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CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 202349th SHELF EDITORS' PICK FOR JUNE 2023When a family is forced to return to the mother‿s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world. Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life. To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.

Boy meets Girl, Boy marries Girl, and years later Boy mysteriously disappears in this Gordon Lish‿style novel. The boy and the girl have been married for decades, mostly getting along as they go about their lives. But one day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Will he return? Who might she be if she moves on without him?This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which God sometimes lives in the garage ‿ she likes to sleep on the freezer ‿ and gigantic words can fall from the sky. Not Anywhere, Just Not cracks open the small dramas of our lives to show the dread and wonder inside all of us. "Ken Sparling is a brilliant writer and this book, like all his books, is a beauty. Sparling chronicles the times I fear most‿the moments of loneliness, of loss, of ennui‿and somehow makes them seem worthwhile, even wondrous, and often flat-out funny. His work makes life look livable, which makes him a wizard to me." ‿ Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot"A gorgeous rendition of the domestic uncanny, Not Anywhere, Just Not is an ostensibly quiet book that slowly and carefully unnerves and unsettles you--both because of its precise swapping out of reality and because of just how familiar it so often seems. All of us, Sparling seems to say, are on the verge of vanishing at any moment." ‿ Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023THE TORONTO STAR 'MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR'‿Cat Person‿ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity. An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She‿s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home. And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city. Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment. "Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker‿s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art." ‿ Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time"In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo." ‿ Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats"Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any." ‿ John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts

The Laws of the Skies, by the same author and translator, was highlighted in the New York Times Summer Reading feature and given a starred review in Publishers Weekly.For fans of Kafkaesque, dystopian literature.

What if we could love the planet as much as we love one another? "e;Warm, wise, and overflowing with generosity, this is a love story so epic it embraces all of creation. Yet another reminder of how blessed we are to be in the struggle with elders like David and Tara."e; - Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis What You Won't Do for Love is an inspiring conversation about love and the environment. When artist Miriam Fernandes approached the legendary eco-pioneer David Suzuki to create a theatre piece about climate change, she expected to write about David's perspective as a scientist. Instead, she discovered the boundless vision and efforts of Tara Cullis, a literature scholar, climate organizer, and David's life partner. Miriam realized that David and Tara's decades-long love for each other, and for family and friends, has only clarified and strengthened their resolve to fight for the planet.What You Won't Do for Love transforms real-life conversations between David, Tara, Miriam, and her husband Sturla into a charmingly novel and poetic work. Over one idyllic day in British Columbia, Miriam and Sturla take in a lifetime of David and Tara's adventures, inspiration, and love, and in turn reflect on their own relationships to each other and the planet. Revealing David Suzuki and Tara Cullis in an affable, conversational, and often comedic light, What You Won't Do For Love asks if we can love our planet the same way we love one another.

From the author of The Baudelaire Fractal, a poetry classic, with new workIn 2004, boldly original poet Lisa Robertson published a chapbook, Rousseau's Boat, poems culled from years of notebooks that are, nevertheless, by no means autobiographical. In 2010, she expanded the work into a full-length book, R's Boat. During the pandemic, she was drawn back into decades of journals to shape Boat. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself."e;Robertson has quietly but surely emerged as one of our most exciting and prolific philosophers-I mean poets. Interested in architecture, weather systems, fashion, autobiography, gender, the classics, and just about everything else, she manages to irradiate her subjects with calm, wit, and astonishing beauty. Robertson's style is both on splendid display and under fierce interrogation in her latest book, R's Boat."e; Kenyon Review"e;In R's Boat, Robertson has penned a post-conceptual, post-lyric, relentlessly self-examining performance of memory and sincerity that manages, remarkably, to be both theoretically concerned and deeply emotive."e; Harvard Review"e;R's Boat grapples with form, the constraint of language and tradition, and the challenge to avoid anything that might exist as template. The poems examine feminism, discourse, the body, and poetry itself through sumptuous, seductive language."e; American Poets

From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mindThirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after theyd turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virignia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolfs A Room of Ones Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of ones own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolfs famous room with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyrass memoir testifies to Woolfs continuing generative power.Mark Hussey, editor ofVirginia Woolf's Between the Acts(2011) and author ofClive Bell and the Making of Modernism(2021)In this beautiful, perceptive book, Sina Queyras moves deftly between the words and wake of Virginia Woolf and their own formation as writer, lover, teacher, friend, and person.Roomsis expert in its depiction of personal and literary histories, and firmly aware of its moment of composition. Reading these pages, I was enticed by Queyrass curiosity and openness, thrilled by the sharp edges of their anger. Tight prose, electric thinking, self-discovery its all here, all abuzz.Roomsis alive. Heather Christle, author ofThe Crying BookIt is impossible not to question the world as we thought we knew it by the end of this book. Sina Queyras painstakingly aims their extraordinary nerve and talent at Virginia Woolfs idea of a room of ones own: 'Its a mistake to consider the room without all of its entanglements.' Taking Woolfs cue, Queyras explores writing that is not world-building but something far more generous and transformative; as Woolf wrote, 'Literature is open to everybody.' CAConrad, author ofAMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Awardink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of 100 essays and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families. The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths assiduously erased by normative forces. ink earls variations are testament in micro to the act of poiesis as not so much a building as an intrepid series of effacements; we rub away at the walls of language weve lived within in order to release both whats been written over, and what we want to say now.

