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Lucky Bruce

Bruce Jay Friedman

For decades Bruce Jay Friedman has charmed the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture. He’s been in publishing. He’s been in theater. He’s been in film. And now, this best-selling author is in his own head, re-illuminating the dazzle of post-war American life. With cameos by Mario Puzo, Richard Pryor, Warren Beatty, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and many others,Lucky Bruce is a moving and scandalous memoir that brushes against the brightest of American luminaries. Advance Praise for Bruce Jay Friedman’s Lucky Bruce: "The hilariously juicy memoir of a successful novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Whether inadvertently snubbing Marlene Dietrich, chauffeuring Natalie Wood or fist-fighting with Norman Mailer, there are plenty of stories here to solidify Friedman’s ranking as a supreme satirist. …

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Very Small Something, A

David Hickey

Olive Bezzlebee might live by the world's biggest bubble gum factory, but she can't blow a single bubble. Not one! Setting out to solve the mystery of her missing bubbles, Olive travels to the edges of her imagination, where a very small something is waiting to happen. And a miraculous adventure awaits. With lush illustrations by Alexander Griggs-Burr, David Hickey's tale of enchantement and belonging is sure to uplift aspiring bubble blowers of all ages. For information, colouring sheets, or to listen to a full recording of A Very Small Something, visit www. averysmallsomething. com. "I like this book mainly because it’s about gum, and gum is one of my favourite snacks . My favourite kind of gum flavour is raspberry. I don’t know how to blow bubbles yet, but my sister can. She’s nine. In the back of the book, there is a guide…

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Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live

Ray Robertson

Shortly after completing his sixth novel, Ray Robertson suffered from a depression of suicidal intensity. Soon after recovering, he felt compelled to try and answer two of the biggest questions we can ask. What makes humans happy? And what makes a life worth living? Robertson is a rock & roll Montaigne, running his hands over the whole of life: these essays remind us that much of what we have to live for requires effort and perseverance, and that we wouldn't want it any other way. Unashamedly working class and unabashedly literary, Why Not? is a rocking, rolling anti-Sisyphean odyssey.

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Big Dream, The

Rebecca Rosenblum

At Dream Inc. , a lifestyle-magazine publisher, people are struggling to do more than their jobs. They struggle to fall in love. They struggle to stay that way. They struggle to be good parents, and to be good children. They struggle to have friends, to eat lunch, to be happy, and to answer the phone. And all that struggle can be pretty interesting . . . especially on company time. In The Big Dream, acclaimed short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum documents a new generation coming of age in the workplace. With its transparent, biting, understated prose, The Big Dream is an In Our Time for the twenty-first century. Coming in Fall 2011.

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In the Field

Claire Tacon

WINNER OF THE 2010 METCALF-ROOKE AWARD Ellie Lucan’s about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She’s got a doctorate in soil science, her husband’s a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at the local Montessori school. When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her two sons to spend the summer in her hometown with her mother. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons. As Ellie is drawn back into the community and finds herself at the mercy of an old lover, she’s forced to decide where her loyalties lie. PRAISE FOR IN THE FIELD “We were much engaged with this unsentimental portrait of a disintegrating marriage whose characters absorbed us. We were…

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Groundwork

Amanda Jernigan

The three sequences of Groundwork comprise a sophisticated reworking of European myth on the order of Yeats’s The Tower. The first is situated by an archaeological dig in modern-day Tunisia, the second by the Garden of Eden, the third by the waters and islands of Homer’s Odyssey. Together they form a devastating critique of contemporary aesthetics. Few poets today are versed in the archetypes that inform the European tradition, and even fewer can manipulate them with the grace of Amanda Jernigan. With rivers of exquisite prosody and a panoramic intellectual scope, her Groundwork has recharted the poetic landscape – and by doing so, has changed it forever. PRAISE FOR AMANDA JERNIGAN “For years now, Amanda Jernigan’s name has been traded between poets like stories of mythical beast sightings; whispers of a poet who could arrive…

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Suitable Precautions

Laura Boudreau

When a woman uncovers a fortune in the attic, she begins a pilgrimage that takes her to the knife-edge between blessing and curse. Two fatherless children think Mr. Crisander is nothing more than a creepy next door neighbour—until they nearly kill his pot-bellied pig, and learn the secrets of his past. A young girl yammers about grade six, stealing cigarettes, and her sister’s no-food diet while being photographed by an internet pornographer. The stories of Suitable Precautions are fresh and haunting. The characters within them exude a bitter beauty. And while their lives may be derailed, reclaimed, celebrated, or questioned, what holds them together is what also binds the stories in this collection: that is, a sense for the strange, tenuous fragility of human bonds. Suitable Precautions is an incisive and moving debut,…

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Wage Slave's Glossary, The

Joshua Glenn

The Idler's Glossary was released when the world was experiencing its biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression: The Wage Slave's Glossary comes as we climb out of it, and continues to explore and challenge the interconnected world of work and leisure and labor, and how the language we use continues to keep us in chains. Fabulously illustrated by Seth.

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