Finalist for the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montreal"A writer may do as she pleases with her epoch. Rage accumulates."From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l'écriture-au-féminin in Québec and ...

In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.

Casting light and shadow, looking backwards and forwards, My Paris is a hypnotizing tale of desire and nostalgia, submerging the reader in the endless—but not always seamless—sensuality of the City of Light.A Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio in this stunning autofiction. Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's des...

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 includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storyte...

Shortlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de MontrealRosine is surrounded by ghosts. Ghosts of family. Ghosts of past lovers. Ghosts of an old Montreal and its politics. Ghosts of the Montreal quarry workers who, in the 1880s, frequented the Crystal Palace gardens, upon whose ruins her Mile-End triplex sits. Her dead maternal family is there, too, with their restlessness, their stories, their forgotten indigenous ancestry, their little crimes and glories. There’s eve...

A welfare cheque floats down the river, a cowboy spreads the Word of the Lord and crotches tick like clocks: the world of Spare Parts is unpredictable, evocative and vividly distorted. Its initial appearance, in 1981, caused a stir; at a time when linear narrative was the m.o. of feminist writing, Gail Scott had the nerve to fracture and dislocate her stories and her language.Spare Parts is as vital as it was twenty years ago. Scott's densely textured tales about ...

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning novelist and literary critic, essential reading for the creative writer.Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are no...

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles TimesPulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticismLiving by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover...

Samuel Archibald is the hottest young writer in Quebec. In a region where short story collections might sell worse than anywhere else in North America, Arvida sold through 25,000 copies.Arvida fits in naturally with "country noir" authors like Donald Ray Pollock and Daniel Woodrell, but with a sharp and humorous French-Canadian twist.The collection explores topical subjects, including the collapse of North American industry, the decline of the middle class...

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies meets Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones in this astounding debut novel about a woman on the verge of infidelity.Tessa is a thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent living in Montreal. She adores her husband and three young sons, but she’s deeply unhappy and questioning the set of choices that have led to her present life.After a surprising run-in with Francis, her ex-boyfriend and first love, Tessa arranges to see...

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from ec...

YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artis...