Over 250,000 O Canada Crosswords books sold in twenty years!

O Canada Crosswords rides again with the twenty-second instalment of this popular series, which features large-sized puzzles split between Canadian and other themes. With over 20 per cent of the clues focusing on Canadiana, you’ll be chomping at the bit as author Gwen Sjogren harnesses h …

Part long poem, part investigation, this true story begins with a whale encounter and then dives into the affair of the École en bateau, a French countercultural school aboard a boat. The École was based on the ideals of ’68, but also twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault’s philosophy and an abolition of the separation between adults …

In this vital début, Kyla Jamieson sifts through the raw material of her life before and after a disabling concussion in search of new understandings of self and worth. Energized by the tensions between embodiment and dissociation, Body Count flickers between Vancouver and New York, passing through dreamscapes and pain states. Both earnest and irr …

Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief su …

Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tra …

An anonymous writer stays up late into the night penning personal and inappropriate letters to a local public official. A new father and cook at a Montreal café chronicles the tyrannical rise of a new manager. An eccentric young student, in trying to carve out a space for herself, deals an existential blow to her roommate. Dead Flowers is a collec …

Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These p …

“This night in Oppenheimer Park Dan asked me to shit-kick this chick in the face as she owed money and I said no because I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t about to play with fire so he sat on the bench then stood up and did a flying kick twice to her chin and she convulsed and passed out he said he didn’t want to spill blood because s …

Near Miss considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, g …

Manipulators, liars, egomaniacs, bullies, interrupters, condescenders, ice queens, backstabbers, hypocrites, withholders, belligerents, self-deceivers, whiners, know-it-alls, nitpickers: these are some of the characters you’ll encounter in the collection of stories, Difficult People.
As these characters fumble through their quests for freediving …

Rife with colloquialisms, irony and a healthy dose of sass, the poems collected in Bec and Call refuse to be silent or subtle; instead they delve into the explicit, the audacious, the boldly personal. Bec and Call subverts the notion of female sexuality as male appeasement, the French wordplay in the title using the meaning of “bec”—a kiss, m …

Featuring 2,600-plus Canadian clues—that’s over 20 per cent of the total—the nineteenth instalment of this popular series offers a motherlode of national content, puns and fun. As always, author Gwen Sjogren digs deep into the Canadian landscape with geography themes like “Water Marks,” “Destination: Fredericton” and “Go West, Young …

Our Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and knowledges interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of t …

WARNING: Cruise Missile Liberals contains few proper poems. That is, poems with proper manners, proper etiquette, or proper service to our national narratives. Poems that reassure the powerful.Poems that lie inert⁠—with the smell of the museums. Poems that are, in a word, nice.

Instead, Spencer Gordon's debut smoulders with explosive contradicti …

Cop House is a short story collection about people desperately trying to recapture--or replace--the things they've lost. There are secret vacations, library book fetishes, women who participate in "fully-clothed, free-form touching and explorative play experiences" in exchange for protection from teenage vandals, and a doomsday cult operating out o …

Climb aboard the O Canada Crosswords express and embrace the adventure of 100 new crosswords. The 18th instalment of this popular series features several wordplay puzzles—including "Rank and Guile," "Sounds Fishy to Me" and "Forecast: Fun!"—as well as a suitcase full of Canadiana like "Quotable Notables," "Witty Women," "Au Naturel" and "Great …

Preoccupied with the complexities of identity and selfhood, memory, embodiment, loss, and family, Rebecca Păpucaru carefully examines details that make up one’s lived experience.

“Lobster Dinner” describes a happy childhood memory of eating an entire lobster with an admiring father as her audience. “Take It or Leave It” is the casual and …

Michelle Elrick's then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places--an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast--as well as the memory-warped terrain …

Puns, fun and Canadiana-they're all standing on guard for solvers in O Canada Crosswords 17. These ninety-five new crosswords provide a playful mix of sixty-five Canadian- and other-themed puzzles in larger grids, plus thirty non-themed Canada Cornucopia crosswords.

For anyone passionate about puzzles, author Gwen Sjogren's books are a go-to sourc …

"Amber McMillan's writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders."
-Kevin Chong, author of Baroque-a-Nova, Neil Young Nation and Beauty Plus Pity

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The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a personal memoir that probes the unique and sometimes unsettling tenor of life …

If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.

Amidst the comings and goings, there's …

With humour and humanity, Surviving City Hall reveals the workings of the municipal world based on author Donna Macdonald's nineteen years as a city councillor. Wrestling with ground squirrels, dealing with dogs and grappling with the Three Bears of Governance, Macdonald offers an insider's view into how things work at city hall in a call to citize …

"a great writer" -Daniel Lanois

"one of the finest songwriters on the planet... his lyrics [are] every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined." -Ron Sexsmith

"a national treasure" -Michael Barclay, Exclaim

"he's a stone genius" -CBC

"Kyp Harness scrapes at the backdrop of reality to reveal the tired, the broken, the lost and d …

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.

A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu's poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic fact …

This latest instalment of the bestselling O Canada Crosswords series serves up an appetizing palate of Canadiana, pop culture and whimsical wordplay. Canadian themes touch on hockey, music, industry and places, and author Gwen Sjogren brings to the table several of her trademark pun puzzles like Money Changes Everything and Fit for a Witch. Seven g …

"Thran's poems offer a meditation on the creativity involved in viewing, engaging with its productivity as well as its superfluity, spilling past the edges of what is represented to reflect the ways through which viewers come to imaginatively inhabit what is seen."
--Michael Borkent, The Journal of Canadian Poetry

Mayor Snow is about both the abdica …

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, …

Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections - "Set," "Re/Set," and "Lect" - all intertwine and o …

Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the …

children of air india is a series of elegiac sequences exploring the nature of individual loss, situated within public trauma. The work is animated by a proposition: that violence, both personal and collective, produces continuing sonar, an echolocation that finds us, even when we choose to be unaware or indifferent.

