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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

'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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare t …

Shortlisted for a 2009 Lambda Award

When Auden learns he’s HIV-positive, he decides to head for Toronto, leaving behind Sudbury and his old personality. Determined to construct a whole new Auden, he gets a new job, new clothes, new habits, new friends, new ways of speaking. And all of these things seem to be leading him inevitably towards Steve, S …

‘The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.’ – Man Ray

Welcome to the world of fringe movies. Here, artists have been busy putting queer shoulders to the wheels, or bending light to talk about First Nations rights (and making it funny, to boot), or demonstrating how a personality can be taken apart and put back …

The 2012 One Book Toronto title
Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award

A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become ai …

Jen Currin’s acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in her new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new territory. These poems push life’s barely hidden strangeness into th …

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates.

When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs an …

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 …

Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by Amiel Gladstone, introducing a wide range of fascinating characters and a formidable new voice in Canadian drama.

In The Wedding Pool, three single friends in unsatisfactory jobs decide to place a bet on who will marry first. The friends - waitress and wannabe dancer Sylvia, rock critic …

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 …

Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumps in her beat-up old car and speeds away. When she pulls up to the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park, where nothing turns into even more of nothing, she decides it just might be the new life she's looking for.

At the centre of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playin …

When a mad dentist steals people's teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town.

Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate.

Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp's memories, s …

In the vast, unnamed metropolis of Hello … Hello, art and commerce have finally and completely conjoined; stylish cafés serve up zebra mussels and the air is thick with a gentle rain of sparrows plummeting down from the mirrored office towers. Everywhere, people are falling for an edgy new fashion accessory: a shiny ball filled with poison that …

Nominated for a Governor General's Award for Translation

Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a sto …

Winner of the Best of the Edinburgh Fringe Prize

Althea: Do you believe in your own death? Every moment you are alive is endless and the present goes on and on with you inside it. Of course the end is truly coming, but it’s so far off, and in the meantime the spring bulbs need bringing out of the dark and the windows must be cleaned. These distant …

Nominated for a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean region), a Toronto Book Award and a Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are ‘in the tip,’ finding easy pickings among the j …

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 …

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 …

Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water.

As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid …

Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes – perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until meaning settles in a hundred different …

pppeeeaaaccceee, is a vast, imaginative and mesmerizing glide through Life and Power. The play is set in Ephemeral; three people firmly floating chat – in O'Donnell's inimitable rapid-fire style - about the revolution. Which revolution? Good question. A gently aggressive meditation, pppeeeaaaccceee examines our being, asks us what we're doing and …

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back.

A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in 'search of a narrative, a narrative in search o …

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest.

Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet. In the process of making …

A welfare cheque floats down the river, a cowboy spreads the Word of the Lord and crotches tick like clocks: the world of Spare Parts is unpredictable, evocative and vividly distorted. Its initial appearance, in 1981, caused a stir; at a time when linear narrative was the m.o. of feminist writing, Gail Scott had the nerve to fracture and dislocate …