August 1, 1875, Toronto: The naked body of a young woman is discovered in a pine box, half-buried in a ditch along Bloor Street. So begins Jeannie’s Demise, a real-life Victorian melodrama that played out in the bustling streets and courtrooms of “Toronto the Good,” cast with all the lurid stock characters of the genre. Historian Ian Radforth brings to life an era in which abortion was illegal, criminal proceedings were a spectator sport, and coded advertisements for back-alley procedures ran in the margins of newspapers.
At the centre of the story is the elusive and doomed Jeannie Gilmour, a minister’s daughter whose independent spirit can only be glimpsed through secondhand accounts and courtroom reports. As rumours swirl about her final weeks and her abortionists stand trial for their lives, a riveted public grapples with questions of guilt and justice, innocence and intent. Radforth’s intensive research grounds the tragedy of Jeannie’s demise in sharp historical analysis, presenting over a dozen case studies of similar trials in Victorian-era Canada.
Part gripping procedural, part meticulous autopsy, Jeannie’s Demise opens a rare window into the hidden history of a woman’s right to choose.
Ian Radforth is a Canadian social historian who taught for more than three decades in the department of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900–1980 and Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States.
We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts, which have occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. In this new work Federici revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, examining the root causes of these developments and outlining the consequences for the women affected and their communities. No less than the witch hunts in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction.
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist and scholar whose writing and political activities have contributed enormously to the broad Autonomist tradition. Known for her intellectual generosity, sharp, nonconformist thought, and searing critiques of capitalist society, Federici’s work has inspired the generation of social activists associated with the rise of the alter-globalization movement.
When nineteen-year-old runaway Verity Darkwood, flat broke and devastated by guilt, takes refuge in a bar to escape the unwanted attention of a stranger, she doesn't expect to meet Gareth Winter, let alone become business partners with him. They discover that they each possess the ability to interact with the world "beyond the veil" and, with the help of Horace Greeley III, editor of the fantastical online journal The Echo, Verity and Gareth spend the next two years on the road, helping the earthbound spirits who haunt their clients to cross over, or exorcising the demons that plague them. But when they stumble upon a series of unsolved child abductions spanning decades which are eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Verity's younger sister, they embark on a pursuit that will take them across Canada in their quest to find The Seventh Devil, the dangerous and mysterious figure who may be behind it all.
Award-winning writer Suzanne Craig-Whytock found her love of literature and writing at an early age. Her passion for the written word continued into adulthood, leading her to earn an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature. She has worked in education most of her life, and was a high school English teacher in Ontario, Canada for over 20 years. She has authored three novels, Smile, The Dome and The Seventh Devil, as well as a short story collection, and has had numerous pieces of short fiction and poetry appear in literary journals.
We're all just animals after all.
Before the beekeeper arrived, the Crimson Quays was just a well-appointed tourist trap: a luxury travel resort replete with swimming pools, musical performances, and amusement park rides. However, the resort's crowning glory--the very feature that drew the beekeeper to the island in the first place--was the zoo.
Although the beekeeper, a biologist by trade, was tasked with the construction of the zoo, he was rarely spotted at resort events. Instead, he spent his evenings chasing other zoological pursuits--specifically, he was attempting to crossbreed a new species of wolf that would thrive in the resort's arid climate. The beekeeper's odd behaviour went mostly unnoticed... until the night the animals got out.
Originally published in Globus Magazine as a serial comic, Crimson Quays was written by travel journalist Jonathan Bousfield and illustrated by celebrated comic artist Igor Haufbauer, creator of the Alcuin Society Award-winning Mister Morgen. In Crimson Quays, Bousfield and Haufbauer reveal a nightmarish tale of human manipulation gone very, very awry.
Igor Hofbauer was born in 1974 in Novi Zagreb (Croatia), where he still lives and works. He attended the local Academy of Fine Arts for three years. He illustrated several books by the Croatian novelist Edo Popovic, and has contributed illustrations and comic strips to international magazines and anthologies. In 2007, he published his first collection of graphic novellas, Prison Stories for Otompotm Editions in Zagreb. This was followed by Firma, a volume of sketches for Turbo Comix (2010), and Grumizna Laguna(2015), which was published in installments in the Croatian weekly Globus before being issued in book form by URK/Mocvara in 2019. Grimizna Laguna is now Available as
Jonathan Bousfield is an English writer living in Zagreb, Croatia. He has written extensively on travel, culture and the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and is the author of guidebooks to Croatia, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Baltic States
Igor Hofbauer's stories niggle at the dark recesses of the psyche. They are visits implying there's much more to face, panels awaiting uncovering, but we don't want these scenes of extended hideous horror to be so easily explained or, for that matter, to come much closer.
--The Comics Journal
Igor Hofbauer is the Charles Burns of the Balkans.
--Nina Bunjevac
The Shining meets Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in this gripping debut from an award-winning talent.
The Gift opens on the snow-blanketed grounds of the Alexander Palace in Western Russia where a moth has come to attend the birth of the fourth Romanov princess, Anastasia. She and her siblings grow up in a gilded world, isolated from the society beyond the palace walls despite their dominion over it.
After mysteriously receiving a camera on her fifteenth birthday, she begins to document her world, but the gift carries with it a weight she can't yet see. A creature moves on the edge of her vision and stalks her dreams. As the revolution unfolds, the confines of Anastasia's world keep closing in. Something is following her, and it might not be human.
