Two novels, two young women at the frontiers of sex.

Like a series of Penthouse letters penned by Kathy Acker, Lie With Me recounts a woman's sexual escapades, picking up random men in bars for a series of increasingly extreme encounters, hoping to understand love from the far side of sluttiness.

In The Way of the Whore, Mira, an introverted Jewish g …

My stomach has invented several new knots and named them all after you. I'm so happy I could burst into flames. That's what she said. Falling asleep is like climbing a tall, leafy tree. The branches get narrower – spot me.

Need Machine clamours through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topogra …

language I'll say yes
from the top of my rib cage
language will you come
out and unearth the salt the certitude

Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, …

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very d …

Through ten incendiary and mercurial stories, Cosmo will take you on a wild ride over the churning waters of pop culture and the malaise of our solitary existence.

WINNER OF THE 2013 CBC OVERLOOKIE BOOKIE AWARD FOR MOST UNDERRATED CANADIAN BOOK

An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew …

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection

Finalist for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation

Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot f …

Milo doesn't quite have it all together. His acting career has stalled. His girlfriend dumped him. His miserable father has vanished, and people keep moving into his house. When Robertson, the autistic eleven-year-old next door – the only person Milo really likes – gets bullied, Milo is finally spurred to action. Milo being Milo, that doesn't r …

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

If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. …

Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and 'natural' spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our f …

The lease is meaningless: a square paced
first by seismic workers, and then your father,
and then by every other man you know.

Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, He …

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)

If it were necessary to tell someone where I am,
I’d say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles.
I’d say I have loved.

These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. 'Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price bu …

In 'Frogs,' a short story from Heather Birrell's Mad Hope, a science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceau?escu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request. A free e-book single from the Journey-Prize-winning short story author.

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in CeauÅ?escu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basi …

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)

Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian mus …

Autumn.
The sky streaked with silk parachutes
or by tears.
A sparkling epidemic.

think if the world truly tore in half it would seep blue.

New Theatre stages a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that calls into question the process and nature of meaning. Steudel’s coolly cerebral ‘Birch’ sequence about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s …

Dr. Penelope Douglas is an ex-forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a styling western boomtown, but on her first day practicing in her boutique suite, a young television writer hangs himself in her subway-tiled bathroom. A dissection of contemporary television drama through the eyes of the dead writer reveals to Penelope an unsettling …

In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspect …

A finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award!

The Combals are not unacquainted with death: they have never quite recovered from the loss of one of them in childhood. And now, on Valentine's Day, they are losing another.?

Guddy races to see her sister, Jerry and Bjarne avoid the phone and its news, Jean finds himself on a beach, and Ann …

Non-profits are big business. According to a recent Johns Hopkins report, third-sector institutions in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, the U.S. and Canada have been growing at an average rate that is twice the growth rate of their GDPs. Canada is home to the second largest non-profit workforce in the world, employing 2 million paid staff and co …

CBC Radio 3 Book Club pick for August 2012!

It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family leads an ordinary suburban existence. Former high school volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife Trixie serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful genocide studies …

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Poetry

David McGimpsey's fifth collection of poems takes to new levels the melding of the deeply personal and the culturally popular that drove his acclaimed book Sitcom (nominated for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) – this is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committe …

Welcome to Crooked River, Ontario. Population 2,851 and falling. Eli has lived in Crooked River his whole life, and he knows better than anyone about that sinking number. His father, uncle and grandmother are dead; he didn't know his mother, and his grandfather Clarence, an eccentric builder of hotels and a now-underwater castle, walked to the rive …

People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know if you’ve spotted an armchair psychologist or a kleptomaniac?

Gabe Foreman …

For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis's lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions t …

First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just 26, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist's lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning 'poetry' on its head before its author (then known simply as 'Jones') swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the t …

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons, all set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J. with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender and narrative. …

It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her dead boyfriend and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man's father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, she was so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnan …

Steve Reinke is one of the most intriguing artists we've got; his scope is enormous, his imagination absolutely singular. His video art — The Hundred Videos, Anthology of American Folk Song, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss — practically define the genre.

Reinke tells us, in 'Kitchener–Berlin,' his appreciation of Philip Hoffman's film of th …

What is it to be plaster-cast in the dense cream of June?
Robed in a chain mail of summer afternoon, your dainties
hang like bricks from a clothesline, the mouth pares its
possibilities: gape or zip,

and the weed-whackers make no noise at all.

Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven’t ever worked out well for him. He h …

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

Winner of the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
Shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for Best Fiction
A Globe and Mail Best Novel of 2011

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And a …

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An En …

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the alw …

Jonathan Ball’s Clock?re is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are de?led. The poems in a sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks …

A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March fami …

Jon Paul Fiorentino's new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience.

The poems …

What is the 'Toronto look'? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.

Shawn Micallef has been examining T …

Night is falling, and so is the snow. As the blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes, and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made. Julie's two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to …

This is the story of Isobel and Emile. They wake up beside each other one morning, and they slowly get out of bed. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They do not want it to be the last time but they know that it is. They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not. She stands …

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award

In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for captur …

Rachel Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conï¬?ict in Israel/Palestine ï¬�*rmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a mineï¬�*eld of competing knowledges, media and public texts, N …

If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, the role chefs can and should play in society – how a city nouris …

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002)

Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram.

The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littératur …

Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she's never met, her adopted father's suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn’t left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protege, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just …

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don’t use humour as …

Nominated for several Dora Awards

When a young scholar finds Eternal Hydra, a long-lost, legendary and encyclopedic novel by an obscure Irish writer, she brings the manuscript to an esteemed publisher, hoping to secure an international audience for the book. But Vivian's obsession with the dead author, who has materialized in her life, is challenged …

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.

The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with …

Her hands lay inert and upturned on her lap – probably stunned, she thinks, by the hideousness of the skirt underneath them. Centre seam puckered, zipper mangled, it's handmade in a way that makes people say, 'Did you sew that yourself?' when they mean, 'How can you wear that thing?' But she made it the day after he died, and she talked to him in …

Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon. Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters – sculptor Charles; his sister Kim, …

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry

This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.

Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Ma …

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region)

A Globe and Mail Top Five First Fiction Title of 2009

Nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh has an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. He knows that if you wet a dog's food with your saliva and he refuses to eat it then he's top dog, and he knows …