Blood Fable--the new work of fiction from Oisín Curran--is a Jules Verne-esque fantastical tale filled with Back-to-the-Land ideology and American Zen Buddhism.

In 1980, New Pond, a utopian Buddhist community on the coast of Maine is on the verge of collapse. New Pond's charismatic leader demands complete adherence to his authority, and slowly, his followers come to the realization that they've been exploited for too long. The eleven-year-old son of one of those adherents is dimly aware of the concerns of the adult world. Yet his imagination provides a refuge both from the difficulties of his parents' lives--including his mother's newly discovered cancer--and from the boredom and casual brutality of school.

To distract his parents and himself from their collective troubles, the boy claims to remember his own life before birth--an epic tale about the search for a lost city made up of the boy's own experiences refracted through the lens of the adventure stories he loves. As the world around them falls apart, the boy and his parents find that his strange story often seems to predict the events taking place in the world around them.

Praise for Blood Fable:

“A family drama, a fantastical voyage, and a poetic reflection on love, death and betrayal, this extraordinary coming-of-age novel exposes the difficult relationship between free-thought and blind faith, evasion and enlightenment. Oisín Curran’s Blood Fable is an adventure for the heart
and soul.” —Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of
The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time

“This careful and loving rendering of a child’s mind proves that acts of storytelling were once not so much vehicles for escape but instead crucial rehearsals for being. A remembrance of lost time—or maybe, to reference its Buddhist undergirding, an alaya-vijnana, a storehouse
consciousness—Curran’s vision of boyhood is perfect in details and sublimely moving. Blood Fable is a magnificent double take, which—like a bistable optical illusion (duck or rabbit?) —allows two universes to coexist. A rapturous adventure tale where the very essence
of adventure is subverted so that fantasy and reality conflate; this is done not for temporary trickery but to deepen our comprehension of the real.” —Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs

“Blood Fable is, for me, a perfect book; it is the novel I always wish I were reading. In its twin stories—one of an eleven-year-old boy and his flawed, beloved parents and the other a wild
tale of love, peril, and adventure across underground tunnels and seas—are all the wonder and terror of childhood, refracted by a luminous imagination. Through the wide eyes of a child, Curran plumbs the world of adults with compassion and acuity. Blood Fable is a quest, a
question, a story of searching—for understanding, insight, heroes—and of failing, finding in their stead the imaginative mercy of love. This is a joy of a novel, glittering, wondrous, and strange. I remain in its thrall.” —Rebecca Silver Slayter, author of In the Land of Birdfishes

Oisín Curran grew up in rural Maine. He received a BA in Classics and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University (where he was the recipient of a national scholarship and a writing fellowship), and a diploma in Translation (French to English) from Concordia University. He is the author of Mopus (2008), and was named a "Writer to Watch" by CBC: Canada Writes. Curran lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his wife and two children.

ARCs available.
Launches in Toronto, Halifax and Montreal.

Deep Salt Water is a stirring memoir about loss and abortion, expressed through the layering of imagery from the ocean. In detail at once sensual and sophisticated, Apostolides unfurls the emotional experience of a love affair and unwanted pregnancy, the abortion itself, and her reconnection with the man seventeen years later—a rekindling of love which stimulates this gentle attempt to come to terms with the abortion and its consequences. Moving from a place of intense intimacy to an outward focus that engages with the broader world, Deep Salt Water discusses abortion in all its complexity, rejecting polarizing rhetoric in favour of the unfathomable truths that women hold in their bodies.

With 9 full colour plates of mixed media collage by Catherine Mellinger.

Marianne Apostolides is the author of six books, three of which have been translated. She’s also a recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a finalist for the KM Hunter Award. Her previous non-fiction work, Voluptuous Pleasure, was listed among the Top 100 Books of 2012 by The Globe & Mail. Marianne lives in Toronto with her two children.

Catherine Mellinger is a mixed media and analog collage artist whose works find inspiration in the ideas originated by the feminist artists of the Dada period as well as the early Surrealists, lending to the exploration of dichotomy; real and unreal; beauty and trauma. Mellinger’s works have been published in literary magazines, and she has been commissioned by musicians, writers and private collectors. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario, with her husband and son. To see more of her work, visit her website: cargocollective.com/catherinemellinger

Electronic galleys available in January 2017
Events in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Waterloo, Vancouver, Victoria, Chicago, IL, and Seattle, WA

Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes, the new collection of poetry from Giller Prize-longlisted writer Jennifer LoveGrove, attempts to make sense of a difficult and unsettling world, where one need not look much further than their own communities to witness acts of trauma and absurdity.