Zoe Maeve is a comics artist originally from Tkaronto/Toronto who is now based in TiohtiĂ :ke/Montreal. She studied visual arts at Concordia University, where she worked in oil painting, printmaking, and textiles before finding comics. Her work is based in her love of research and she is interested in hauntings, archives, ecologies and other realities. In 2016 her book July Underwater was the recipient of Best English Comic at the Expozine Awards. She currently shares her home with one feisty black cat.
Both quietly understated and yet chillingly ominous in tone, The Gift is a disquieting journey into pseudo-history.
--Broken Frontier
"A moth drifts through a palace and we follow, entering a dreamy, surreal, and haunting imagining of the life and last days of the 4th Romanov princess, Anastasia, gorgeously penned in delicate inks. We are caught between the scenes Anastasia captures with her camera, a gift from someone unknown, and the strange figure she glimpses from the corner of her eye. Poignant and powerful, a sensual fever dream building to the inevitable tragic ending, we are enveloped in an ethereal foreboding."
--Jo Treggiari, Governor General Award-nominated author of The Grey Sisters Both the pleasures and the eeriness of The Gift are achieved from Maeve's meticulous attention to details- a tense glance, a long shadow, or a hand across a ruffled skirt. This comic is intriguing, unsettling and extremely beautiful. -Lee Lai, creator of Stone Fruit Maeve delicately renders the loneliness and melancholy of a doomed princess in precise, sparsely composed panels awash in the blue of a long winter dream. With its deliberate, suspenseful pacing Maeve commands a poetic mastery of the medium in The Gift. -Drew Shannon, co-creator of The Montague TwinsGraphic shorts filled with horror, humour, and the absurd
Award-winning Canadian cartoonist Dakota McFadzean returns with a brilliantly dark collection that offers a glimpse into the cracks between childhood imagination and the disappointing harshness of adulthood. Populated by cruel bullies, exhausted parents, and relentless cartoon mascots, the world of To Know You're Alive renders the familiar into something that is alien and absurd. The characters in these stories long to uncover something uncanny in shadowy attics and beneath masks, only to discover that sometimes it's worse to find nothing at all.
Dakota McFadzean is a Canadian cartoonist who has been published by MAD Magazine, The New Yorker The Best American Comics, and Funny or Die. He has also worked as a storyboard artist for DreamWorks. McFadzean is an alumni of The Center for Cartoon Studies. He has two books available from Conundrum Press: Other Stories and the Horse You Rode in On, and Don't Get Eaten by Anything, which collects three years of daily comic strips. He is a co-editor/co-founder of the comics and art anthology Irene, and distributes his own short stories in his ongoing minicomic series, Last Mountain. McFadzean currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
Deliberate, creepy, and wonderful.
Starred Review, Foreward Reviews
In Ojibwe cosmology there are thirteen moons, and in these pages are thirteen offerings from Ghost Lake, an interrelated cast of characters and their brushes with the mysterious. Issa lives in fear of having her secret discovered, Aanzheyaawin haunts the roads seeking vengeance, Zaude searches for clues to her brother's death, Fanon struggles against an unexpected winter storm, Eadie and Mushkeg share a magical night, Tyner faces brutal violence, and Tyler, Clay, and Dare must make amends to the spirits before it's too late. Here the precolonial past is not so distant, and nothing is ever truly lost or destroyed because the land remembers. Ghost Lake is a companion volume to Adler's Indigenous horror novel, Wrist (2016, Kegedonce Press). It was the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award in Published English Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award in Book Design.
"We love these stories! Interconnected horror stories based on traditional Anishinaabeg stories all set on an eerie reserve aptly named Ghost Lake? Yes please. Every story surprises. An absolute page-turner, deeply engaging horror stories that leave you breathless. The sheer breadth and range of what Adler has accomplished here is impressive." Jurors' citation, 2021 Indigenous Voices Awards
Born in 1970, Phillip Ernest grew up in Northern Ontario. Fleeing home at the age of fifteen, he lived on the streets of Toronto until he was twenty-eight. He learned Sanskrit from the book Teach Yourself Sanskrit, and later earned a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Sanskrit from Cambridge University, with a dissertation on the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. Marrying a woman from Pune, India, in 2006, he lived in that city until 2016, working first in the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, then as a writer and editor at Dilip Oak Academy. His first novel, The Vetala, was published in 2018, and he lives with his wife in Bengaluru, India.
A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
Callum Angus is a trans writer and editor currently based in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Nat. Brut, West Branch, LA Review of Books, Catapult, The Common, Seventh Wave Magazine and elsewhere. He has received support from Lambda Literary and Signal Fire Foundation for the Arts, and he holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the founding editor of the journal smoke and mold.
Mostly recently, Cal's writing is featured in the anthology Kink edited by R. O. Kwon, Garth Greenwell (Simon & Schuster 2021).
"Callum Angus is one of the younger writers I'm most excited by, with a mind full of marvels and an ear to match. Every story surprises; every sentence strives gorgeously toward music. This is writing as transition, as entrancement, as transcendence." - Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
A Natural History of Transition is overall a beautiful and mystifying collection of stories that arrives at a time when it's much needed. - Montreal Review of Books
Detransitioning, childbirth, deadnames, outing, and of course transition are all themes that Angus manages to explore in deeply unique ways. It's the range Angus captures that makes this a worthwhile read. - Cleo Peterson, The Puritan
Progressing through the collection, the sediment of every trans character builds in richness; layers of queer history pile up, jagged and dense. The accumulated layers reveal an intimate cross section--each story a marvelous sample, filled with the glittering gradation of transition. - Chicago Review of Books
Reading this slim yet expansive collection is a joyride for the brain, even when it reckons with deep-rooted pain and grief. - The Seventh Wave