are higher than ever. Where it all began is where it will all end, in a chilling confrontation with the man who has been tracking her for years. In a disturbing finale, we are left to watch as Lizzy walks straight into the path of two dark and dangerous killers - and makes the biggest mistake of her life.   Praise for Nondescript Rambunctious: "... a thriller that succeeds by nodding politely to the formula, then turning it on its head." (Quill & Quire)

In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the parting. We acknowledge, we recognize, we nod knowingly, and not just from familiarity but because her words have snapped our head forward. And we realize the dummy on her lap, frozen and smiling, is us, and the jaw drops from laughter and dismay, but just as often it drops in awe. Advance Praise for Slinky Naive: "The urban, visceral, longing-infused poems in Slinky Naive are fast, dense, and laser-focused. And when the lines are funny, and they often are, it's like laughing before the blade comes down. Caroline Szpak is doing exactly what poets should do: she is doing something no one else is doing." (Stuart Ross, author of Pockets and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent)