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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

'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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award

Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: ‘gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole.’ Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs i …

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a …

Brian Lembeck – ‘Pulpy’ – takes life slow and steady. He likes his office job, and he likes his gentle, figurine-collecting boss, Al. He even likes the bitter receptionist, though he’s the only one who does. He likes his wife, Midge, too, and their ice-dancing lessons. Midge works as a candle-party hostess – she quit her office job when …

Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award

The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that it’s winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter.

They don’t talk much with the other ten-year-olds — mos …

Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson apply …

Nominated for a 2005 Governor General's Award

Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the c …

What is the best way to tell a story?

In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nic …

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide.

His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbal …

Better break out your sledgehammer – it's time for a little concrete! Concrete poetry, that is. Concrete what? Well, it's poetry that's a lot like art – its meaning comes from what it looks like instead of the order of the words, so it's full of great visual puns and word puzzles. And one of its foremost practitioners is bpNichol, one of Canada …

Demons, ogres, werewolves – men have all the fun. Not here. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan's The Monster Trilogy turns the tables and offers up three monstrously evil women in three explosive monologues.

In The Susan Smith Tapes, the infamous young mother who drowned her three sons tries to recapture the public's attention by auditioning for tal …

There are no lost women, only women who've forgotten their scripts.' RM Vaughan's play about Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner comes off the stage and onto the page in this handsome edition from Coach House Books. An insightful look at the gender politics behind the cameras and studios of the golden age of cinema.