The Colophon

“I think Quebec is Newfoundland writ large because we do have our own culture and that is so tied up in the language.”

Very much in the spirit of a good grift, the novel lures us in willingly before snatching all our assurances away from us.

The notion of making oneself “legible” to oneself and others is at the centre of Halen’s project.

“I’m interested in that idea: when we transform ourselves, are we transforming our pain?”

“These stories ask the question What is a monster? and complicate the definition of ‘monster’ along the way.”

This Is the House That Luke Built is a strong first novel, clearly adept at marrying its form and content.

Failure is inevitable because perfection is unattainable.

“That kind of direct connection with readers and creators is probably the majority of why I make art in the first place.”

Perović’s ideal of Canadian nationalism based in universality and Enlightenment freedoms has always been chimerical.

Lee does not make value judgments about high or low culture: she is equally at home watching Wong-Kar Wai films without subtitles and watching twenty seasons’ worth of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

What is apparent throughout Bad Cree is Johns’s facility for dealing with the rocky and tumultuous terrain of familial memory.

“I wanted to approach magic as a sort of organic, biological thing.”

Traces of writers as diverse as Daniil Kharms and Jorge Luis Borges are detectable in the collection.

By melding elements of Greek mythology, nature, and body horror, Desjardins has created something unique and enticing.

Metafiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy are among the genres represented in these brief and intriguing works.

Paced like a thriller and cast as a chase novel, The Rooftop Garden is a compulsive yet somewhat vexatious read.

Canning’s fiction is as intriguing for what it leaves out as for what gets included.

“The more conscious you are, the more intentional you are about writing, the better you understand why your own stories work or don’t,” Teebi says.

Godfrey, who succumbed to complications from lung cancer, was “an extraordinary … writer whose voice was clean, crisp, and daring on every page.”

Taken together, Dream States and Sideways comprise a particularly incisive look at the theory and practice of smart cities.

White Resin restores a vision of the Canadian wilderness more in line with Indigenous ideas of a mutually dependent relationship between humanity and the natural environment.

One of the innovations made by the publisher during the Covid-19 pandemic is the establishment of an editorial committee to seek out new work.

The two Indigenous authors offer different ways of thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and providing suggestions for how to rewrite those stories to our benefit.

The twin poles of scientific reason and religious faith animate this vibrant and surprisingly funny memoir.

When Khaw is at their best, their writing has teeth – blackened, razor sharp, and ready to rend flesh.

Small presses and debut authors account for the bulk of the fifteen titles that appear on this year’s shortlists.

The multiple award winning author was best known for his novels featuring English detective Alan Banks.

Ducks deserves a place alongside Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus as one of the finest examples of its genre.

As a primer to the ways cinematic horror works on audiences’ psyches and the specific neurological responses these techniques can elicit, Nightmare Fuel is a breezy and fluent read.

It would be salutary to see critics inside and outside of the academy pick up this book and engage with it thoroughly and thoughtfully.

Two collections of short fiction and two works in translation are represented on a list that spans the country from PEI to Alberta.

The single book review was of a book by technology columnist Josh O’Kane.

The Talosite exists at the confluence of sci-fi and body horror, with the actual horrors of the First World War a constant shadow in the background.

“If I could go back, I might tell younger me, ‘Don’t do this.’ “

Lambert uses the structure of a classical Greek tragedy to tell the story of a strike at a sawmill and the amoral, charismatic figure caught up in it.

Rather than farm teams, it’s preferable to think of smaller publishers as craft breweries or artisinal vineyards.

Plett’s own debut collection of short fiction, A Safe Girl to Love, is being reissued by her current publisher, Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press.

One need not agree with everything the author writes or believes in order to recognize the importance of his memoir as a document of the LGBTQ+ community’s development in Canada.

Despite some missteps and shots at easy targets, Parker’s novels combine to form a provocative riposte to a culture that valorizes a certain kind of profane masculinity.

Like Animals has a modernist sheen, providing a chaotic surface reflective of its protagonist’s conflicted and disaffected psychology.

“Even though I’ve been living in this country for twenty-two years and this is for all intents and purposes my home – it’s where I intend to live the rest of my life – elsewhere is this notion that one or two pieces are missing,” says Abdelmahmoud.

In her imaginative sequel to Sputnik’s Children, Favro comments on the nature and responsibility of storytelling.

Ruthnum’s brief work of fin-de-siècle body horror reads like a mash-up of David Cronenberg and Henry James.

The novel, which is structured to resemble a double album of interconnected tracks, follows a cast of characters searching for a sense of belonging.

Canadian-Irish writer Colin Barrett is a wizard with language that sings with the rhythms and cadences of the working class.

In this story about a man’s assignation with a married woman, the chaos and culture of Buenos Aires serve as metaphors for the couple’s incompatibility.

Hage’s story of a doomed, ineffectual man is a layered consideration of religion, history, and the nature of celebrity.

Pugsley resurrects a seldom-used literary form – the epistolary story – and repurposes it for the internet age.

Fu’s three-part story fuses realism with fabulist elements.

This story, about a teenage girl sent to live with her grandmother during the final months of her pregnancy, is about a struggle between conflicting notions contained in the title.

Like Alice Munro, MacLeod has the ability to build whole lives in a compressed space and to subtly shift a story’s focus and meaning without apparent effort.

English’s story excavates the chasm that exists between two halves of a couple, a gulf that is exposed by the death of the pair’s dog.

In this chilly story, three men do battle for the soul of a fifteen-year-old film star.

An ice cream truck driver faces mental anguish resulting from his inability to escape the incessant jingle of his vehicle’s music.

In Friedman’s story, family secrets, like orchids, flourish in darkness.

In a brief and barbed satire, Giller winner Omar El Akkad links our current geopolitical malaise with the capitalist impulse to sell stuff.

Millar’s story, ostensibly a psychological drama, is in fact a trenchant satire on the pernicious attractions of a particular kind of American dream.

Set in a tiny fishing village on Canada’s east coast, the story limns the distance between fact and supposition.

One of the author’s best, this story interrogates the notion of societal visibility through the prism of a middle-aged-woman working as a labourer flooding ice rinks in the middle of the night.

If the novel is a regal lion king, the short story is a cackling hyena.

The new members-only social-media site aims to replicate the café or salon in a virtual environment.

Stintzi’s novel traverses space, time, and a sprawling cast of characters in its attempt to allegorize our most profound challenges in the present.

The author says in a statement that she has “full confidence” in the work that went into the book.

The move comes after criticism of the cold-case team’s methods and assumptions by experts on the Holocaust and the Franks.

Alexander MacLeod’s new collection is out in April.

Edgar Smith, the convicted murderer of a fifteen-year-old girl, found some powerful advocates in conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and Alfred A. Knopf editor Sophie Wilkins.

Glickman’s focus on technique on a granular level reveals her to be a deeply knowledgeable and highly erudite reader of a wide range of poets.

The novel, about a sentient AI that develops a relationship with a university therapist, examines ontological questions about what it is that makes us human.

These twelve stories interrogate individual human consciousness and the dangers of technology in our postmodern world.

The new book, which proposes a Jewish notary as the person responsible for giving up the Franks’ hiding place, has come under fire by historians who question its assertions.

With not one but two pirate incursions, a mutiny, and other onboard shenanigans, the novel offers a fast, noisy narrative.

Set in Montreal during the 1980s, the novel outlines the full range of the immigrant experience, from heartache to hope.

Grudova’s previous collection of short fiction was delightfully strange; the new novel appears to continue in this vein.

In his debut literary novel under his own name, Ruthnum provides a slippery, serpentine narrative that calls into question notions of identity and narrative stability.

The Toronto poet recalls her mother, a former stunt motorcycle rider, and her former home in Vietnam.

Timid is not a word anyone would reach for to describe Blais’s fiction, and especially her early work, which remains as shocking and defiant today as when it first appeared.

Hammond has written a text that is frankly unclassifiable: part biography, part critical exegesis, part hipster manifesto.

“Art is a way of remembering what it is like to be alive when you may have forgotten,” says Cayley.

The risk in writing a domestic thriller with 9/11 as backdrop is that the geopolitical material comes off as a gimmick rather than an integral story element.

In his new memoir, the author contemplates his life and community in the wake of two significant figures dying within five months of each other.

The book uses Grand Guignol techniques to literalize the process of tearing oneself open in the act of artistic creation.

In this suite of sixteen uncanny tales, memory and loss are manifest in the spectres that haunt various characters.

For the author, the titular condition involves those moments when one is just trying to live one’s life and is suddenly reminded of one’s race.

“The function of it was the pleasure of the work for readers, and the value to writers was to show them how good they had to get,” says longtime series editor John Metcalf.

Horror doesn’t gel with those who’ve propped up CanLit respectability – that is, chiefly cishet, nondisabled white people, Pottle writes.

“Horror movies really, really distracted me from the most painful time of my life. Alone in the theatre for a couple of hours, being manipulated into screaming, swearing, and tossing my popcorn, I was transported.”

“If you just look at your own nightmares, you know that there are no rules.”

“A lot of it reminds me of just how much I have come through. And how much the people I know have come through. And what it was like to lose people.”

“The very things that nurture you in the horror genre are also the things that can suppress an understanding of what you’re trying to do.”

“I think I see life in very, very noir terms,” says the author, who considered quitting after finishing work on her latest novel.

“I didn’t have much of a relationship with masculinity growing up,” MacIntyre says. “I grew up among women.”

The brief novel’s propulsion and effect result from its author’s key understanding of just how far to push her technique to achieve maximum effect.

Though Bhat’s new book is described as her second novel, the individual pieces comprise all the attributes of linked stories.

The Toronto author’s story provides a metaphorical response to a very real history of trauma and violence.

Awad’s latest novel uses allusions to the Bard to tell the story of a woman whose chronic pain is miraculously alleviated.

The Vancouver journalist’s book chronicles a four-year plunge into the depths of the NXIVM miasma.

“Any story, any work of literature, any storytelling endeavour has to be both lighthouse and storm,” El Akkad says.

A breezy, plot-driven book and an abstruse, philosophically dense ontological mystery provide different pleasures for readers.

“I realized the adult world was every bit as fucked up as anything else.”

The through-line in Thompson’s book involves a historical inability on the part of Western culture to see Black people as fully human.