Outside
Emotional and uplifting, Outside is the story of a teacher's escape to Japan from classroom, country, and self in the wake of a small-town Ontario tragedy.
David Woods, a first-year teacher, shares his grade-4 students' passion for nature and their reluctance to be hemmed in by classroom walls. He pushes the boundaries of risk and the constraints of …
The Renter
"Absolutely brilliant!" — Guy Maddin
The sentimental and financial education of a young Jewish Winnipegger in and around 1968.
1968. Winnipeg Beach. Summer. Poor Jewish boy meets rich Jewish girl. The sun is high, libidos soar, even the high is high. And as the poor boy tries to marry up, the Jacob-Rachel myth gives way to an Icarian leap.
The stil …
Collapsible
The short story form is unambiguously un-dead in this new album of thirty fictions from writer Tim Conley, coming at the reader in a variety of shapes and guises running the gamut from elliptical micro-fictions to tales of the inexplicable.
Steeped in Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, Conley's multiple universes allow for werewolves that excite ridicule …
A Short Sad Book
With an Introduction by Erín Moure and an Afterword by George Bowering.
These days, Canada is a heavyweight of world fiction, boasting some of the gaudiest names in the literary firmament, its schools graduating great writers by the frontlist. It's easy to forget that it was not always so. Forty years ago, George Bowering saw a country still strug …
Dance Moves of the Near Future
Tim Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and fantastic absurdity to create surreal, compact worlds. Whether they're sketching the familial fallout of a stentorian patriarch or teaching the eponymous dance moves to survivors of the apocalypse ("With the rise of the invertebrates, spinelessness has never been so hip"), these sto …
Words, Words, Words
Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …
The Shiva
Failures in business and marriage tip poor Mooney into a spell in a psychiatric ward. But he has the great fortune of befriending an Indian seer, one of his pals from the casino where Mooney hangs out, who promises to put Mooney's life back together. Dennis is no ordinary Indian seer. For one thing, he's a rez Indian, from right around Winnipeg, ju …
Sweet England
Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post-Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in …
Caprice
WITH A FOREWORD BY ARITHA VAN HERK.
It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and, in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand. Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, …
The Box
In his first work of fiction since 2004's Standing on Richards, George Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate, reminds us why he is one of our country's most interesting writers. In a series of ten stories introduced by archival photographs, Bowering leads us through the glory days of 1960s Vancouver, when the Hotel Vancouver boasted an understreet …
The Briss
Sammy and Anna Ostrove raised a typical Jewish family in Winnipeg: Marilyn, the older daughter who is a successful lawyer and Teddy, a son who was to be a doctor. Life, of course, had other plans. Marilyn just ended an affair that should have been kept a secret. Teddy, who dropped out of medical school, went on a ten-day Birthright Israel tour whe …
More House
"From the opening 'cast list' that includes such characters as 'Grandad' played by 'My mother's father,' to a narrator who admits, 'Actually, this is not even a story,' because, as s/he/it later declares, 'There is always more than one possible life,' this book keeps you guessing, laughing and dropping your jaw at the weird insights and awesomely d …
Topic Sentence
From the Introduction by Brian Fawcett "A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's title: Topic Sentence. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the post-modern: What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twis …
