When fifteen-year-old Mutton is robbed at gunpoint while working in her mother’s Hamilton thrift store, the thief makes off with an item that she knows isn’t meant for him, hurling Mutton and her family into a summer of remarkable and heartbreaking events. From fighting unscrupulous developers to first loves to the anguish that comes from never …

Spitball literary essays on the off-kilter joys, sorrows and wonder of North America’s national pastime.

A collection of essays for ardent seamheads and casual baseball fans alike, The Utility of Boredom is a book about finding respite and comfort in the order, traditions, and rituals of baseball. It’s a sport that shows us what a human being mi …

Sideshow Concessions is the first book from queer performer and scholar Lucas Crawford. A collection populated by the circus-like bodies and experiences of a narrator navigating rural pasts and urban presents, Sideshow Concessions is the unofficial story of someone who is both a bearded lady and the fattest man in the world.

"Sideshow Confessions is …

My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when she found out.

Niko Kiriakos, tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he was cursed. Following …

Loyalties collide with long-buried love, a man builds a nuclear bomb in his garage, and children walk up walls. The stories in What You Need beautifully recount the rawness of human experience. Andrew Forbes’s characters struggle to escape the things that hold them in their all-too-ordinary lives, falling victim to fate, to one another, and to se …

Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What tells the story of a musician whose twenty-year career has been spent either at the forefront of Canada’s indie rock renaissance or in the background of some of the most popular indie games, films, and ad campaigns of the past decade. Through interviews with Jim, his collaborators, and fans, this book explores how a se …

One of the CBC’s Best Books of the Year.

A pregnancy test is taken at a wedding, a bad diagnosis leads a patient to a surprising outlook, and a civic holiday becomes a dystopian nightmare. By turns caustic, tender, and creepily hilarious, Sweet Affliction reveals the frailties, perversions, and resilience of Anna Leventhal’s cast of city-dweller …

The Juno award-winning Wooden Stars both epitomized and transcended the sound of mid-90s indie rock. One of Canada’s greatest bands, they helped build a scene whose members would go on to be associated with some of the country’s most revered acts including Julie Doiron, Islands and Arcade Fire. With Wooden Stars: Innocent Gears, Malcolm Fraser …

Winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction

Lansing Meadows has one last shot to get it right. With the clock ticking, he sets out on the road one last time, to sing his songs to anyone who’ll listen, and to try to right his wrongs, before it’s too late.

Fallsy Downsies is a novel about aging, art, celebrity and modern Canadian culture, told t …

Low is a novel about family, identity, illness, love and loss. Lyrical, personal prose draws readers into the world of Adriana Song. We feel our way through Low with her as she navigates lopsided friendships, failed romances and tries to to weather the storm that is her life.

“An empathetic coming-of-age story about the redemptive power of love.†…

Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize

A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better …

The Deadly Snakes: Real Rock and Roll Tonight charts the rise and gentle fall of Canada’s greatest band. Unwilling to bow to industry demands, the Deadly Snakes instead made records they were proud of and played music by their own rules. From their chaotic teenage beginnings to the band’s exquisite final act, the story of the Deadly Snakes is b …

NoMeansNo: Going Nowhere looks at a band whose career has spanned three decades, 14 albums and produced an alter ego that’s become as much a part of the Canadian consciousness as SCTV. Through interviews with band members, bit players and fans, the book will explore how one punk band from Victoria, B.C. influenced musicians across the world and c …

The stories included in Andrew Hood’s sophomore collection are beautiful, gross, funny, and personal. The Cloaca is a train wreck of awesomeness. It’s your high school gym coach, drunk and dishing dirt on all the other teachers on the crosstown bus-a stomach-turning spectacle that’ll make you laugh out loud now, feel bad later. You won’t be …

Over a decade after the release of their first album, The Dears have weathered the indie fringes, the collapse of the music industry as we knew it and the near implosion of the band itself, with their creative vision and gang dynamic intact. The Dears: Lost in the Plot looks at how The Dears survived the fallout, and helped launch the acclaimed mid …

What hidden evasions and exclusions lie behind the subtle perfection of the BLT? What is the etymology of the croissant? Why did we drink all that Bud Lite Lime? What did you do to my face? This collection of writing by Jonah Campbell-metalhead, misanthrope, unrepentant good eater-explores both the finest and most furtive of culinary pleasures. Foo …

Shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award

The innocence and clarity of Teri Vlassopoulos’s narrative voice reveals new and unexpected layers. The characters in these stories look for signs and omens as they attempt to understand events in their lives by framing them in abstract superstitions. The stories in Bats and Swallows are sharp, accur …

A small flat sits unoccupied above Henry’s café. When a woman comes to rent the room, Henry’s world begins an unusual transformation. As they grow closer the city itself is affected, changed, and slowly dismantled. Unsure if he is a victim of his own senility, the chaos inches closer and Henry suspects it may have something to do with the woma …

Ghost Pine: All Stories True offers thirteen years worth of sparkling true stories from the life of author Jeff Miller, compiling the best of his long-running zine. From his youth in suburban Ottawa in the late 1990s, to travels across Canada and North America and his current home in Montreal, Miller’s stories are equal measures funny and sad, no …

A classic work of award-winning Atlantic fiction

Leah is haunted: by the things she’s done, and the things she has failed to do. And then there's the the ghost of her brother. She has to learn to let go of the past if she, or her brother, are ever going to move on.

A funny, urban story, Homing is about love, death, and rock and roll-through the eye …

Ten emerging Canadian writers explore pace and place in stories where movement is central. Transits is about people who are mobile and things which are transient, (im)migrating, running away, coming home, waiting.

Combining Stacey May Fowles’s humorous, biting prose with Marlena Zuber’s whimsical and raw illustrations, Fear of Fighting searches for meaning in the mundane. Set in the lonely, urban landscape of downtown Toronto, the story revolves around Marnie, a broken-hearted young woman fighting to find something more.

"Fowles navigates the devastating …

Contributors explore the urban systems and structures that frame our everyday lives. The Art of Trespassing imagines networks, neighbourhoods, and relationships, exposing them as both confining and liberating.

In a Mist explores longing, loss and isolation. This debut collection of short stories examines the lives of socially isolated individuals with obsessive interests and desires. These lonely protagonists find solace in emotionally evocative forms of cultural expression such as early jazz, classic cinema and renaissance motets. The transcendent poten …

Ruby returns to the scene of a recent heartbreak, only to find the woman her lover left her for around every corner. A soap opera of gleeful rumours and turf wars ensues, and Ruby comes to wonder why a woman she’s never spoken to now embodies all of her problems.