The Shining Fragments is a family saga about the Irish in Canada that explores the ramifications of abandonment, obsession, love, memory, and visionary power. Spanning the years 1882-1904, it follows Joseph Conlon from his early childhood in Ulster to his experiences of youth and adulthood as an immigrant. Left behind as a small boy on a Toronto...

Jennifer Zilm's poetry collection, The Missing Field, concerns themes of translation, preservation and the engagement with the transitory documents of everyday life, whether a snapshot of a Vancouver bus, postcards from the Middle East, lecture notes on Euripides, a van Gogh museum catalogue or marginalia in a water-damaged collection of Rilke poems.

Small things is a book of mini-anti-essays, part of Sky Gilbert's project to dismantle and challenge the rigid classifications of genre, thus challenging 21st century notions of truth. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, Foucault, and the post-structuralist project, the small writings in small things are story, essay, and memoir combined. They question the notion that...

Ramya immigrated to Canada from India with her husband about fifteen years ago. She typifies the first generation immigrant—a person who straddles two cultures, two countries, two continents, even perhaps two different worlds altogether.The novel has two intertwined threads of narration simultaneously unspooling. The one set in the present is about Ramya's...

Learning to Miss opens with imagery of events, moments, that dream into, and imagine beyond "getting on with it." Imagining, in the next group, holds the love and empathy of an aging, experienced, self-aware observer, while the final group works some family history into the movie I make of my past, as I direct and act, having learned to miss, not kill … to...

Attempting to make sense of her life, and change her sad demure to a happy one, the author of In the Backyard: Relearning the Art of Aging, Dying and Making Love seeks out the help of her in-house therapist/husband, Dr. George Nemeth. The accredited psychologist's answers to the big questions provide a compassionate and humorous backdrop on to how to seize...

Paul, an aspiring writer in his mid-twenties, marries Carlos, a boyfriend he lived with in Guatemala; brings him Montreal, and looks forward to a life of bliss. Things go wrong from the beginning, and the trouble Carlos causes leaves Paul little time for much else—and they break up. Bill, whom Paul sees as the father he always wanted, helps him overcome his...

Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros’ collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph...

A Rogue’s Decameron consists of ten stories—tales—that loosely follow the fabliaux style and are based within the spirit of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron: extravagance, joy and ribald humour around sex, lust, vice, death and other ‘hungers’ of human beings. Using similar framing technique as these works—a prologue, a short...

Part memoir of the author's early life--including his experience as a New York City cop and a US Border Patrol agent before he became a college professor--and part polemical discussions of a host of diverse topics, from aging, religion, and war to teaching and higher learning, corporate capitalism and consumerism, technology and media, this book challenges...

Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a...

Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali’s kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel...

Hard Luck Lenny Lasante is the quintessential good son, brother, and father. He fears a calamity will derail his son's future the way his own dreams were derailed years ago and is adamant that Frankie leave home for college, but Frankie is preoccupied with thoughts of Gennaro DiCico, the son of a small-time mobster. Lenny's fears are realized when a...

In Wait, relationship and reflection are drawn on to free emotion and understanding from fear, whether it would grow in praise of passion or cooling love, or arise from being trapped by power or lost to indulgence. The poems in Wait seek to cut through the dishonesty and abuse that skew life.

Like consists of fifty poems every one of which uses the word “like.” Like is about people and things Layton likes -- or, sometimes, dislikes. In these poems, Layton expresses a gamut of emotions, from the fear of death to the peaceful contentment of watching two nesting Canadian geese. However, “like” as more than an emotionally charged verb. It is also...

Meet the Garneau boys, triplets from small-town Ontario. Daniel the “eldest” is gay, and moves to Toronto with his best friend Karen to attend university. Eventually, he meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance...

There are unseen forces in our lives that shape who we are and what we become. How we respond to those forces determines our futures. These stories examine how characters respond to the unexpected. Do we carry our memories of the beautiful moments of life with us into death? And, ultimately, what do we value in life that defines us—from a hat to the shadow...

This story—part memoir, part historical fiction—spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people—the author's parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others—as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one...

Joseph, the tactician behind the Piccadilly Circus bombing, finds himself in a nursing home in Pierrefonds, Quebec. A visit from a long-lost former fellow cell member interrupts his dalliance with the night nurse, provoking both a crisis and a period of reflection. Did he lose his mind back then as a young man? Or...

Nobody Looks at Young Here is about interconnected characters who struggle with whether to accept or reject their seemingly predetermined lives in Currie Township, Southwestern Ontario. The youth and adolescence of one character, Michael Carrion, makes up a large part of the narrative, but the narrators vary in age and...

What is the literary and cultural benefit of a diaspora anthology? It presents work from a community, a family of writers. It represents a cultural contribution to Canadian literature. It makes it known where they come from personally and metaphorically, what inspires them. In this case, they are all writers who...

The 100 wide-ranging and idiosyncratic poems of Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be confront, grapple with, explore, argue with, and ultimately embrace the human condition as they wend their way through the worldly and the otherworldly aspects of absurdity and existence, the ordinary and the extraordinary spheres of...

A fiction writer in the tradition of Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, and David Gilmour, in Faithful and Other Stories, Daniel Karasik brings together an assortment of complex characters searching for meaning and connection in a world that is by turns violent and indifferent. These award-winning stories have received...

In exchange for the slavish obedience of her two daughters, the mother promises to support them against the tyrannical father. Rather than Montreal or the suburbs, the family settle in a hotel at the crossroads of a practically deserted village. An impenetrable forest surrounds the hotel where the usual customers...

Poets attribute an array of roles and capacities to the involuntary muscle. The heart becomes a repository of erotic and familial love, and a sanctuary for memory. The poets explore the flux of the heart’s responses and instigations: the heart’s tender overtures, its joyous pulse, its mating call for the other...