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A woman, travelling alone through time, Africa, and unnamed lands, searches for Dr. David Livingstone, celebrated by the West as a “discoverer” of Africa. Throughout her quest, for knowledge and for Livingstone, the traveller visits many peoples, listens to their stories and their silences, and learns about their Silence. Suspense, parables, and dreams play major parts in the story as it twists and turns toward the traveller’s confrontation with Livingstone-I-presume. Looking for Livingstone explodes Western assumptions about the “silence” of indigenous peoples; this is an elegant and compelling novel which beautifully gives voice to the ancestors to whom it is dedicated.First published in 1991 by The Mercury Press, this new edition features an introduction by the author and an afterword by Michael Nardone.

Three works that bookend Joyce Mansour’s two decades of published fiction“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, this work chronicles the slow collapse of boundaries between visitor and patient, authority and submission, imagination and extinction. What begins as an act of filial duty becomes an existential entrapment, as the narrator is absorbed into the institution’s rhythms and hierarchies.Doctors and nurses embody a cruel vitality, their health weaponized against the dying. Patients drift through states of dependency, hallucination, and rage. Bodies leak, fail, and betray their owners, while language splinters under the pressure of describing what polite discourse refuses to name. The hospital is a place for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands,” her final work of narrative prose, marks an important shift in her creative life in which she begins to look outward, rather than inward, for inspiration.Rooted in Surrealism yet strikingly contemporary, “Floating Islands” (1973) is collected here alongside Mansour’s earliest prose works, “Julius Caesar” (1955) and “The Parrot” (1956), a combination that reads as both culmination and reckoning: a final confrontation with mortality, authorship, and the limits of imagination.

A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara.Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of music’s most celebrated sister duos, from their start as Neil Young’s protégés to Canadian indie-rock purveyors and, making their riskiest transformation yet, into mainstream pop breakouts.Coming up as grunge-loving musicians in the late '90s and early 2000s, Tegan and Sara found themselves awkwardly pushed into categories that didn’t quite fit: a novelty twin sister folk act when they wanted to be taken seriously; pop when they wanted to be indie rock; and sellouts when they finally made their bid for mainstream success. As young, queer musicians who didn’t see anyone else like themselves growing up (in a time where Internet access hadn’t yet formed global spaces and communities for LGBTQ+ people), Tegan and Sara’s path to pop stardom was filled with familiar hurdles, but no clear instructions on how to navigate things like homophobic press, niche queer audiences that wanted to claim them, or sexism at every turn.It’s a journey with ups and downs, but Tegan and Sara’s perseverance—alongside a music industry and journalism world that’s had to learn to confront its own biases—has helped create a musical world today that more readily accepts and embraces queer voices. Featuring continuous sonic transformations, Tegan and Sara’s story is essential to Canadian music history.

WINNER OF THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTIONA GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 202249TH STREET EDITOR'S PICK FOR SEPTEMBER 2022A reclamation offemale rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.Frances is quiet and reclusive,so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated inthe basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herselfstarts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember therebeing a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when sheturns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between herchildhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and herdreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound nowcoming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall.With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Müller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.

Winner of the Nelson Ball Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman AwardMinimalist poetry for maximalist times.Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.

We don't choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past .Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.

An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism.From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance.Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.

A collection that careens from Ancient Greece to the Klondike Gold Rush, for readers of A. S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood.“It is the part that is missing that I am drawn to, that I try to pin down. My gaze is always divided by what is here and what is no longer here. That, for me, is where the deepest pleasure lies, where the sweet overcomes the bitter."A couple coping with a recent loss are tasked with taking stock of a late biology enthusiast’s hoard. A support worker dedicated to rehabilitating young women suffering from, among other things, a certain unexpected effect of the climate apocalypse faces a truth that shatters the illusion separating her work and her personal life. An archaeologist formerly working in Syria struggles with her decision to flee from unrest, while the people she has left behind face an uncertain fate.In Jennifer Falkner’s richly imagined first collection, past and present glancingly converge, making the familiar outlines of myth, history, and everyday life seem suddenly strange. With spare, elegant prose, Falkner introduces the reader to those whose narratives are written in the language of empty space. Above Discovery is a stunning debut collection from an author to watch.

