Poet, playwright, and librarian, E´va Circe´-Co^te´ was a prolific journalist writing for progressive newspapers under a number of pseudonyms. As a feminist and a freethinker who fought for equality and secularism, she offers a non-conformist perspective on Quebec society and politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Freethinker is translated from the 2011 Clio prize winner, E´va Circe´-Co^te´, libre penseuse, 1871–1949.

Lazer Lederhendler is a full-time freelance translator specializing in contemporary Québécois fiction and nonfiction. His work has earned him literary distinctions in Canada and abroad, including multiple nominations for the Governor General’s Literary Award, which he won in 2008 for the translation of Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner. Lederhendler is also a three-time winner of the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation awarded by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. His translation of the novel Malabourg by Perrine Leblanc is forthcoming from the House of Anansi later this year. Lazer Lederhendler lives in Montreal.

How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism?

Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality —once tightly regulated by conservative institutions—become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market. But even as it promoted legal equality, this shift increased disparity and social inequality. Today, the glue of sexual identity strains to hold together a community ever more fractured along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the celebration of LGBTQ inclusion pinkwashes injustice at home and abroad.

Queer Progress tries to make sense of this transformation by narrating the complexities and contradictions of forty years of queer politics in Canada’s largest city.

From 1974 to 1986 Tim McCaskell was a member of the collective that ran The Body Politic, Canada’s iconic gay liberation journal. He was a founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, and a spokesperson for Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. He is the author of Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality.

Writing for Maclean’s magazine in 1965, Peter Gzowski saw something different about the new generation of the left. They were not the agrarian radicals of old. They did not meet in union halls. Nor were they like the Beatniks that Gzowski had rubbed shoulders with in college. “The radicals of the New Left … differ from their predecessors not only in the degree of their protest but in its kind. They are a new breed.” Members of the New Left placed the ideals of self-determination and community at the core of their politics. As with all leftists, they sought to transcend capitalism. But in contrast to older formations, New Leftists emphasized solidarity with national liberation movements challenging imperialism around the world. They took up organizational forms that anticipated—in their direct, grassroots, community-based democracy—the liberated world of the future. Radical Ambition is the first book to explore the history of this dynamic movement and reveal the substantial social changes it won for the people of Toronto.

Peter Graham is an independent researcher and sessional instructor at McMaster University. His work examines municipal politics and the role of the left in Canada.

Ian McKay is the L.R. Wilson Chair in Canadian History at McMaster University and the author of the award-winning Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920 and the co-author of Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in the Age of Anxiety.

Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present.

Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

Bryan D. Palmer was the Trent University Canada Research Chair (2001-2015), and currently chairs the Department of Canadian Studies.

Gaétan Héroux is a long time anti-poverty activist with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the National Book Awards: Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize
Winner of the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award
Winner of the 2019 NOS Literature Prize

An exciting contemporary Russian writer explores terra incognita: the still-living margins of history.

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.

In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Maria Stepanova, born in Moscow in 1972, is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, essayist, and journalist, Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poems have been translated into numerous languages including English, Italian, German, French, and Hebrew. She has received several Russian and international literary awards, including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. Her novel, In Memory of Memory, is a documentary novel that has been published in over 20 territories. It won the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award, an annual Russian literary prize presented for the best book of Russian prose, and the 2019 NOS Literature Prize. Stepanova is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal, Colta, which covers the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia, reaching audiences of nearly a million visitors a month.

Poet, writer, and translator Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex, England. She has published five collections of poems with Carcanet Press, most recently Deformations, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020, and an Observer Book of the Year 2020. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and is Poet-in-Residence at St John's College, Cambridge (2018-2021).

The Absence of Zero is a triumphantly-executed celebration of the long poem tradition. Consisting of 256 16-line quartets, and 34 free-form interruptions, this slow-moving haunting work is a beautiful example of thinking in language, a meditation that explores time and memory in both content and form. The 20th century is already more than 20 years past: The Absence of Zero is Kolewe's elegy to that era, and the disparate fragments of its ideas that continue to affect and disrupt our present.

R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto, and writes full time. His work has appeared online at ditch, e-ratio, The Puritan, and (parenthetical), as well as in the Literary Review of Canada and PRISM International. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Afterletters (Book*hug Press, 2014) and Inspecting Nostalgia (2017).

Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children’s generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani’s university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A “manifesto” to be remembered.

Once a teacher, theatre director and adjudicator, Brian Van Norman left those worlds behind to travel the planet with his wife, Susan, and take up writing as a full time pursuit. With four novels currently on the market: The Betrayal Path, Immortal Water, Against the Machine: Luddites and Against the Machine: Manifesto. Against the Machine: Evolution is the third book in this trilogy. He has journeyed to every continent and sailed nearly every sea on the planet. His base is Waterloo, Ontario, Canada though he is seldom found there but for this year of the Covid pandemic.

Once a teacher, theatre director and adjudicator, Brian Van Norman left those worlds behind to travel the planet with his wife, Susan, and take up writing as a full time pursuit. With four novels currently on the market: The Betrayal Path, Immortal Water, Against the Machine: Luddites and Against the Machine: Manifesto. Against the Machine: Evolution is the third book in this trilogy. He has journeyed to every continent and sailed nearly every sea on the planet. His base is Waterloo, Ontario, Canada though he is seldom found there but for this year of the Covid pandemic.

Long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal for Humour

When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He’s been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Eurasian history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.

K.R. Wilson was born in Calgary in 1958. He has a bachelor’s degree in music (BMus) from the University of Calgary, with a major in theory and composition. He also has a law degree (LLB). He lives in the Toronto area with his wife and daughter. He has been, among other things, a music teacher, a delivery truck driver, and an office supplies salesman. He sings in a fine 100-voice concert choir. He likes British television, unreliable narrators, and avant garde music.

A father comes out to his daughter as a woman. Or at least, he was once a woman. It's complicated. Funny. Painful. Eventually joyful. Meanwhile the daughter, who was adopted, has her own identity issues. At the Aboriginal addictions treatment centre where she works, everyone assumes she is Indigenous. But is she? How can she find out? Cardinal Divide explores the hunger for certainty and the mutability of identity, whether of gender, race or sexuality. Authenticity isn't simple. Acting as somebody else is simultaneously a way to deceive and to explore the world. Characters who pass as male, as white, as straight, straddle the cardinal divides. And then, sometimes, passing is becoming.

Nina Newington’s first novel, Where Bones Dance, won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Georges Bugnet Award in 2008. A former Kennedy scholar with an MA from Cambridge, she makes her living designing gardens and building things. English by birth, she and her American wife immigrated to Canada in 2006. They raise sheep on unceded Mi’kmaw territory near the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.