Uncle

From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics. Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what co...

Eunoia

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002) Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram. The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly i...

Word problems

From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the...

Theatre of the unimpressed

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...

The dark library

Libraries are magical places. But what if they’re even more magical than we know? In Cyrille Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He’s tired of pe...

The baudelaire fractal

The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire. One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap...

Midday at the super-kamiokande

Midday at the Super-Kamiokande is part existentialist cry, part close encounters of the other kind. Think Kierkegaard in a spacesuit, Kubrik in a Left Bank café.

House divided

A citizen's guide to making the big city a place where we can afford to live.

Days by moonlight

Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Longlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Profe...

All my friends are superheroes

“This book is like a kiss in the afternoon sun." – Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A tenth anniversary edition of the worldwide cult favorite, now with new material and illustrations. All Tom's friends really are superheroes. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But a...

Queen solomon

The erotic awakening and mental disintegration of an intense young man who leaves home and enters the phantasm of Israel.

Splitsville

A bookish love affair, start to finish, with the backdrop of a city in protest.

Fifteen dogs

An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.

A matter of taste

And the birds rained down

An award-winning and haunting meditation on aging and self-determination. 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 ...

Swivelmount

Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of the...

Cursed objects

Now that we've sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we've set up shop? In Cursed Objects, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding...

Army of lovers

Underwear art and queer punk parties: a portrait of artist, activist and civic hero Will Munro.

The ward uncovered

An archaeological dig uncovers the secret history of Toronto’s long-forgotten first immigrant neighbourhood. In early 2015, a team of archaeologists began digging test trenches on a non-descript parking lot next to Toronto City Hall -- a site designated to become a major new court house. What the...

Closer

A provocative look at why our current understanding of female sexuality isn't getting us off. QUILL & QUIRE BEST OF 2016 QUILL & QUIRE BEST COVER OF 2016 We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated – if anything, we’re told we’re oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dis...

Whitemud walking

WINNER OF THE 2020/2021 ALCUIN SOCIETY BOOK DESIGN AWARD FOR POETRYWINNER OF THE ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2023 STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON AWARD FOR POETRYWINNER OF THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERSLO...

Disfigured

A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how d...

The seed

Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn’t support women struggling to have children.

Hard to do

From Jane Austen to Taylor Swift, a look at the surprising politics of romantic love and its dissolution. Whatever the underlying motives – be they love, financial security, or mere masochism – the fact is that getting involved in a romantic partnership is emotionally, morally, and even politi...

The supine cobbler

A contemporary clinical abortion in the spirit of a Western.

Permission

A grieving young woman learns something new about love from a dominatrix in this haunting and erotic debut. Echo is a failing actress who prefers to lose herself in the lives of others rather than examine her own. When her father disappears in a seaside misstep, she and her mother are left grief...

Fauna

In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature? A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – hum...

Entering sappho

An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless er...

Avant desire: a nicole brossard reader

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French tha...

The crash palace

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARDA joy ride set on a crash course with the past.Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s a...

On nostalgia

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a fo...

Sky wri tei ngs [sky writings]

Poems written only from three-letter airport codes demand a new kind of passport.

No place to go

This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we're allowed to "go" in public.

Night became years

Poems about alchemy, love, Protestant witch judges, Indigenous identity, the cultural abutments of the inner city, football taunts, border ballads, and half­breed wailing.

Lances all alike

Two of the twentieth century’s greatest art provocateurs, avant-gardists, and bohemians finally connect in the poetry of Suzanne Zelazo.

Little beast

A little girl with a beard must find herself a home in this contemporary fairy tale.

Anatomic

We talk a lot about what we're doing to our environment, but what is our environment doing to us?

Obits.

Can poems mourn the unmourned?

Nights on prose mountain

The long-lost fiction of avant-garde hero bpNichol collected into one groundbreaking volume.

The sleeping car porter

FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA'S INSTAGRAMSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDWINNER OF THE 2022 GILLER PRIZEWINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTIONFINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTIONPU...

The xenotext

Enciphered in a bacterium, The Xenotext is the world's first living poem.

Utopia

Since the election of Mayor David Miller in November 2003, Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. At long last, Torontonians see their city as a place of possibility and potential. Visions of a truly workable, liveable and world-class city are once agai...

Sitcom

The monster trilogy

Ogres, trolls, demons – monsters, like violence, are always represented as male. Not this time. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan gives us, in three one-act monologues, three very monstrous women. In A Visitation by St Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance, we meet a middle-aged police o...

Eternal hydra

A postmodern look at the making of a modernist masterpiece.

Occasional work and seven walks from the office for soft architecture

Pompoms, blackberries and Value Village: Take a stroll through the thoughts of one of Canada’s most intriguing poets and thinkers.

In love with art

Learn about the woman behind the graphic novel revolution, Françoise Mouly, and her long relationship with Art "Maus" Spiegelman.

Little cat

The first two novels by Tamara Faith Berger, acclaimed author of Maidenhead — they're every shade of dirty.

Biting the error

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 includ...

3 summers

A grappling with time, form, and embodiment.