Featured on 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: 2023 Fall Fiction Preview"Things used to be easier, but even in those carefree days, the rules were in place for a reason. And that reason is: so we can all agree. So we can all have the same standard applied across the board. So there is no special treatment, which no one should receive. This is why we need the rules."The stories in Avalanche combine humor with an earnest examination and indictment of white entitlement, guilt, shame, and disorientation in the wake of waking up to the reality of racism. Focusing on the perspective of white, cis, straight, and mostly middle-aged and middle-class characters, this collection shines a light on the obliviousness of white privilege, the violence of polite, quiet racism hiding just under the surface of mundane, everyday situations, and the anguished flailing of "well-intentioned white ladies" desperate to confirm their essential goodness at all costs. Westhead writes with compassion and empathy for both her frustrating and frustrated white protagonists and the racialized characters who encounter them, and uses humour not to comfortably distance white readers from the harmful behaviour of her self-absorbed protagonists, but to pull them in close to recognize—and reckon with—those familiar parts of themselves, and to become more aware of the insidious systems of white supremacy at work behind the scenes.

Motherhood, trauma, and familial history are woven together into a powerful collection from the award-winning author of What Became My Grieving Ceremony.Beginning with a revelation of familial sexual abuse, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People charts the impact of this revelation on the speaker. From the pain of estrangement to navigating first-time motherhood in the midst of a family crisis, Morgan explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.

Winner of the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canadathe lantern light seems to have written a poem;they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.—“lantern” by Fei MingThe work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s  personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.

Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.It’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

"Jay Ritchie's poem's veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie's vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousListening in Many Publics is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous, and held in common. The book expresses this vision in three long poems which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems. Using a circular structure that resists linear capitalist logics, fragmentation that attunes us to sound over sense, and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative, the poems speak to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of rehearsing different ways of being, and of returning to material truths, together. Plural, civic, and political, the poems locate themselves in the many publics that constitute our individual and social being, interrogate that which brings the subject into existence, and ultimately convey an open, hopeful sensibility in the face of the structures and systems they critique.

Winner of the 2015 Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction AwardRevised and expanded tenth anniversary edition, featuring new essays and an introduction by Christa Couture.This is a sex book. It’s a book about fucking yourself, fucking someone you love, fucking strangers. It’s about saying words like cunt and come, and all manner of perverse verbiage. Mostly, it’s about speaking honestly about our bodies and our vulnerability, recognizing we’re all imperfect, worthy, and desirable.In this ten year anniversary edition of Hot, Wet & Shaking, Kaleigh Trace—disabled, queer, sex therapist—chronicles her journey from ignorance to bliss as she shamelessly discusses her sexual exploits and bodily negotiations. Trace’s memoirs and essays generously welcome the reader into her world, modelling a humour and radical self acceptance that can teach us all how to talk about sex, and then some.

Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city's last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon's past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of its youth in the 1950s and 1960s, to the grating difficulties of the 2015 garbage crisis and the struggle to accommodate and assimilate refugees, this is a journey through a city, and an expedition into the idea of home, that only Rima could shepherd. No matter the detours.

"Andrew Forbes’s exquisitely rendered prose makes The Diapause both realistic and futuristic, devastating even while it is oddly hopeful. Vast and intimate, the novel absorbs and grips. I cannot shake its central image: the strange little noodles, the mysterious worms who seem to be dancing in the moments before catastrophe."—Liz Harmer, author of Strange LoopsWhen ten-year-old Gabriel and his parents retire to his late grandfather’s disused cabin to wait out a pandemic, the big, dangerous world seems very far away, and Gabriel enjoys the freest summer of his young life. But tensions begin to surface, testing the family unit, and resulting in consequences that he will spend his life attempting to unravel.Spanning nearly a half-century, The Diapause is a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. Part White Fang, part Station Eleven, The Diapause is a novel about how the things we seek are often the things we didn’t know we’d lost.

