Announcing our Spring/Summer 2024 books!
Hello, friends! We are thrilled to share our Spring and Summer season of books!
This season includes a Spanish translation, sexy autofiction, a quirky noir, a lost gem of diasporic literature, three returning poets, and an updated edition of a fan favourite in nonfiction. Keep reading to check out these books that are putting a spring in our step!
Living Things by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches
Available June 18, 2024
Living Things follows four recent graduates – Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex – who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist’s thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling.
Indian Winter by Kazim Ali
Available May 14, 2024
A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present.
Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet.
Pet, Pet, Slap by Andrew Battershill
Available June 4, 2024
Having recently undergone an ethical awakening, Pillow has converted to veganism and is in the middle of trying to rehome his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark) in humane animal shelters. His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, has recently faked his own death by waterfall, and has now gone incognito and is Pillow’s in-house doping expert.
The thing is, Pillow doesn’t feel all that motivated to train for his next big fight, and he’s further distracted from his training when his car and pet shark mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of Neozoological Surrealism, and part existential mystery novel.
Yesterdays by Harold Sonny Ladoo
New foreword by Kevin Jared Hosein
Available June 11, 2024
Originally published in 1974, Yesterdays is nominally the story of one man’s attempt to launch a Hindu Mission from Trinidad to convert the heathen Christians of Canada. Yet this conceit quickly derails into a ribald, outrageous portrait of West Indian village life, and a prescient, proto-parody of what would become the archetypal 'immigrant story.'
Yesterdays is one of the great lost English-language novels of the previous century—perhaps ahead of its own time upon its initial release, but sure to appeal to 21st-century audiences who will appreciate its startling prescience, linguistic inventiveness, as well as its bold singularity amid a canon glutted with paint-by-numbers respectability.
Lossless by Matthew Tierney
Available May 7, 2024
Tech-inspired sonnets and prose poems that decode a life through the experience of loss.
Tierney's new collection takes its title from lossless data compression algorithms. It positions the sonnet as lines of code that transmit through time and space those 'stabs of self,' the awareness of being that intensifies with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people.
Good Want by Domenica Martinello
Available May 21, 2024
What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion and hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?
Good Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of 'good,' 'bad,' and 'god,' these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.
I Will Get Up Off Of by Simina Banu
Available May 21, 2024
Overthinking simple actions leads to overwhelming poems about what one can lean on if promised help doesn't help.
In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate.
Stroll, updated edition by Shawn Micallef, illustrated by Marlena Zuber
Available May 7, 2024
The updated edition of a Toronto favourite meanders around some of the city's unique neighbourhoods and considers what makes a city walkable.
Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.
