News coverage of the fall of Baghdad and its aftermath were the inspiration for Ravenna Gets, especially the smaller stories of people being killed suddenly in their homes in the middle of otherwise normal days. Each story in Ravenna begins as any novel might, but abruptly loses the luxury of becoming a novel through a seemingly random and violent intrusion from beyond the world established by the story. The effect is intended to be that of the experience of war as the sudden end of stories, rather than being a war story itself. This destabilizing ‘pinch’ seeps into the consciousness of some of the stories, but not as a consciousness of events, but rather as nightmarish bends in experience and perception.
Ravenna Gets could probably be classified as speculative fiction, influenced by J.G. Ballard, and, though experimental in spirit, it employs strong conventional storytelling techniques.

Ruby Ruby is a soft-boiled murder mystery that follows the trail of our expatriate Canuck as he tries to sleuth out the answers to a puzzling series of pointless and apparently motiveless murders: Who’d want to kill a sixtyish night watchman guarding an abandoned pie factory?

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s narrator, is the “heir reluctant” of the family business (the salvage company of the book’s title) and an aspiring NHL defenceman. His life hurtles between the hockey rink, the junkyard, the road, and the three women in his life: The Intended, the mesmerizing Waitress X, and ex-wife Kathy.

Savage 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate’s nuclear family, bracketed by July 1986 — when he first saw Randy Savage in person — and the wrestler’s sudden death in May 2011. When Savage dies, Nate is freed from beliefs — once a source of beauty and escape — that had come to constrict him, fusing him to a moribund past.

Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity. Lizzy is streetwise, yet fragile, and her desperate journey is both uplifting and heartbreaking.

The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests.

Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

Shag Carpet Action is Matthew Firth’s boldest and brashest collection of stories to date. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada’s most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.

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.