An autobiographical essay on fear, The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar et l’araignée) explores the symptoms, sources, and genesis of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary kind. Using short chapters that are fragments of her life, Claire Legendre breaks down the psychological, physical, and social mechanisms associated with that emotion. Her style is lively, often funny, sometimes dark — though never complacent — and the story traces a unique path between France, Canada, and the Czech Republic, casting a defiant yet vulnerable gaze upon the world.

Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire, personal choice and the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to play. She hates to pay.

The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

Originally published in 1967 by McClelland and Stewart, Mirror on the Floor was the first novel from an emerging young writer named George Bowering. Now with over 100 publications to his credit, we are proud to be reissuing Bowering’s debut novel.

Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor vividly evokes the Vancouver of that era, when neon signs still shimmered on the rain-soaked streets and Theatre Row bustled with excited movie-goers.

From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom and Possessed comes Monster, a mesmerizing, brave new work of autofiction. Monster is a shattering, feminist manifesto exploring sexual awakening, motherhood, immigrant trauma, and the power of female rage.

In this ambitious short novel, R.H. Slansky weaves a complex narrative about the very nature of narrative: it is an annotated re-issue of a fictional autobiography that casts a questioning eye on the reliability of family lore.

The story starts with a newspaper photo taken in an obscure Nova Scotia town after the murder of eight bald eagles. The bizarre photo wins a contest and, over time, the unidentified girl in the foreground becomes, like Diane Arbus’s Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, infamous. Rita Van Loon decides, after seven painful years, to explain herself and the events surrounding the murders.

These brief tales are alternately fantastic, humorous, menacing, contemplative, absurd, hallucinatory, violent, confessional, and always provocative. If there is one thing that unites these narratives it is their brevity and their drive for conclusion. Potent text-bites for the short-attention-span reader.