Words like radio waves, bouncing off the spectres of mortality, middle age, and the mundane. Arriving at middle age was a decisive experience for David O'Meara, standing equidistant to the past and future with its accompanying doubts and anticipations, inviting re-evaluation of past goals, confronting personal loss, and the death of his father and friends. These are the masses on radar, indistinct but detectable existential presences encroaching, and in the center of the radar is the lyric 'I' sweeping its adjacent experience. Poems like "e;I Carry a Mouse to the Park Beside the Highway,"e; "e;I Keep One Eye Open and One Eye Closed,"e; and "e;I Sleep as the Volcano Ash Falls like Snow,"e; usher the reader through thematic corridors of memory, fracture, and recovery. Embracing uncertainty and incorporating seasonal forecasts, humour, trivia, satire, politics, the environment, loss, and the mundane, these poems are a detection system signaling a paradox of meanings.

From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion.';The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.' For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It's a story that plays out in sport after sport team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected."e;I couldn't stop reading Perry King's Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto and to the power of local recreation in any major city."e; David Miller, former mayor of Toronto

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry AwardSmart, raunchy poems that are sorry-not-sorry.Sticky, sad, and sultry, Exhibitionist is a merry-go-round circling back to the tender, awkward parts of ourselves. Molly Cross-Blanchard allows her poems to ask the reader out for ice cream, to fart at a dinner party, to sprawl out on a chaise lounge, stare through a dusty skylight and whisper that they think they may love you. And that love will be unmistakably mutual. Mallory Tater, author of The Birth Yard and This Will Be GoodMultiple orgasms appear in the first line of the first poem in Exhibitionist. Multiple orgasms, as a relative image or a practice, elicit everything from mystical worship to moral panic. Molly Cross-Blanchard understands this diametric power. She nods to this power with countless crisp and explicit images throughout her debut collection. Read her poems first to marvel at the well-crafted voicing of sexuality. Read a second time to appreciate Cross-Blanchards beautiful charge of juxtaposition. Again and again, she places the erotic beside mundane so that both are transformed a dirty basement carpet becomes the backdrop of profound intimacy and gas station coffee acts as a symbol of self-discovery. Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me and Sodom Road ExitIf this book had a fragrance, it'd be a Britney perfume, any one of them really, but with hints of prairie in the dry late-summer, notes of the sweet ocean smell that passes through Vancouver when the wind gets high, and a fabulous pair of overalls. Katherena Vermette, author of River Woman and The BreakOne minute shes drying her underwear on the corner of your mirror, the next shes asking the sky to swallow her up: the narrator of Exhibitionist oscillates between a complete rejection of shame and the consuming heaviness of it. Painfully funny, brutally honest, and alarmingly perceptive, Molly Cross-Blanchards poems use humour and pop culture as vehicles for empathy and sorry-not-sorry confessionalism. What this speaker wants more than anything is to be seen, to tell you the worst things about herself in hopes that youll still like her by the end.

Kicking ass and taking notes—what it's like to be a woman in the ring.Alison Dean teaches English literature. She also punches people. Hard. But despite several amateur fights under her belt, she knows she will never be taken as seriously as a male boxer. ';You punch like a girl' still isn't a compliment — women aren't supposed to choose to participate in violence.Her unique perspective as a 30-something university lecturer turned amateur fighter allows Dean to articulately and with great insight delve into the ways martial arts can change a person's — and particularly a woman's — relationship to their body and to the world around them, and at the same time considers the ways in which women might change martial arts.Combining historical research, anecdotal experience, and interviews with coaches and fighters, Seconds Out explores our culture's relationship with violence, and particularly with violence practiced by women."e;An important addition to women's martial arts scholarship, Dean provides personal insight into the radical space women occupy in sport fighting. Seconds Out is a must-read for all fighters looking for mentors in the complicated world of martial arts."e; —L.A. Jennings, author of Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC"e;Dean brings a fresh new female voice to the topic of combat sports."e; —Trevor Wittman, renowned MMA trainer, UFC analyst, and founder of ONX Sports"e;Trained in the discipline and art of both fighting and literature, Dean combines both with style. She honors the fighters, writers, and historians who have come before her and definitively ends the idea of women fighters as a novelty. Seconds Out is a must-read for anyone who feels the call of the bell and reverence for a good fight."e; —Sue Jaye Johnson

