Canadian literary star Gordon Bridge is delighted with his celebrity, his famiy, and his bond with fellow writer Taylor Shepherd, whom he has been friends with since they were teenagers. Bridge publishes a highly critical review of Shepherd's much-lauded new novel, showing off how his commitment to writing trumps social conventions. After his friend confronts him, however, he realizes that his pan is a catastrophe of self-deception: he has attacked a masterpiece. The review destroys the fr...

The Enormous Room is a fictionalized autobiographical account of the three months that E. E. Cummings spent in a French prison under suspicion of espionage-a circumstance he could have easily avoided had he professed a hatred of Germans. Instead, when questioned, Cummings answered French authorities in a way that insured that he would accompany his friend "B." (William Slater Brown), who was indeed guilty of writing letters critical of the French government. The psychologically te...

A poverty-stricken guitar virtuoso navigates the political landscape of nineteenth-century Parisian society as he comes out of retirement for one final concert. A sessional instructor competing for the prestigious Interdisciplinary Chair in Aretha Franklin studies gets sidetracked by her obsession with a mysterious student in a yellow hat. A dying doo-wop DJ and his wife try to bridge the estrangement wrought by illness as they travel in search of the horns, drums, and vocals of highlife. ...

In the tradition of Borges, Nabakov, and Bolaño, The Red Album is a work of fiction that questions historical authenticity and authority. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an edited and footnoted narrative of dubious origins. In the second part, a section of "documents" (including essays, memoirs, a short play and a filmography) shed light on the first narrative. Familiar characters are revealed to be writers, and the writer and editors of the initial narrative are reve...

Tanna Patterson-Z’s fictionalized account of the 1998 kidnapping of driller Edward Leonard by the leftist guerrilla forces of Colombia guides readers deep into the physical and political terrain of a beautiful but dangerous country that remains off-limits to the casual traveller. Butterflies in Bucaramanga is the story of a man who gets caught in the collision between Western corporate imperatives and revolutionary politics—and whose unlikely obsession with the beautiful blue morp...

Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR.Psychic Anna Gareau and public relations expert Collie Kostyna keep things quiet for local magicians and for their biggest client, an underground supernatural society known as the Embassy.In Grayling Cross, an investigator arrives in town on the trail of a missing teenage psychic, and hires Anna and Collie to be his liaisons to the local magic community. Troublingly, though, he turns out to have a kn...

Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother—although she does understand how to take care of her peculiar kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left ...

After Morgan Wells’s wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells—but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto. On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish’s The...

Joelle is about to lose her husband Marc, who has become obsessed with Ketia, a young Haitian woman. Ketia lies to her family to conceal her liaison with Marc. Joelle’s friend Diane does not realize that her boyfriend Nazim has never told his Muslim family in Morocco about her. Then Nazim gets a letter that threatens his secret.Alice Zorn leads readers into the lives of a diverse cast of characters struggling with conflicting cultural values and the demands of intimacy. Set against...

These are short stories about people who harbour relics from their past: a postcard from Vienna, the cigarette burns that scar a boy's chest, a stolen USB pen, blue concentration camp numbers tattooed on a forearm, a man's sense of his own body as HIV overtakes him. Alice Zorn's remarkable debut collection displays these talismans of personal history and transforms them into extraordinary stories about relationships between partners, family, friends, and strangers.Praise for Ru...

El Salvador, 2005: a group of Canadian human-rights activists are taken hostage by a former revolutionary fighter who demands that a new gold mine stops production. For Danielle Byrd, the situation is all too familiar, as she was there twenty years previously as an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country’s civil war. Now, her daughter Aida must herself travel to the scarred landscape and choose her allies carefully if she wants to see her mother alive once more....

“Three weeks it’s been raining, but no puddles…”Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where water will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself obsessively writing and rewriting her own story in order to gain some sense of control over her life.Reading like John Barth by way of Lena Dunham, Shallow Enough to Walk...