From celebrated Quebecois author Bertrand Laverdure comes Universal Bureau of Copyrights , a bold, strange and addictive story that envisions a world where free will doesn't exist, and an enigmatic global corporation buys and sells the copyrights for all things on Earth, including real and fictional characters. Through this novel, which is part poetic narrative, part sci-fi-dystopian fantasy, readers become acquainted with the main character, a man who deconstructs himself as he navigates the mystifying passages of the story. Having no control over his environment, time continuum, or body, he is a puppet on strings, an icon in a video game and, as he eventually discovers within the bowels of the Universal Bureau of Copyrights, the object of countless copyrights. With touches of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Universal Bureau of Copyrights packs a multitude of modern cultural references into an audacious exploration of identity and one's place in the world.

Bertrand Laverdure is an award-winning poet, novelist, literary performer, and blogger. His poetry publications include Rires (2004) and Sept et demi (2007). He has written four well-received novels, Gomme de xanthane (2006), Lectodôme (2008), J'invente la piscine (2010), Bureau universel des copyrights (2011). Lettres crues, a book of literary correspondence with Quebecois author Pierre Samson, was published in the fall of 2012. Most recently, he published a YA poetry collection, Cascadeuse (2013). Awards include the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (1999), and the Rina-Lasnier Award for Poetry for Les forêts (2003). Les forêts was also nominated for the Emile-Nelligan Award for Poetry (2000), while Audioguide was nominated for the Grand Prix du Festival International de Poésie de Trois-Rivières (2003), and Lectodôme for the Grand Prix littéraire Archambault (2009). Find Laverdure on his blog, http://technicien-coffeur.blogspot.ca/, follow him on Twitter @lectodome, or connect with him on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bertrand.laverdure.


Oana Avasilichioaei's previous translations include Wigrum by Quebecois writer Daniel Canty (2013), The Islands by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir (2011) and Occupational Sickness by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu (2006). In 2013, she edited a feature on Quebec French writing in translation for Aufgabe (New York). she has also played in the bounds of translation and creation in a poetic collaboration with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra, (2009). Her most recent poetry collection is We, Beasts (2012; winner of the QWF's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry), and her audio work can be found on Pennsound. She lives in Montreal. Learn more about Avasilichioaei at www.oanalab.com.

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).

Eric Alford, one of the brave but shell-shocked soldiers of WWI, sets out during Canada's Great Depression to find his British sweetheart. He ends up in Australia, where he finally wins ordination as a clergyman. After an emotionally fraught round the world trip, he arrives home in Quebec only to find his traumas growing worse. He continues to battle it as bravely as he did the enemy, causing heart-rending anguish to himself, his loving bride and his only son. Set in the turbulent twenties and thirties, this story of an earlier hero mirrors with horrifying force the PTSD that afflicts our returning troops today, and offers uplifting lessons about the unquenchable human spirit.

Paul Almond, OC, was one of Canada's preeminent film and television directors, and has directed and produced over 130 television dramas for the CBC, BBC, ABC and Granada Television (SevenUp). He has now turned his talents to writing a series of novels based on his family's own pioneering adventures in Canada: The Alford Saga, five of which have been published, (The Deserter, The Survivor, The Pioneer, The Pilgrim, and the Chaplain) and three more to come over the next two years (The Gunner, The Hero, and The Inheritor). Paul Almond lives on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec and Malibu, California. www.paulalmond.com

A Migrant Heart is about departures and arrivals, uprooting and attachment, resettling and returning. Denis Sampson left Ireland as a student, leaving behind the farming countryside of his childhood, the city of Dublin where he was educated, and the history and culture of his native country. He arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and discovered he was not the only one in search of a new life; and then that search became his life. He also discovered many different ways to return to Ireland, until slowly, what was painfully forced apart was rejoined in a life lived in two places and cultures.

Denis Sampson is the author of Outstaring Nature’s Eye, The Fiction of John McGahern (Lilliput Press, 1993), Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist (Doubleday, 1998) and Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist (Oxford University Press, 2012). He lives in Montreal and Kilkenny.

In 1978, when workers at a nearby phosphate refinery learned that the ore they processed was contaminated with radioactive dust, Karen Messing, then a new professor of molecular genetics, was called in to help. Unsure of what to do with her discovery that exposure to the radiation was harming the workers and their families, Messing contacted senior colleagues but they wouldn’t help. Neither the refinery company nor the scientific community was interested in the scary results of her chromosome studies.

Over the next decades Messing encountered many more cases of workers around the world—factory workers, cleaners, checkout clerks, bank tellers, food servers, nurses, teachers—suffering and in pain without any help from the very scientists and occupational health experts whose work was supposed to make their lives easier. Arguing that rules for scientific practice can make it hard to see what really makes workers sick, in Pain and Prejudice Messing tells the story of how she went from looking at test tubes to listening to workers.

Karen Messing is an award-winning and internationally recognized expert on occupational health. She is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles and the book One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women. She is also the editor of Integrating Gender in Ergonomic Analysis, which has been translated into six languages.

From award-winning author Alisha Piercy comes Bunny and Shark, a middle-aged coming-of-age story-cum-shark-adventure that reveals and celebrates women's power in the trenches. Plunging into the first thirteen days after the 'bastard' pushes his ex-Playboy wife 'Bunny' over a cliff in the Caribbean, Bunny and Shark is a fable about island survival, and the perils and potentials of being exiled from one's identity.

