The word "magyarázni" (pronounced MUG-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-f …

In 1934, Gertrude Stein asked 'What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.' Throaty Wipes answers this question and many more! How does broadband work? Does 'chuffed' mean pleased or displeased? What if the generations of Adam had mothers? Through her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism, Holbrook delivers what we've …

What might a word lose – or gain – without its prefix?

Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings – radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate – to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelme …

After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between m …

A spun radio dial passing clean through poetry. A stuttering loop of Endgame recorded by Stockhausen, remixed by Kraftwerk. The chatter of minotaurs and metadata. Transmissions from far-off futures or new pasts, recordings from a recoded present topped off with a cherry. Evel Knievel, above it all, mysterious, forever taciturn. Mission Creep comes …

Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer.

WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLAGIENS

Simon turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough
of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together.
Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometim …

When Halland is found murdered almost right outside his door, his widow, Bess, is of course the prime suspect. She isn't worried about that, though, but about the daughter she abandoned years ago. As the police investigate, the slightly cantankerous Bess instead follows a trail of her own regrets and misapprehensions.

Atmospheric and haunted by the …

The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia

Shortlisted for the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards)

Internationally renowned poet Christian Bok has encoded a poem (called ‘Orpheus’) into the genome of a germ so that, in reply, the cell builds a protein that encode …

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE

Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was al …

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.

The manate …

something like wait for me
in the braille of scars
tonight can i suggest a little punctuation
circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment
a pause that transforms
light and breath
into language and threshold of fire

Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing w …

His body, like yours, would lie
mute as a plum
until a vigilant limb came
to a decision. As you might have guessed
I've come to one myself.

Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, …

Chinksta rap is all the rage in Red Deer, Alberta. And the king of Chinksta is King Kwong, Run’s older brother. Run isn’t a fan of Kwong’s music – or personality, really. But when Kwong goes missing just days before his crowning performance and their mom gets wounded by a stray bullet, Run finds himself, with his sidekick, Ali, in the middl …

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch.

More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can't stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after …

From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selection

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation

An abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.

We’re nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essen …

The story of the growth and destruction of Toronto's first 'priority neighbourhood.'

From the 1840s until the Second World War, waves of newcomers who migrated to Toronto – Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American and Chinese, among others – landed in 'The Ward.' Crammed with rundown housing and immigrant-owned businesses, this area, bordered by …

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.

Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d bec …

Winner of the 2015 Quebec Writers' Federation's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

If you tore off the tops of canola --
yellow canola flowers -- would you
jump in a tub of canola margarine
just to make the best of despair?

Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on …

I'm ill-equipped
for this. I sit
by a fake fireplace

that frames a real flame.
I've been crossed
by two crows today.

'Multi-vectored, Rogers's poems hum with life and tension, their speaker poised as mother, seer, reporter and daughter. They speak of loss and cold realities (misplaced charms of luck, a tour of an assisted-living facility, coins t …

An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.

WINNER OF CANADA READS 2017

WINNER OF THE 2015 GILLER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE 2015 ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2015 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS

— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.

—I'll wager a year's servitude, …

Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral version …

John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with four friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy.

Andy is an …

An old man in a military uniform and a Santa hat is dumped at the police station. He doesn’t speak English, and a lawyer’s business card is baited on the meat hook that hangs on his neck. As a lawyer, a police officer and a translator struggle to unravel the truth, they uncover a past that won’t stay buried, and a decades-old quest for justic …

How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics?

DOWN takes junk language – with cameos by Frank O’Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations – and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal …

One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014

The fairground screamed. The mountains
and valley were gone. The fire was gone
too. The hanging ‘because’

was gone too. The men were away
and my heart already dead
and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth.

A spectre haunts a derelictNSA surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. Our po …

Now that we 'curate' even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?

‘Curate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate t …

It is true Canada is not exactly a Utopia, Ltd.,
for there is hard work and a rough, raw, erudite wail
against the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion to be done
before comfort or affluence are built. I used to have a lot of idyl
fantasies inwrought with Indign traits about your too bruised
and scared surface looking into the seeds of time. How …

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and obliqu …

In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and sch …

These stories are diary shreds of young women who are in school but things happen anyway. Girls with their hears open like agar petri dishes. The setting could be Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, a Gothic castle or a bathtub. What people say matters. The girl might finally find someone she can talk to but falls asleep too soon. She will fall down ta …

One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014

Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting …

'Like all my favourite art, these paintings bring out that covetous feeling – I want to wear them, dance to them, show them off as an example of how life feels to me: dirty, dumb, terrifying, spiritual and so funny.' – Miranda July

'In a time of ironic detachment, Margaux Williamson is a painter of extreme candour, but the violence of her vision …

Nominated for the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation

All sorts of things can happen, no matter what road you take, and I never forget that. Death in particular can never be forgotten. Since Rudi’s death, I have tried to anticipate and dodge obstacles like an Olympic skier. My agile imagination glides between the little red flag …

'Teenage Head changed the face of music in this country. I would not be who I am today without their first record ... In 1979 they were the only band that mattered.’—Hugh Dillon

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no Canadian band rocked harder, louder or to more hardcore fans than Hamilton, Ontario's own Teenage Head. Although usually lumped in …

Nominated for the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

It's 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, Venice's four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting - Albrecht Dürer's The Brotherhood of the Rosary - across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pust …

While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the 'Crackpot' file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel's will, written by several notable Nobel laureates – including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie — each offering …

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock’s deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgängers, the Kraken and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.

André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' TRUST OF CANADA FICTION PRIZE

ONE OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL'S GLOBE 100: BEST BOOKS OF 2014

There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's …

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating …

At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Currin’s sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community.

'School is about the ways in which life eluc …

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

These eleven people Â? from …

Poet Margaret Christakos, throughout her eight previous poetry collections, has created ruptures and splices inside of and against the limits of the confessional lyric, often using recombinatory procedures, cyclical and serial structure, and enmeshing intimate vernacular with highly aestheticized language in writing that explores maternality, sexua …

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering de …

Nominated for a 2014 Saskatchewan Book Award

Françoise Mouly, an editor and publisher of uncommon taste and creativity, and an artist in her own right, has spent nearly four decades transforming comics. With her husband, Art Spiegelman, Mouly founded the landmark magazine RAW, which showcased artists such as Ben Katchor, Chris Ware, Charles Burns …

“First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before the form had a name. Considered an early masterpiece of the medium, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction and appreciation by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It’s a Good Life, If …

Whether misreading sixth?grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino'?s sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information —?? but does so with a wink during detention, a dodgeball to the gut during recess.

'Needs Improvement is as …

Will was pretty much the perfect role model.' - Beth Ditto, The Gossip

In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes when local artist, DJ, activist, impresario, promoter, party-thrower, café operator, community-builder and lover Will Munro died of brain cancer at the unfathomably young age of 35. Famed for his s …

These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, where the act of living becomes more and …

Winner of the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

In Greenland, the discovery of a new island off the nation's coast mirrors a growing rift between the island’s discoverer and his family.

In Iceland, set against the backdrop of the banking crisis, a confrontation between a real estate agent and a tenant takes an unexpected turn.

A young …

Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, c …