Gripping and emotional." —David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day"Both tender and truthful in its evoking of the canyon that lies between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age, this is a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda." —Diana Evans, The Guardian"De Vries's final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories." —Financial TimesA wrenching and spare novel about an electric friendship that slowly reveals itself as a deep and lifelong love.Jan de Vries is a virtuoso pianist who would be in the prime of his career but for the crippling auditory hallucinations that have plundered his performances and mind. As the disorder reaches its devastating peak the walls Jan has built around himself start to crumble, and he's unable to repress the trove of memories and unspoken words that linger between him and his childhood best friend, Dirk Noosen, with whom he lost touch long ago. He is faced with only one recourse: to head home and confront Dirk.With a masterful balance of emotional resonance and restraint, Eric Beck Rubin tells the story of Jan's obsessive friendship with the charismatic, irreverent Dirk as the reader breathlessly awaits their reunion. This is a story about music, repression and regret; about adolescence, sex and friendship; and, ultimately, about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.

    The Book of Craw -- comprised of poems and proverbs from Craw's own notebook -- is the companion volume to The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel.

    Fly is a reader, too, and when he’s not in his taxi he is at home in the equally dizzying labyrinth of books that fills his tiny apartment. His best friend is Otto, a political activist who’s in and out of jails and asylums, mourning his dead wife and lost foster son. On one otherwise tawdry night Fly meets Mary, a book-loving passenger with a domineering husband. So begins a romance that is, for Fly, a brief glimmer of light amid the shadows and grit of the Carnival city.Along with Otto and Mary, Fly introduces us to madmen and revolutionaries, magicians and prostitutes as he picks them up and drops them off, traveling through a nightmarish town that is—we can’t help but notice—a parable for our own debauched, unjust world.Wildly imaginative and darkly ironic, Carnival is a magnificent achievement.

    Vowing to lie low, he moves in with Pete Culpepper, a Texas cowboy who has always been a grounding influence on Ray, but whose debts are growing faster than his corn. Between roofing houses and watching Pete's nine-year-old gelding at the races, Ray soon crosses paths with just about everyone in town, including Pete's new jockey, Chrissie, a tough young woman whose ease with horses is equaled only by her mistrust of people, and Ray's former lover Etta, who views him with more skepticism than ever. Then there are the hired hands of the Stanton Stables: Dean, a wise guy who embodies the phrase "all hat and no cattle," and his sidekick, Paulie, a simple-hearted man who has a way with animals. And last but not least, there's Sonny Stanton, the vicious, violent, and spoiled heir of his father's electronics fortune-and the man Ray spent two years in jail for nearly killing. When the opportunity arises to con Sonny out of some ill-gained wealth-and protect themselves and their homes in the process-everyone's willing to band together and take a gamble.Surprisingly poignant yet laugh-out-loud funny, All Hat tells a classic story of little guys fighting big guys and reaffirming the meaning of honesty and friendship-and second chances-in the process.

    Twelve episodes in the everyday life of the community of Mariposa

    But in a Scarborough subdivision populated by newcomers from all over the world, a series of sudden catastrophic events reveals that not everyone’s dreams come true. Moving from house to house, Carrianne Leung explores the inner lives behind the tidy front gardens and picture-perfect windows, always returning to June, an irrepressible adolescent Chinese-Canadian coming of age in this shifting world. Through June and her neighbours, Leung depicts the fine line where childhood meets the realities of adult life, and examines, with insight and sharp prose, how difficult it is to be true to ourselves at any age.

    She plunges deep into her inner world, shadowing the progression of the disease. Reality takes on sharp edges: the swell of cancer and its retreat with chemo. Her inner corporeal reality versus her outer manifestation of health, vitality, and femininity. Holding fast to the great love of her life, while preparing to leave him behind. Contemplating who she was before cancer, and who she is now.Starkly honest and wholly profound, Not One of These Poems Is About You distills life to its essence. Teva Harrison continues to gift the world with her clear-eyed insight and her open heart.