This collection breaks new grou …

Book 14 is packed with all the trivia, puns and fun that solvers love (and sometimes love to hate!). Thirty-four Canadian-themed crosswords key on well-known places, people and events, with titles including The Wonder of Canada, When Brian's Eyes Are Smiling, Exposed and Fields of Dreams. Thirty-two universal crosswords offer even more Canadian con …

"Later we will laugh; shake moonlight
off our clothes like ash.

For now we stare at the clock. The
day wears, tired as mechanism."
--from Undark

Undark: An Oratorio is the highly anticipated second collection from Sandy Pool, whose debut book of poetry Exploding into Night (Guernica, 2009) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for poetry i …

It's lucky 13 for the latest instalment of the bestselling O Canada Crosswords series. This volume features 100 puzzles for solvers from coast to coast, including 67 with full-on national content. Solvers can take a trip to the nation's capital with Destination: Ottawa. Savour true Canadian flavour with For the Foodies and Eponymous Edibles. Test y …

In Kerosene, her debut book of poetry, Jamella Hagen weaves individual memories into a narrative that charts the process of orientation and growing maturity within shifting geographical locations.

Patterned on the author's own experience, the collection follows the story of a young woman's life, encompassing the beauty and harshness of a childhood s …

What would you do if your child was a furry feral creature or your new love interest a potential serial killer (or worse, a fictitious cliché)? In The Odious Child, Carolyn Black invents her own blend of urban fantasy, crafting a unique storyscape that she populates with a series of mostly nameless figures who are trapped in social roles that they …

Patternicity contains a suite of poems that won a 2008 CBC Literary Award and follows the author's debut book of poems, The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). As a physiologist currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Johnstone's work is informed by a scientific approach, his own corporeal environment and an explorati …

"I have to wonder why poets are always expected to write exactly what they wrote the last time they wrote a poem. So I wrote the poems a little differently this time. That's okay too."
- MillAr, interview published in The Danforth Review

Jay MillAr's poetry resists classification. This book, being a collection of Other Poems, is an assemblage of see …

Written in the near absence of creative works by Ukrainian Canadians of her generation, God of Missed Connections is a breakthrough collection by one of Canada's leading young poets. This book is profound, devastating, and draws on Ukraine's brave and bloody history as a means to explore the author's place in the contemporary world.

"This book expl …

"Living Things thrives." –George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

Written in the year after the birth of Matt Rader's first daughter, Living Things honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world: "how what we see in daylight is less than whole / and also more so." Using words in lieu of sonar, these poems bounce off the ecology …

Shortlisted for the 2008 Relit Award for Fiction

Dirty pool halls, greasy restaurants, suburban skateboarder showdowns, and dangerous drug dens--some things in life just aren't very subtle.

And neither are the short stories in Six Ways to Sunday. In fact, they brashly make out with subtlety's teenage crush, beat subtlety into the sidewalk, take a dum …

The Cold Panes of Surfaces is the moving second collection of poems from award-winning author Chris Banks.

Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings …

"Recommended... 3 stars out of 4."
-Stephanie Yamniuk, CM Magazine.

Since its publication in 1993, thousands of children have enjoyed the whimsical text and illustrations of The Ferryboat Ride and its companion volume, The Ferryboat Ride Colouring Book. These bestselling titles have garnered praise from teachers, parents and young people, with more …

"Matthew Holmes brings us to the end of his rope with a nuanced precision... we are not tethered by what he hitches us to, for as he writes, generously, 'the premise of tying' is, yes and ever, 'to untie.'"
-- Er�n Moure

"A solid debut distinguished by Holmes' far-ranging versatility."
-- Steven Heighton

Hitch is the first collection from New Br …

a blewointment book

"bill bissett is my astral twin."
--Margaret Atwood

Many of Canada's most renowned poets salute a national treasure in this poetic tribute to bill bissett. bissett has been a landmark on the Canadian literary scene since the 1960s, renowned as much for his fascinating life as for his poetics. He is best known for his anti-conventi …

Stole This from a Hockey Card is a thinking-fan's hockey book that strikes just the right note for those disillusioned by today's NHL.

Chris Robinson pushes the bounds of both hockey writing and creative non-fiction in this hard-boiled contemplation of where hockey fits into a man's life--whether he be a casual beer-league player who first embraced …

"Sure to score big with soccer fans, especially girls who play the sport themselves."
- Julie Chychota, CM Magazine

Soccer is the most popular sport for more than 350,000 Canadian girls, and their heroines and role models are the talented players profiled in Goals and Dreams: A Celebration of Canadian Women's Soccer.

Goals and Dreams is a detailed, …

Winner of the 2006 Ottawa Book Award for English Fiction

Bonk on the Head is the fictional account of a young man's strange and gruelling journey through military indoctrination, and the strange and gruelling family life that drives him to it. Author John-James Ford, himself a graduate of Royal Military College, presents a spirited coming-of-age nov …

Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets.

Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in …

In this book, 19 of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers contribute the narrative pieces that together compose a humorously accurate national reflection. Each author was commissioned by the Ottawa International Writers Festival to write a chapter, set in their local community, in a serial story moving across the country from East to West. Started b …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.