Here, we're haunted by the ghosts of alienation, trauma, delusion, and fear that the past decade has instilled in us, and bear witness to moments of extreme crisis--in emotional breakdowns, the failures of the mental health system, the lack of support for the most vulnerable members of society, and the impact of psychosis not only on the ill but on those orbiting them.

With inventive and startling imagery and logic, we're led on an odyssey through the terrain of unsettling dreamscapes, where a whole host of personas, both tame and wild--from humans, to foxes, moose, deer and crows, slugs, fish, beetles, mosquitos, earthworms and more--give voice to the things we can't express in our daily lives.

Praise for Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes

"LoveGrove’s poetry apprentices itself to the world we live in, pacing out the dimensions of the enclosure called the present—the enclosures of culture, history, family, and other patriarchal institutions—with a keen eye and a relentless heart. In pursuit simultaneously of holistic perception, love, and an escape route, LoveGrove invites words to hold hands in unusual combinations, enters dreams and lets consciousness run feral. “There was a war going on and / ours was a very important mission,” LoveGrove writes, and it’s true." -Helen Guri, author of Match

Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of the Giller Prize-longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as two poetry collections: I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. In 2010, LoveGrove was nominated for the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Literature and in 2015, her poetry was shortlisted for the Lit POP Awards. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications across North America. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario.

Electronic galleys available in February 2017
Events in Toronto, Peterborough, Montreal, Ottawa and Kingston

Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers.

Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.

In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Blank explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

Praise for M. NourbeSe Philip:

“Philip’s questions are difficult, and of an intensity of insistence rarely achieved.”—Erin Mouré

“Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and
stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip.” —Juliana Spahr

From award-winning writer Bertrand Laverdure comes Readopolis, a novel translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.

It's 2006 and down-and-out protagonist Ghislain works as a reader for a publishing house in Montreal. He's bored with all the wannabe writers who are determined to leave a trace of their passage on earth with their feeble attempts at literary arts. Obsessed by literature and its future (or lack thereof), he reads everything he can in order to translate reality into the literary delirium that is Readopolis--a world imagined out of Chicago and Montreal, with few inhabitants, a convenience store, a parrot, and all kinds of dialogues running amok: cinematic, epistolary, theatrical, and Socratic.

In the pages of Readopolis, Laverdure playfully examines the idea that human beings are more connected by their reading abilities than by anything else. Funny and sardonic, whimsical and tragic, this postmodern novel with touches of David Foster Wallace and Raymond Queneau portrays the global village of readers that the Internet created, even before the 2.0 revolution.

Praise for Lectodôme

"Brilliant, playful, perfectly convincing, Lectodôme has everything to place Laverdure in the ranks of the 'sickest literary greats.'" —Le Devoir

Bertrand Laverdure is a poet, novelist, and the current Poet Laureate for Montreal (2015–17). A prolific writer, Laverdure is the author of three books of poetry and four novels, including Lectodôme (2008), Bureau universel des copyrights (2011; published in English by BookThug as Universal Bureau of Copyrights in 2014), and La chambre Neptune (2016). He has won many awards for his work, including the 2003 Grand Prix du Festival International de Poésie de Trois-Rivières, and the 2009 Grand Prix littéraire Archambault for Lectodôme.

Montreal-based writer, translator, and editor Oana Avasilichioaei has published five poetry collections, including Expeditions of a Chimæra (with Erín Moure; 2009), We, Beasts (2012; winner of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation) and Limbinal (2015). Previous translations include Bertrand Laverdure’s Universal Bureau of Copyrights (2014; shortlisted for the 2015 ReLit Awards), Suzanne Leblanc’s The Thought House of Philippa (co-translated with Ingrid Pam Dick; 2015), and Daniel Canty’s Wigrum (2013).

Electronic ARCs available in January 2017.
Launches in Montreal, Toronto and NYC.