Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, a Montreal construction worker whose hands have helped build the city he lives in. He has dug out its metro tunnels, shaped islands in the Saint-Laurent river, and built the expressways that wind through the city’s core. But progress has come at a cost. Neighbourhoods are razed, streets cleared off the map, and the Morel family is expropriated. Bristling with life, Morel unearths a story of Montreal long buried beneath yea...

A Tristram Shandy–esque novella about failing memory and failed writing, from one of French Canada’s most exciting new voices.A young, floundering author meets Robert ‘Baloney’ Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of several evenings, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec’s Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poise...

"Fire! Wake up! The shelter is on fire!"His students affectionately call him "Doc Survival." He's Quebec's Indiana Jones in a forest setting. Searching for the treasures of the wilderness has been his life-long quest; with passion as his only guide, he has dared to penetrate the forest on its own terms, facing increasingly difficult challenges in the hope of becoming nature's confidant, of learning her secrets.Professor emeritus André-François Bourbeau holds a Guin...

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...

"As beguiling and delectable as France itself."*Mimi Sheraton"Ann Barry tells her tale directly and clearly, without cloying artifice or guile, so that it has the warmth, honesty, and force of a long letter from an old friend. She makes her reader a welcome house guest in her much-loved little cottage in the heart of France."*Susan Allen TothAnn Barry was a single woman, working and living in New York, when she fell in love with a charming house in Carennac ...

Savage Love marks the long-awaited literary return of one of Canada’s most lauded and stylistically brilliant authors. Slyly holding forth with subversive wit, Glover skewers every conventional notion we’ve ever held about that cultural/emotional institut

In Good Bones, first published in 1992, Margaret Atwood has fashioned an enthralling collection of parable, monologue, mini-romance and mini-biography, speculative fiction, prose lyric, outrageous recipe and reconfigured fairy tale, demonstrating yet again the play of an unerring wit overseen by a panoramic intelligence. Good Bones is a cornucopia of good things—precise, witty, wise, and sometimes offbeat Atwood writing, with the funny and the sidelong view of the world w...

"A little thing happened to me. Which could have just as easily happened to you. You're on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and you're about to go see some friends, but something holds you back, a mysterious reticence that prevents you from going to find them. Here is the novel of this reticence, small and specific, and of the fears that it instigates, little by little. Because not only are your friends not there when you do decide to go find them, but, several days lat...

An NYRB Classic OriginalJean-Paul Clébert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clébert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called “aleatory novel” assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His “gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction” is an astonishing d...

What is the truth? A gift of the human condition to the self. Free Verse in Useless Times is the first collection of poetry ever published by the author. Peter W. Chaltas has written 14 collections of poetry over many years. This is the first to be released. The poetry addresses questions that concern everyone. Free Verse in Useless Times asks questions about the truth of the human condition, speaks about nature, about beauty, and about what may transcend the finite human existence. It is ...

An adventure in the Ardeche, France, using any and all transport, visiting interesting muséums, towns, gorges, caves and accommodation places. Innovative and imaginative poetic writing by this prize-winning author. Includes practical notes of the best ways and means of getting around.

The title Night Vision refers firstly to the night vision goggles that enable soldiers to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, and secondly to a vision of the political and ecological night that threatens humankind, but also to the faint possibility, grounded in personal relationships and cultural values, that we will see through and somehow transcend this night. The book is a major expression by a veteran poet of searchingly reflective and finely articulated thought. Its...