Raised in a conservative Christian home in the East Coast of Canada, Mag is urged to preserve her purity at all costs. Desperate to secure her place in heaven, she rejects the hyper-sexual youth culture of her small town—until she falls for a magnetic, sophisticated girl while attending a program designed to usher young people into Evangelical Missionary work. Spiraling into shame and regret, Mag breaks away from the Church and launches herself into the world of sex for hire, attempting to shed her repressive past and become an anti-virgin—the antithesis of who she was raised to be.

“Though the four novellas comprising Dead Writers vary tremendously in style and subject matter, they all evoke a delicious, spine-tingling sense of dread. These tales take readers on a head spinning journey through the inner workings of a cruel colonial school, all the way to a creepy contemporary vacation rental, never losing sight of the selfish, unscrupulous, and inescapable aspects of human behaviour. This is a collection that will keep you turning pages, but that will also make you wonder: Are the pages turning you?”—Allegra Hyde, author of The Last CatastropheIn this collaborative fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. A biographer surveying the career of a “haunted” literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor’s complicity in a colonial scandal: These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.

Cut Side Down feasts on books. Diving face-first into the bookcase, MacEachern calls up the pleasure and pain of influence in sumptuous, body-and-mind-bending poems. Here Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and companions attend salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman, while Lorine Niedecker scolds Charles Olson in class. There are glimpses of the poet too—a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, a young woman in Montréal—as she concocts worlds and words. Immersed in a life of reading, and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, ;Cut Side Down melds lyric and conceptual experiment in a delightful banquet of autobiography, desire, invention, landscape and memory.

Makeshift Fields is a snapshot of grassroots baseball in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Played as it is in the rain and cold, on temporary diamonds that are sometimes less than ideal, baseball is still fragile in these places. This book is the story of people who love the game, the story of people who believe that baseball can flourish where it’s been planted, with each location contributing its own idiosyncrasies.On one hand, baseball is baseball, and what is depicted is not dissimilar to what one might see in North America. On the other hand, it feels different. More precarious, yes, but also more communal. This is baseball played for its own sake, played in public parks by people who have fallen in love with the game, or people who are searching for a piece of home.

“Country Music is both delicate and ferocious, tender and steely. [...] Spackled with violence, hilarity, grotesquerie, these poems are animated by Koss’s profound listening and attentiveness and a kind of wild longing. These are poems as if exchanged among friends and family, as if generated around an archaic campfire, as if John Prine had spent his youth in the Kootenays, as if poetry were still a medium of common life: and suddenly we see with this book that it is.”—Maureen McLane, author of My PoetsZane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.

As the children of a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. That is, until Claire moves to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Enter the slow, hopeful, devastating process of fertility treatments. While Laura prepares for IVF, Claire has her own encounter with the fertility industry.Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters’ lives, from communication to reproduction.

A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2025“This book is so strangely moving and truly funny and sad and beautiful. An impressive debut from a writer already in possession of a unique voice.”—Miriam ToewsThe Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins’ physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie’s sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of “The Reuben Beast,” though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents’ deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor.A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world.

“Opening Diving Board is like waking in a white room with no doors or windows. A question resonates as one reads these stories: How did Tomás Downey place me here so perfectly, and why is it that I don't want to leave?”—Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh and The UnworthyTomás Downey writes from the edge of the abyss. A little girl disappears midair; a horse grows from a seed; a war widow receives a visit of condolence, over and over and over again. In “The Astronaut” a man has become weightless, bobbing around on the ceiling, nauseated every time he is brought down and tethered to the earth. But the question here is not “how” or “why,” it’s “what happens next?” The astronaut wonders “Will I burn like an asteroid or drown in the void of space?” just as all of Downey’s stories reside in that threatening, destabilizing moment when all connection is lost. The world is filled with an ever-thickening mist, an old love haunts the living, making fruit rot in the bowl, and resolution isn’t offered or even sought—the human condition is queasy, fretful, absurd. All we can hope for is the leap into the unknown.

A surreal story of honeyed sweetness, predatory stings, and metamorphosis.In a coming-of-age story inspired by second-wave feminism, the intelligent and curious Habella confronts her passions and those of the men around her. From her first period, to unsettling sexual encounters, to her dissatisfying life as a mother and wife, The Bee Book follows Habella as she negotiates the complexities of her desires as they conflict with the oppressive norms of patriarchy. In this genre-defying work that brings together fiction, poetry, visual art, games, and more, we follow Habella—deeply inspired by the lives of bees—as she seeks self-liberation.Originally published in 1981, this new edition features an introduction by Stephen Cain and Eric Schmaltz.

Constructed with the tools of poetic and documentary convention—fragmentation, oral history, rhythmic and imagistic leaps—Baby Face / Face de bébé weaves a portrait of Denise Cassidy, known as Baby Face, the first woman to own a lesbian bar in Montréal.Iconoclastic and authoritative, revered and feared, Baby Face's story remains nevertheless largely undocumented. Yet for those in the know, the Montréal queer scene is nearly impossible to recount without her. The story of Baby Face is, too, the story of a formative time and place in North American lesbian culture and a testament to those who have worked to preserve her history.Blending photographs by Baby Face’s personal photographer Suzanne Girard with archival clippings, spliced interviews, audio from independent films, and other marginalia, the book offers a window into a particular moment in queer life—and a nod to the DIY methods often used to preserve histories relegated to the margins.

“A luminous novel told in snippets, The Alchemy of Paradise considers how best to live in the face of loss. […] Metaphysical and insightful, The Alchemy of Paradise is an innovative novel.”—Carolyn Wilson-Scott, Foreword ReviewsA curator confronts grief, loss, and mortality by arranging the fragments of her life—objects, memories, impressions—into a fragile order.Set in contemporary England, with Venice shimmering at its core, The Alchemy of Paradise follows her attempt to preserve what might otherwise vanish, shaping a collection that makes survival possible. When order fails to yield meaning, she turns to the alchemical, where matter shifts into metaphor and loss becomes transformation.A novel of ideas told through poetic essays and reflections, The Alchemy of Paradise explores the tension between collecting and transmuting, order and disorder. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s collections, and in dialogue with writers like W.G. Sebald, Patti Smith, and Leanne Shapton, it meditates on the ways that art and imagination allow us to chart personal maps through the universal yet individual territories of loss. Refusing collapse into despair, The Alchemy of Paradise offers curation itself as a restless, ongoing practice of creation and renewal.

123 artists, bookbinders, publishers, librarians, and scholars answer a deceptively simple question: What is a book?In April 2018, after publishing The Book in The MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge Series, Amaranth Borsuk began to approach artists, bookbinders, publishers, librarians, and scholars to inquire about their definition of the book. This collection, originally published in 2021 with 101 definitions and now expanded to 123, documents the responses and decentres the author’s voice to draw attention to the many other formulations of what the book is and can be.Some definitions from the book:“The book is the physical limit at which we give up trying to contain a concept.”—Craig Dworkin“The book, for a very short time, stabilizes what flows through it, with the proviso that some works do not flow, just as some bodies do not progress from one time to the next in fluid or malleable ways. In this case, the book functions differently. It becomes the ground, a nearby or volatile ground for what lies down: upon it. Throw a charnel next over the book Set out a bowl of water for the unseen beings, the animals and birds, that gather at its boundary. Or brink.”—Bhanu Kapil“What is a book? It stinks. B.O…O. K. Like a drunk. L’IVRE. Each one is a long island, brother. L.I. BRO. A kit full of As and Bs. KITĀB. Latin. LIBERation & Saxon BOG. The Taíno language would not have had a word for it but is had GUAROCO = to know, but also to remember (see petroglyphs). A book is a way of knowing, re-membering what is forever lost in translation.”—Urayoán Noel“A book is the flesh between flesh, a hard text sculpture from soft text immensities, a staged performance of time, a tangible glance of minds, the desire to speak other.”—Lisa Samuels