By Philip Quinn
The Skeleton Dance takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers.
Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in. Maybe they’re slightly better off than they were at the start. Or maybe not. One has a girlfriend though. They both have a little extra cash, enough to order nachos whenever they want to without going through their pockets first. They’re not dead, and that’s something right there. And they’re not arrested, which is the quite surprising part.
By Jen Currin
Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in The Sleep of Four Cities use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities—cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss—with only the map of language as a guide.
In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways.
By Chris Millis
Winner of the 2000 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
A capricious comedy of errors, Small Apartments resonates with tremulous energy and memorable characters.
The film adaptation of Small Apartments was directed by Jonas Åkerlund. Franklin Franklin is played by Matt Lucas, and his landlord, Mr. Olivetti, is played by Peter Stormare. The cast co-stars Dolph Lundgren, Johnny Knoxville, James Caan, Billy Crystal, Juno Temple, Saffron Burrows and Amanda Plummer. Screenplay by Chris Millis. The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 10, 2012.
By Chris Millis
The underground cult hit that won the Grand Prize in the 23rd Annual International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest is now a major motion picture from Sony Entertainment directed by Grammy Award winner Jonas Akerlund and starring the most refreshingly offbeat cast ever assembled for a dark indie comedy.
Following the success of his novel, The Dreamlife of Bridges, Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. Settings are extreme or post-apocalyptic and walk the line of magic realism. Despite the sometimes-alien landscapes his characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, love and loss.
Snatch is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, Snatch picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence.
