Globe and Mail Best 100 Book of 2015
The secret world of Mauritian street-gangs is not for the faint of heart. Fraught with peril and mischief, its inner workings are a mystery to the daughter of one of its most valued members: Serge, the Grand Menteur. A liar of exceptional caliber whose sole responsibility is to purposefully confuse police with …

National Post "NP99" Best Book of 2015
Paul, who is not always the same Paul, but could very well be a similar Paul, another Paul in a long line of Pauls. Paul runs through forests, drinks in student housing, flirts with girls, at times is a girl, loves men, makes friends, jumps from buildings, hurts people, gets hurt, climbs up towards the sky, w …

At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of the modern couple's apartment.

In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives voice to the anguish of a generation of people who grew up …

Fracking - tar-sand runoff - dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.

Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler's first full-length collection …

Did she say, at the beginning, that it rained every day? She was wrong. She misspoke. She didn't mean it.... No. It did not rain every day. But it rained for a hundred days, that year, which was enough--more than enough, even.
In prose by turns haunting and crystalline, One Hundred Days of Rain enumerates an unnamed narrator’s encounters with tha …

In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family's past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, a thin line between works at 'peeling away the …

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced.

Sophrosyne is one of only four …

Guadalupe Muro, recipient of the Raul Urtusan - Frances Harley Scholarship for Young Emerging Artists from Argentina, has always had her own unique way of experiencing life. When applied to her writing, Muro says she finally "felt like a dog deciding to be a dog." Muro's Spanish publications have achieved strong acclaim, and now, BookThug is proud …

Secession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erín Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself dis …

Life Experience Coolant is a collection of four long poems informed by artistic isolation, directionless reading, and the avoidance mechanisms that make poetry simultaneously possible and impossible at our current cultural velocity. Using methodologies of textual appropriation, collage, rehistoricization and self-sufficent rhetoricality, Life Exper …

Chris Eaton, a Biography is a novel that arises from the idea that we have all been driven, at some point, to Google ourselves. And if you did, what did you find? That there are people out there who seem to have something in common with you? Dates, places, interests? How coincidental are these connections? And what are the factors that define a hum …

Agony is the first in a trilogy of long confessional poems. It uses semi-rigorous mathematical and logical constraints to view the author's life and body, telescopically, as little bits of time and space. Everything written here is as true as possible – that is to say, pretty true. It attempts autobiography as a refutation of autobiography, and a …

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth about the Writing Life is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. These stories, by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, are sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths. Voluptuous Pleasure will take you inside brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; …