Rare Machines – serie

Finalist for 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction • Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First BookAfter years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell.Persephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency.It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

The true story of how one Muslim woman shaped her own fate and escaped her forced wedding.Sumaiya Matin was never sure if the story of the Shaytan Bride was truth or myth. When she moved at age six from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Thunder Bay, Ontario, recollections of this devilish bride followed her. At first, the Shaytan Bride seemed to be the monster of fairy tales, a woman possessed or seduced by a jinni. But everything changes during a family trip to Bangladesh, and in the weeks leading to Sumaiya’s own forced wedding, she discovers that the story — and the bride herself — are much closer than they seem.The Shaytan Bride is the true coming-of-age story of a girl navigating desire and faith. Through her journey into adulthood, she battles herself and her circumstances to differentiate between destiny and free will. Sumaiya Matin’s life in love and violence is a testament to one woman’s strength as she faces the complicated fallout of her decisions.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A meditation on the meaning of life in an increasingly global world, from acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Xue Yiwei.Set in modern-day Montreal, Celia, Misoka, I is the story of a middle-aged Chinese man who has been living in the city for fifteen years. After the death of his wife, he begins to reflect on his past and how he has ended up alone in Canada, a solitary member of the Chinese diaspora. It is in this period of angst and uncertainty, during the most unusual of winters, that he meets two women by Beaver Lake, on Montreal’s Mount Royal. They, too, have their own stories: stories of their own personal plights, which connect present to past, and West to East.The distinct paths taken by these three characters — Celia, Misoka, and “I” — span continents and decades, but, whether by chance or design, converge in Montreal, like mysterious figures in an ancient Chinese Zen painting. After coming together, the three begin to examine who they are, where they might belong, and how to navigate otherness and identity in a globalized world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit AwardA professor of English literature writes the autobiography of his fantasy alter-ego, wanton movie star Gloria Grahame, while his own sexual desires go frustrated.Denton Moulton — a shy, effeminate male professor — lives inside his head, where he is really a long-dead movie star: the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. Professor Moulton is desperate to reveal Gloria’s shocking secret before he dies. Does he have the right to tell this woman’s story? Who, in fact, has the right to tell anyone’s story at all?A scandalous, humorous novel of taboo desires and repression, I, Gloria Grahame alternates between Gloria’s imagined life with her film-director husband, Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, and Denton’s increasingly frustrated real-life attempts to produce his own work of art: an all-male drag production of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The novel takes us from high-strung film sets to dark bars and the puritanical offices of government arts granting agencies, where Denton runs up against the sternest warnings that he may not, in fact, imagine himself as someone else, even in art.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the superrich.It's 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness “wakes up” in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian.Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her, learning about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse.Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt — the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library).Finalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First NovelSeven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them.The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness.Both sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

For readers of Queenie and Honey Girl, a coming-of-age story about queer Black identity, love, passion, chosen family, and rediscovering life’s pleasures after loss.Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister.Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life’s most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present. On the journey to turning twenty-five, she finally sees that she belongs to herself, and goes about the business of reclaiming that self. Through a series of whirlwind love affairs, parties, and trips abroad, Jade stumbles toward relinquishing the weight of her trauma as she fully comes into her own as a young Black woman and writer.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A mid-level drug trafficker and self-proclaimed low-life with a big vocabulary comes to terms with his actions and his mental health.Andrew Brobyn’s relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents’ home in Toronto while he figured out what to do with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer.Equal parts hilarious and terrifying, Babble On is a psycho-philosophical memoir that tracks Brobyn as he navigates the consequences of his eccentric choices and struggles with profound ambivalence toward his own health and well-being.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

“At once experimental literature and alchemical apparatus — designed to take all the flavours of one man’s life experiences and transform them into something that nourishes.” — ANDREA THOMPSON, author of A Selected History of Soul SpeakA tasty yet experimental recipe of creative memoir in poetic prose cooked up for your consumption — one letter at a time.Alphabet Soup is a poetic exploration of the deeper meaning discovered by stirring up the depths of one’s most personal lived experiences. Twenty-six letters, one missive addressed to each letter of the alphabet, dive into the scalding heat of memory through themes that recall and reframe love, death, joy, sorrow, victory, devastation, and more.Using prose that is by turns startling, revelatory, humorous, sorrowful, and triumphant, these introspections on the nature of living engage the mind and heart in the difficult, unending work of grappling with one’s past in the present, with the hope it can help create a more satisfying future.