Literally lost at sea, Bunny is fueled by the miracle of having been saved from sharks by a band of dolphins. And her continued survival depends on her ability to become a spiritual extension of the landscape: she is the mood of the ocean at night as she swims blindly in it, and the protective coolness of the jungle by day as she recovers from a loss of limb; the close-walled refuge of the sailboats anchored in the harbour, and the sparkling deck of an opulent superyacht when, transformed, she makes a triumphant return to her former world.

Introducing one of the great heroines of contemporary fiction, Bunny and Shark takes readers on a voyage intense with abandon and illumination, in a story that invokes more than a little bit of magic in the telling.

Alisha Piercy is a Montreal-based writer, artist, and painting conservator. Studies in literature,art conservation and print media influence her creative practice, which ranges from drawing installations to sculptural bookworks to the writing of novellas. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries in eastern Canada, with international projects in Iceland and Mexico. Her chapbook "You have hair like flags~" won the bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2010.

Inspired by real-life events, Hate Mail examines the transformative power of speaking out against prejudice.

Jordie’s cousin Todd has moved back to Montreal and is attending Jordie’s high school. Todd has autism and requires an aide. Todd has not been welcomed in the school. He’s known as a freak, and even other parents seem to resent Todd’s special needs. Jordie does everything he can to distance himself from his cousin, fearful of what his friends might think. When he learns that Todd’s whole family is buckling under the pressure of a hateful letter, Jordie starts to question his own behavior. But Todd’s resources are unique, and he soon finds a way to prove his worth to his peers and to the community at large.

Monique Polak is the author of more than thirty books for young people. She is the three-time winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Prize for Children's and YA Literature for her novels Hate Mail, What World is Left and Room for One More. In addition to teaching at Marianopolis College in Montreal, Monique is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Maclean's Magazine, the Montreal Gazette and other Postmedia newspapers. She is also a columnist on ICI Radio-Canada's Plus on est de fous, plus on lit! In 2016, Monique was the CBC/Quebec Writers' Federation inaugural writer-in-residence. Monique lives in Montreal.

At the start of the twentieth century, the modern metropolis was a riot of sensation. City dwellers lived in an environment filled with smoky factories, crowded homes, and lively thoroughfares. Sights, sounds, and smells flooded their senses, while changing conceptions of health and decorum forced many to rethink their most banal gestures, from the way they negotiated speeding traffic to the use they made of public washrooms.

The Feel of the City exposes the sensory experiences of city-dwellers in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the century and the ways in which these shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space. Using the experiences of municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, workers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens, Nicolas Kenny explores the implications of the senses for our understanding of modernity.

Nicolas Kenny is an associate professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University.

A wide-ranging study that examines everything from the blockbuster movie franchise Les Boys to the sovereigntist hip hop group Loco Locass, Hockey, PQ explores how Canada’s national sport has been used to signify a specific Québécois identity. Amy J. Ransom analyzes how Québécois writers, filmmakers, and musicians have appropriated symbols like the Montreal Forum, Maurice Richard, or the 1972 Summit Series to construct or critique images of the Québécois male.

Close analyses of hockey-themed narratives consider the soap opera Lance et compte (‘He shoots, he scores’), the music of former pro player Bob Bisonnette, folk band Mes Aïeux, rock group Les Dales Hawerchuk, and the fiction of François Barcelo. Through these examinations of the role hockey plays in contemporary francophone popular culture, Ransom shows how Quebec’s popular culture uses hockey to distinguish French-Canadians from the French and to rally them against their English-speaking counterparts. In the end, however, this study illuminates how the sport of hockey unites the two solitudes.

Amy J. Ransom is an associate professor of French at Central Michigan University.

Eric Alford's safe and romantic life on the peaceful Gaspe Coast is shattered by his decision to follow his elder brother John (the Pilgrim and The Chaplain) into the 1914-18 cataclysm of death and destruction known as the "Great War for Civilisation". By his thundering Howitzer, Gunner Alford assaults the Hun through every major Canadian battle of WWI: Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Hill 70, The Somme, and "The Hundred Days" that ended the conflict. A developing romance with a lovely Londoner is cut short by a German shell. Evacuated to a Rouen field hospital, he is surrounded by hellish wounds: blindness, amputations, and gas-inflicted horrors. Finally, back in Blighty among other shell-shock victims, he recovers and returns to his Gaspe home, bereft of his London love and changed forever.

Paul Almond, OC, was one of Canada's preeminent film and television directors, and has directed and produced over 130 television dramas for the CBC, BBC, ABC and Granada Television (SevenUp). He has now turned his talents to writing a series of novels based on his family's own pioneering adventures in Canada: The Alford Saga, five of which have been published, (The Deserter, The Survivor, The Pioneer, The Pilgrim, and the Chaplain) and three more to come over the next two years (The Gunner, The Hero, and The Inheritor). Paul Almond lives on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec and Malibu, California. www.paulalmond.com

An entertaining and digestible volume that demystifies science

Eat this and live to 100. Don’t, and die. Today, hyperboles dominate the media, which makes parsing science from fiction an arduous task when deciding what to eat, what chemicals to avoid, and what’s best for the environment. In Is That a Fact?, bestselling author Dr. Joe Schwarcz carefully navigates through the storm of misinformation to help us separate fact from folly and shrewdness from foolishness.

Are GMOs really harmful? Or could they help developing countries? Which “miracle weight-loss foods” gained popularity through exuberant data dredging? Is BPA dangerous or just a victim of unforgiving media hype? Is organic better? Dr. Joe questions the reliability and motives of “experts” in this “easy-to-understand yet critical look at what’s fact and what’s plain nonsense.