    Morbidly amused by the decadent decay of his surroundings, he watches the patrons fall into their nightly oblivion, making notes for his novel. In the hope of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with the cast of variously pathological regulars. But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to serve himself more often than his customers, and the moments he lives outside the bar become more and more painful: he loses his wife, his way, himself. Trapped by his habits and his loneliness, he realizes he will not survive if he doesn't break free. And so he hatches a terrible, but necessary plan of escape and his only chance for redemption. Step into Ablutions and step behind the bar, below rock bottom, and beyond the everyday take on storytelling for a brilliant, new twist on the classic tale of addiction and its consequences.

    Lau's deft clinical inspection of the dynamics of power, sex, and money takes caustic snapshots of lives lived in stasis or, worse, caught in a downward spiral. In the title story, Monica, the queen bee of the massage parlour, is threatened by the constant influx of supple young women: "New girls, they come; new girls all the time. How am I supposed to make a living? Tell me!" In "Marriage," a nameless young woman falls heavily for an older doctor. Under his deluge of compensatory gifts and outright cash, she gasps, "I have no similar method of striking such bargains with my conscience." Plain Jane, in "The Apartments," dares to dream that "Perhaps tonight will be the night he sinks to his knees" and tells her that he loves her, "that he can't be a client anymore." Not a chance. On the sobering cab ride home, "between the waves of nausea it occurs to her that certain things, things that once seemed so possible, are becoming less and less likely with each passing night." Lau's writing is clear and relentlessly nuanced, neither jaded nor sanctimonious. A detour toward personal destruction spawned her best-selling 1989 memoir, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Three years later, her first book of poetry, Oedipal Dreams, made Lau the youngest-ever Governor General's Award nominee, and she has continued to fashion poignant books of poetry, short story collections, and novels from the shards of her shattered past. --Sigcino Moyo

    Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they've never met.Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time...but it's really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question.

    The rich and powerful are engaged in a web of depravity, a new and horrifying disease called sturnusemia has swept the city, and severly traumatized children are turning up at the local psychiatric institutes. Kurtz seems to be at the centre of it all.Lilah, witness to events tearing the very fabric of her society, seeks solace as always in the great works of literature and prays for Marlow to find an capture Kurtz - before it's too late.

    Entitled Songs in Time of War, Shared Ground, The Traveller and Seven Elements, the libretti take us all over the world - from Chinese and Indian poetry, to the beauty and quietness of the Wiltshire rectory where English poet George Herbert lived and died.Spanning centuries of creativity and humanity, the poems that form these libretti pulse with life, energy and inspired brilliance.They are accompanied by four pieces of calligraphy by the author.

    Simultaneously, Vintage Canada is delighted to publish Downie's first book of poetry, under the same title. It will also contain the lyrics to the sixteen songs on the record.Coke Machine Glow is a rich, haunting collection that reveals both the public and private selves of one of Canada's most enigmatic musicians. In poetry that is urban, gritty and political, as well as romantic, nostalgic and whimsical, Downie allows us a glimpse inside his world. With his acute and observing eye, he gives us snapshots of his life, both on the road and at home; he writes of loneliness and isolation; of longing and desire; of the present and the past; of dreams and nightmares; love lost and love of family. Ultimately, this book is about the distances that bridge and separate us.Layered and deceptively simple, imbued with Downie's wit, insight, anger, compassion and rock 'n'roll edge, Coke Machine Glow is a remarkable debut. With its publication, Gordon Downie becomes a part of the wonderful literary tradition of Canadian songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who are also poets.

    In her third collection of poetry, Viper Rum, Mary Karr delves into autobiographical subject matter; various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which, as the title suggests, deal with drink:I cast back to those last yearsI drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink, bathrobed, my head hatching snakes, while my baby slept in his upstairs cageand my marriage choked to deathPrecise and surprising, Karr's poems take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own (Poetry).Also included is Karr's controversial and prize-winning essay Against Decoration, in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days-the new formalism that elevates form to an end itself.

    Two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates are variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars.