A flash fiction novel, The Sea-Wave details the aftermath of the kidnapping by an elderly and emotionally damaged man of a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound, unusually bright, depressive 12-year-old girl incapable of speech. The content of the novel consists of the girl's entries in her diary-like memorandum book, entries which relate her own, surprising thoughts on her kidnapping, family, and disabilities, in addition to her verbatim transcriptions of the old man's monologues, which appear to reveal, in fragments, the details of a very specific and unusual period in his life. As the pair can't verbally communicate, the book is free of dialogue in the conventional sense. The emphasis, instead, is on character, and emotional effect.

"When Harper Martin drifts into a sleepy Cape Cod resort with a mysterious investment plan, he unleashes a firestorm involving the F.B.I., the State Department, the government of Nicaragua, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Laura Marello's hilarious new novel features a surreal cast of characters, among them the Souza Family ("Provincetown's version of the Kennedys. They were handsome, glamorous, Catholic and doomed"), Voodoo Woman, and a parrot named Sydney Greenstreet. We come to know them all - fishermen, artists, drug dealers, owners of bars both gay and straight - through the lens of a winsome young amnesiac whose own past is shrouded in mystery. Marello's passion for art and film, seen in her earlier work, helps propel the action forward to its riotous conclusion; her love for the glorious foibles of our human nature, rendered with compassion as well as humor, keeps us caring about what happens." Constance Solari, author of Sophie's Fire

Laura Marello is the author of Claiming Kin, The Tenants of the Hotel Biron, Balzac's Robe, The Gender of Inanimate Objects and Other Stories, and several other books. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious arts grants. She resides in Lynchburg, VA

Stone Woman is a saga of Blossom?s unconventional family of five women, whose lives are bound by a Vietnam-War draft dodger David, immersed in the Yorkville subculture of the hippie daze of Toronto. During the 1967 Art Symposium, a giant block of marble intended for a sculpture disappears from High Park, and the mystery of the theft becomes the focus of speculation in the Toronto arts community. The novel draws the reader into a web of liaisons?into David?s love affair with Blossom?s mother Liza, his covert dealings with her friend Anna, as well as the mysterious Helena. The intrigue culminates in the convergence of their loves and tragedies, and quests for social and cultural change inherent in the tumultuous milieu of the period. The story is brought to the present through the lives of the women?s daughters who discover that their family secrets have been sculpted?literally?into an art form that imparts a sense of homecoming and alludes to a more hopeful future.

Max has been a freelance reporter dodging bullets in Latin America, a small-time newspaper editor who delights in infuriating his publisher and, finally, a flack for a communications company -- the elephant's graveyard for journalists. But none of this compares with the terrors of assisted living, so instead Max risks everything on something he's kept secret until recently: his increasingly unreliable ability to travel in time. He set out to search the past for his late wife and settle down with her again. In turn satirical and poignant, replete with dark humour, sarcasm, wise-cracking characters and laugh-out-loud funny bits, this is a debut novel that is going to ring some bells and stir some pots.

This migration anthology is an entertaining miscellany of factual stories, essays, newspaper reportage, and even a poem, all of which highlight the humour, as well as the ironies and agonies generated when humans seek a new homeland. The authors, and their stories, are as diverse as our Canadian population itself, and help to tell who we all are within this amazing, tolerant, nurturing geographic space called Canada. All migrants have stories, but not all are writers, so although most authors here are academics and/or widely published, the voices of others are well represented.

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani-prize winners: the novel Berlin (2012); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019, won the 2020 Hamilton Literary Arts Award for fiction. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Island & Other Galaxies, appeared in the fall of 2020 and was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. A new poetry collection, At the End of the World was published in 2021. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both “The Sand Flea” and “Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro” are Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer’s residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a 200,000-word novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.

Migration stories are an essential component of Canada?s historical/literary continuum; we need to know of such writings to rationalize about who Canadians really are, and where they are from. Aren?t we all the children of migration? Where we came from, how we got here, who we were, and are, and who may become in time ? such themes should interest all those naturally concerned about identity and origin; that eternal enigma wrought of migration. These short-fiction stories tell much about migration and Canada, in ways that are funny, ribald, tragic or contemplative, but never dull.

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani-prize winners: the novel Berlin (2012); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019, won the 2020 Hamilton Literary Arts Award for fiction. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Island & Other Galaxies, appeared in the fall of 2020 and was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. A new poetry collection, At the End of the World was published in 2021. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both “The Sand Flea” and “Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro” are Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer’s residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a 200,000-word novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.

Book I of The Canticles puts into dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Marx can excoriate Queen Victoria. Book II will focus on Black folk readings of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, with a few other religious texts canvassed too. Book III will narrate the rise of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia.

Acclaimed for his narrative lyric suites (Whylah Falls and Execution Poems), his lyric “colouring books” (Blue, Black, Red, and Gold), his selected poems (Blues and Bliss), his opera libretti and plays (Beatrice Chancy and Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path), George Elliott Clarke now presents us with his epic-in-progress, Canticles, a work that views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection. A native Africadian, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate ranges the atlas and ransacks the library to ink lines unflinching before Atrocity and unquiet before Oppression.

Freeze is an allegorical comedy that dramatizes the Great Ice Storm of '98 as a metaphor for "cooler", more tolerant times in Quebec compared to the separatist "heat" of earlier decades. Five Montrealers find themselves trapped inside the power-outed duplex of Nicole, a pur-laine pro-sovereignty journalist. Her boyfriend Curtis, a Black Anglo jazz musician, arrives with a shocking marriage proposal. Mickey, an Irish gambling-addicted handyman, exploits the storm by selling firewood at exorbitant prices. And Hydro Quebec lineman Réjean tries to do his job, while Claire, the horny elderly neighbor, struggles to mediate. This dysfunctional quintet butt heads over politics and love, provoking us to ponder whether Montreal's "two solitudes" has become a stereotype in this new Century.

Marianne Ackerman?s second collection of stories for Guernica, Mankind, puts the focus on women, their ascent to selfhood, the beauty and carnage en route. Picking up from the Gothic shadows of Albert Fine in Holy Fools (2014), she follows the lives of an Ontario farm family marked by a bloody incident they struggle to understand. Literary Montreal is the setting of two stories spun around an alpha poseur, George. Four interlocking stories unpeel the secrets of one man?s sister, ex-wife, friend and mother. Sardonic and often funny, these tales follow the byways of aspiration and self-deception, casting a warm light on all.

The poems in Arguments For Lawn Chairs don't trust your grandmother's cooking. They have visited Pangea, they have visited Toronto and Montreal, the B.C. Gulf Islands, Tiberias, the tailing ponds near Sudbury, and they are still not satisfied, are still unconvinced, still need more proof. They are suckers for dovetailed boxes, winter fire pits, houses that sit not quite true, a rent garbage bag spilling its guts on Queen Street. The poems in Arguments For Lawn Chairs are devoid of hope, but are joyful nonetheless.