Away From Her meets Strangers on a Train in this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained DownAfter And The Birds Rained Down, a stunning meditation on aging and freedom, Jocelyne Saucier is back with her unique outlook on self-determination in this unsettling story about a woman's disappearance.Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms. And so, one September morning, she leaves Swastika, her home of the past fifty years, and hops on the Northlander train, eager to put thousands of miles of northern Quebec between her and the improbably named village, and leaving behind her perennially tormented daughter, Lisana.Our mysterious narrator, who is documenting these disappearing northern trains, is eager to uncover the truth of Gladys's voyage, tracking down fellow passengers and train employees for years to learn what happened to Gladys and her daughter, and why.

One of the World's Favorite Foods: Many culinary cultures from around the world have a version of dumplings.Cook What You Read: Readers can try cooking the dumplings featured in the book with easy-to-follow recipes.A Diverse Collection of Food Writing: For fans of food writers with an interest in history, like Michael W. Twitty, Samin Nosrat, and Tamar Adler.

Chinese-Mauritian Diaspora Poetry: Asian American representation in poetry spans a wide range of generations, regions, and cultures but only recently has begun to take a place on the mainstage with award-winning poets such as Ocean Vuong and Yi Sang.A New Talent in Poetry: Pulses was selected by Griffin Poetry Prize winner Liz Howard for the prestigious Writers' Trust of Canada Mentorship program. Howard wrote, "In reading Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin's poetry, I became immersed within a deep sense memory of why I came to love poetry in the first place."

Literary Fantasy: This joins recent books such as Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James that are rooted in current issues (challenging male power, denunciation of sexual violence), but take place in a place and time more like a fairy tale.French-Canadian Critical Darling: Marie-Hélène Poitras is already highly praised in French Canada, with outstanding reviews from Le Devoir, La Presse, Journal de Montreal, and many more. A Rhonda Mullins Translation: Rhonda Mullins has translated many popular Coach House titles from French including Suzanne, And the Birds Rained Down, and The Laws of the Skies.Weird shit going on in the woods: describes many Coach House translations; Sing, Nightingale may be the ne plus ultra of this list.

Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flaneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenth--century English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian inner--city worldview, the poems in Night Became Years unfold as separate entities while at the same time forming a larger narrative on the possibilities of poetry today and the nature of mixed--blood identity.

Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn't support women struggling to have children.

The story of how Toronto became a music mecca. From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto's music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more! 'Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto's music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it's happened - the live venues that come and too frequently go - as well as on the people who've devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it'd rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales.' - Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard's '100 Greatest Music Books of All Time' 'Toronto has long been one of North America's great music cities, but hasn't got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto's place in the music universe.' - Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music 'The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that's not just a time capsule, but a time machine.' - Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers

In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie.An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream."S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future." —Douglas Glover

LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURETHE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness.When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love.Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire …RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us."Pervatory is RM Vaughan's perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating." – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays"RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn't know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront." – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot"Brilliant, funny, propulsive." – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in peoples lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.Whitemud Walkingis so smart and so ceaselessly innovative. It represents for me a fully assured instantiation of the Indigenous literary project: a confrontation of history's terrors head on and an articulation in the present of our beauty and indomitability. Weigel refuses the archive's efforts to flatten Indigenous subjectivity and, in so doing, opens up a kind of boundless space to remember and grieve but also to hope and imagine otherwise. A deeply felt accomplishment. Billy-Ray Belcourt, author ofA History of My Brief BodyWhitemud Walkingis a testament to the power of grief and outrage that so much theft has been allowed to bulldoze Indigenous land rights. Matthew James Weigel's passion for research both honours and mourns what has been trampled and lied about. This is a devastating read but one to learn from. Mahsi cho, Matthew. Your grief is our call to action to learn our own histories and build upon our own Indigenous testimonies of what really happened and when and who was there to witness it. Mahsi cho. Richard Van Camp, Tlicho Dene author ofThe Lesser BlessedandMoccasin Square GardensWhitemud Walkingis a textual ecology, that through archival troubling, sampling, and reframing, allows the material, human, truly cellular historicity of treaty to enter as a living presence in our contemporary moment. Weigel writes, 'Here treaty means reciprocity and obligation. Here, treaty lasts forever'. This book is not the document you may hold in your hands but the shift in consciousness it foments within you. It is a gift. Liz Howard, author ofInfinite Citizen of the Shaking TentEchoing the caw and grackle of magpies, Matthew James WeigelsWhitemud Walkinglives the sound of Treaty 6. Voices whisper sanctuary in creekbeds, papers rustle precedence in archives; theres a buzz in your ear, a catch in your throat listen. Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate