FRESH LIT (Not Canned)

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,…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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.

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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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Attack of the Copula Spiders

Douglas Glover

“Glover is a master of narrative structure. ” —Wall Street Journal In the tradition of E. M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions.

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Malarky

Anakana Schofield

"This is the story of Anakana Schofield's teapot-wielding 'Our Woman': fretful mother, disgruntled farmwife, and—surprisingly late in life—sexual outlaw/anthropologist. Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity. "—Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist Our Woman will not be sunk by what life’s about to serve her.

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