Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, “what makes them so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.”

In The Trenches: The Best of subTerrain represents ten years of alternative writing, as featured on the pages of Vancouver's literary renegade magazine, subTerrain.

The Inanimate World is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. These are sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing—for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace.

The Incomparables is a novel about ambition, betrayal, “failure,” love, family dynamics, how we deal with societal, family, and personal expectations, and how we come to accept who we are.

Nathaniel G. Moore follows up his 2014 ReLit Award win for Savage with a diverse collection of short fiction, his first — Jettison, featuring stories which dangle somewhere between horror and romance.

Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it’s also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb.

PRAISE FOR KASPOIT!
“…Reminds me of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange in its inventive language and insular
world of violence; also Beckett and Mamet in the lowlife characterizations, back-andforth dialogue, and the sheer absurdity.”
—Myna Wallin, A Thousand Profane Pieces

“…compelling, sickening, and, ultimately, hits what is most likely closest to the truth about what happened there than anything else that’ll get out in the world. Kaspoit! puts me in mind of A Clockwork Orange (the book), for its neologisms and violence/bleakness, and Pulp Fiction (the movie) for the unrelenting violence, so
much so that we become inured to it.”
—Janis Harper, Body Breakdowns

“…there is a well-executed gloom that maybe owes a tip of the hat to Harry Crews or
Flannery O’Connor, or maybe a drunken Hawthorne. The dialogue never grinds or
presents an obstacle—it runs smooth, which is a must considering its importance
to the story. In many ways it is the story.”
—Phillip D. Alexander, The Next Rainy Day

Melissa Bull’s debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets and landmarks of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull’s characters shine with the dirt of digging just deep enough.

A strangely unified collection, unsettling and surprising, Knucklehead resides where the lines between real and imagined blur. Giles’s penetrating view and unsentimental honesty shape these stories and push the reader’s expectations of the “ordinary.” These are mature and compelling narratives that encapsulate everything great about short fiction. They freeze a moment, but upon closer examination reveal something more, a message that resonates long after that story has been read.

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.