A dark, satiric novel about a woman whose attempt to escape crises in her health and marriage ends up causing more chaos.Cat's career has stalled, her marriage has gone flat, and being a stay-at-home mom for two young kids has become a grind. When she finds out, all within a few days, that she is pregnant, that a lump in her breast is the worst thing it could be, and that her husband has done something unforgivably repulsive, she responds by running away from her marriage and her life — a life that, on the outside, looks like middle-class success. Her actions send waves of chaos through the lives of multiple characters, including a struggling house cleaner, a rich and charismatic yoga guru, and even an ailing dog. What follows is a dark comedy about marriage, motherhood, privilege, and power.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

New risky fiction — with no names attached.If authors could write their sex scenes anonymously, would they be less reticent? Would they include the stuff they didn’t want their mom, or the newspapers, to read?Here are twenty-four original short pieces of fiction on the theme of sex, by twenty-four prominent authors living in Canada. Heather O’Neill, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Zoe Whittall, Pasha Malla, francesca ekwuyasi, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tamara Faith Berger, and Susan Swan are among these. But we won’t tell you who wrote what.The pieces are uncensored, unpredictable; they veer from graphic to subtle to surreal. There is straight sex and gay sex. There is frustrated sex. There is sex that happens entirely through text messages. Secret Sex is a book of erotic imaginings by some of Canada’s most sophisticated and respected writers, working in total freedom, secretly.Featuring Angie Abdou, Jean-Marc Ah-Sen, Tamara Faith Berger, Jowita Bydlowska, Xaiver Campbell, K.S. Covert, francesca ekwuyasi, Anna Fitzpatrick, Drew Hayden Taylor, Victoria Hetherington, Marni Jackson, Andrew Kaufman, Michael LaPointe, Pasha Malla, Sophie McCreesh, Lisa Moore, Heather O’Neill, Lee Suksi, Susan Swan, Heidi von Palleske, Aley Waterman, Zoe Whittall, David Whitton, Michael WinterA RARE MACHINES BOOK

An anarchist online group sets out to assassinate the corporate elites they believe have turned culture into a digital nightmare.Don Barton is the visionary creator of Greenhouse, a popular immersive game where millions play at “saving the environment” in the surreal digital landscapes of the metaverse. Now retired to his plutocratic wealth, he learns his teen son, a gifted gamer, has suddenly gone missing, having joined a terrorist group led by a mysterious young woman, Eris, a former cryptocurrency trader. She’s on a mission to destroy the world’s entertainment and social media platforms and assassinate the corporate elites who run them.In desperation, Barton roams Greenhouse, the only place his radicalized son will talk to him, learning that the game — his life’s work — is on the terrorist hit list. And both his life and his son’s are in danger.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FINALIST • CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2024The secrets of the house are the secrets of the heart.It begins with an act of betrayal that destroys the tenuous bonds of Celestina Errantes’s family. For years afterwards, Celestina longs for an escape from her unhappy home. Then an unexpected gift from her wealthy Lolo offers that chance: a long-forsaken property in Manila’s bohemian district, close to where ladies of the evening ply their trade. It is no place for a proper young woman, but this house, even with its ghosts, makes Celestina feel at home.Celestina tears into life, losing herself in the pleasures of the night, but soon finds that the emptiness within her is not easily filled. When finally a true chance at happiness promises to save her, a sinister voice from the past returns, threatening to destroy it all.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Striving to get ahead in a world of scams, Hamid is caught in the fervour surrounding a charismatic social-media imam with questionable intentions.Hamid Shaikh is a small-time crook in the big city, hoping that one of his cons will lead to riches. Tax fraud, telemarketing tricks, government scams. Whatever it takes. When he’s not working the phones hustling fake promises, he dreams of a move that will finally announce his arrival.When his girlfriend Natalie Mendoza vanishes, Hamid finds himself pulled into the orbit of former Guantanamo Bay detainee turned social-media imam Abdul Mohammad. On the surface, Abdul’s organization is virtuous: they are helping other detainees rehabilitate to life outside the prison. But as Hamid dives deeper into Abdul’s nebulous and luxurious world, he finds a confusing mix of religious zeal and cynical self-advancement. With his connection to the imam deepening, Hamid must decide just how far into darkness he can go before losing sight of himself.

Gosia feels stalled in her life, but a family trip opens her eyes to the life she has … and the life she wants.Gosia, a high school chemistry teacher, travels to her native Poland to visit her estranged father. Back in Canada, meanwhile, her father-in-law — who has been more of a dad to her than her own — is dying of cancer. Away from her routine, Gosia questions everything in her life, including her long-term boyfriend, Peter. She feels stuck in the terrifying time of early adulthood, in her first grown-up job while managing student debt, monogamy, and existential dread. Is this really it, she wonders? Gosia’s time in Poland gives her the chance to examine her life, and she finds herself pulled homeward to Canada, where she faces the fact that Peter’s father — like her own — is far from perfect. Can she love despite betrayal? Can she find hope in her fiery, complex love for Peter? Is there something more to this life that she didn’t even realize she had?Becalming tells the story of two people realizing that happily ever after is not something to be but something to continue to explore, through adversity and outrage, tragedy and inspiration, and love.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A poignant novel about two best friends sharing yearning, rejection, and lip gloss in a close-knit blue-collar town.It’s 2004 and childhood friends Sami and Lucy are on the edge of adulthood. Lucy knows what she is going to do — she’s going to school and getting out. But Sami, caught in an endless loop with a boy, True, who is from a troubled family, can’t seem to get unstuck.“I’d used to feel, when I was with True, that I was safe, that he would take care of me, that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen. But now I wasn’t sure what I had constructed that from. His easy way with words, his confidence, maybe, his height. I was tall but he was bigger than me; in my mind he was bigger than anyone. Or maybe it was the surprisingly gentle way he’d touch your hair, your face. But in reality, he’d offered no more protection than a child’s night light against monsters, a tender deception we fall for, easily, before we grow up and know better.”The further Sami drifts from Lucy, the harder it is to not be guided and bound by her heartbreak for True, whose destructive presence continually interferes with Sami’s hope for stability and connection. As their paths begin to diverge, Sami must learn to navigate life in their small town — and the universe — without the one person she’s always counted on.“If soulmates were real, she was mine.”

A bold, unsettling, and sinister collection of stories that ask what monster means.What is a monster? The word encompasses the grotesque, the immoral, or the merely wondrous. Mythical creatures, corrupt executives and mean exes are all monsters. Monsters live among us. Sometimes the monster is us.What do monsters mean to writers? Here is a literary grab-bag: fourteen writers from diverse genres — literary, mystery, horror, the experimental — interpret monsters either literal or metaphorical. Stories from: Sifton Tracy Anipare, Steve Burrows, Brenda Chapman, Chinenye Emezie, Barbara Fradkin, Zsuzsi Gartner, Liz Harmer, Babak Lakghomi, Pasha Malla, Andrew Pyper, Naben Ruthnum, Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson, Andrew Sullivan, and Emily Weedon.

Gen X wore a lot of black clothing and ate a lot of Kraft Dinner, but who are they? Twenty Gen X authors answer that question in fiction.Is X, the unknown variable, the middle child of generations? Born when the Boomers seemed to run the world, or at least official culture, Xers grew up skeptical of causes. They are the last generation to come of age free-range, without smart phones and without constant parental supervision. Their dark humour and their hard-edged music made them alarming to the pious millennials who followed them. Have they become invisible? Now they’re grown up and trying to care for aging parents and trying to understand their kids. What can Gen X’s irreverent voices offer the world? This collection features rule-bending fiction from the rag-tag voices of the class without a cause — latchkey kids, slackers, chillers, punks at the back of the bus who would rather laugh than scold.

An orbital hotel becomes a dazzling trap, where desire, danger, and forbidden science collide — and every secret could shatter reality itself.High above Earth and the sweltering summer heat, the Hotel Psyche orbits like a glittering mirage. A marvel of ambition and decay, its corridors teem with androids stitched from human remains, visionaries chasing forbidden knowledge, and guests haunted by questions the living were never meant to ask.Among them is Penelope, an android pieced together from a lost life, desperate for connection and a sense of self. Alice, a young bellhop searching for her vanished mother, stumbles into a labyrinth of intrigue after being kidnapped aboard. And in the hotel's observatory, scientists train a telescope on the probe Galatea, a window into another dimension that whispers secrets too dangerous to ignore.As desires collide and obsessions spiral, the Hotel Psyche begins to reveal its darkest truth: this hotel is not a sanctuary but a threshold; one that blurs the line between life and death, and dares its visitors to cross.

An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change.With the world’s oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed.Stories of Émeraude’s ancestors — a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak — weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

“Equal parts Harlequin romance, Gothic horror story and Camusian moral tale.” — GLOBE AND MAILFrom the bestselling author of Drunk Mom, comes a story of romantic obsession, mental illness, and self-discovery as one woman travels to a haunted quarantine island.Josephine is obsessed. Or possessed — by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn’t promise anything, but who gives her a taste of intimacy that puts her on the brink of losing her mind. Oscillating between her elusive lover and her older former partner, stuck in the hell that is working in a cubicle, and obliged to tend to her destructive, senile mother, Josephine is trapped. After a work assignment promises to deliver distraction, Josephine makes a decision to visit a former quarantine island in the Adriatic Sea, where she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Intimate and erotic, Possessed is a dark and funny story exploring sexual obsession, mental illness, and the supernatural.A RARE MACHINES BOOK