Illustrated throughout with photos and snatches of dialogue from Rick’s encounters and exploits across Canada. “[Mercer’s] trademark one-camera rants against the Canadian parliamentary machine are more concise, and more believable, than any campaign ads.” —The Globe and Mail “The comedian of choice for viewers who read.” —Toronto Life “Canada’s hottest TV comic.” —Maclean’s "Week after week, Mercer continues to delight with his alternately giddy and cutting political humour.” —The Canadian Press “Canada’s leading political satirist.” —The New York Times  “A good rant is cathartic. Ranting is what keeps me sane.They always come from a different place. Take the prime minister, for example. Sometimes when I rant about him, I am angry; other times, I am just severely annoyed—it’s an important distinction.”—Rick Mercer, from his introduction Within these pages you’ll find every rant that Rick has so brilliantly and blisteringly delivered since the publication of his previous bestseller, Rick Mercer Report: The Book. Together these rants form a chronicle of human folly, mostly featuring politicians, of course, but with honorable mentions going to people who don’t know how to use escalators and Canadian drivers who don’t think they need snow tires.   Is Mercer getting better or are the fools among us getting worse? Whatever the inspiration—Rick Mercer’s ranting has never been stronger or more on target.   There is a loud, cathartic laugh to be found on almost every page here—with the exception of Rick’s impassioned rant on bullying in schools, words that touched thousands of Canadians, went viral and helped widen the debate on a major problem. Also reprinted here is the rant encouraging students to vote, which resulted directly in a campus ballot and outrage in Ottawa.  (People still are still standing on the left on escalators, and the prime minister is still very much the man he was, but you can’t win them all.) In addition, Rick has authored three new essays specially for this book: the hilarious behind-the-scenes story of his meeting with Rick Hansen, a hero who absolutely was not a disappointment in real life; a heartfelt reflection on public reaction to his bullying rant; and an account of his response—mystified, followed by delighted—to the news that he’d inspired a “vote mob.” Illustrated throughout with photographs and dialogue from Rick’s travels across Canada, A Nation Worth Ranting About will make you proud, will make you think, will make you almost as angry as Rick, and over and over again will make you laugh out loud.

    Following the death of his domineering father, a middle-aged man tries to uncover a truth about their sometimes difficult relationship. When a grade-six teacher tyrannizes a student without apparent reason, the boy learns an unexpected lesson and his young life is changed irrevocably. An elderly widow falls prey to a con artist, revealing what we are capable of sacrificing to appease what we dread the most. A twelve-year-old boy is shunted off to his grandmother's farm and becomes part of an adult world he scarcely understands. A group of high-school students play on a classmate's self-delusions and set up what promises to be the most loaded boxing match ever staged. Whether writing from the point of view of a child, an adolescent, or a man in his seventies, Guy Vanderhaeghe takes us into the lives of his characters with razor-sharp insights laced with gentle humour.

     These 12 all new and original stories from Rusty Wilson, the World’s Greatest Bigfoot Storyteller, will keep you intrigued, hanging onto the edge of your seat, or wishing you could travel up north and see what all the excitement’s about for yourself. Come read about a young man who finally gets his wish to visit one of the world’s wildest places, where he quickly realizes that maybe his parents were right after all—then read about the strange case where a Sasquatch discovers a rare fossilized dinosaur skeleton—and then, if you dare, read about a woman who stops for a break on a remote Canadian backroad and ends up taking something home with her that she really doesn’t want—and there’s the Sasquatch that ends up saving peoples’ lives by stealing all their food in the dead of winter—and a Sasquatch that brings a couple together through its death—one who decides it wants to be in a painting—another who likes the taste of loons—and a man who discovers a secret Bigfoot food source—all these and more great campfire tales are guaranteed to make you happy you’re safe and sound in your house instead of listening to a Sasquatch screaming in the darkness from inside your thin nylon tent, deep in the Canadian wilds. Or, if you’re truly the adventurous type, maybe you’ll want to buy a thin nylon tent and head to British Columbia or Alberta. Fly-fishing guide Rusty Wilson spent years collecting these stories from his clients around the campfire, stories guaranteed to scare the pants off you—or make you want to meet the Big Guy! “I suspect that Canada has more wild things than we could imagine in our wildest dreams. If you take a look at a map, you’ll see just how immense and rugged many parts of this country are, especially those regions in the north and around the Canadian Rockies and Coastal Mountains. I’m sure there are things out there we could only imagine, one of them being Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, as our northern friends call him.” —Rusty Wilson

    A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.

    No more than eeny, meeny, miney, mo and who we were supposed to catch by the toe.Wish Mooney’s earliest memory in life is finding a corpse in the Waterford River. Jarring stuff for a four-year-old, yet far from the most shocking or bizarre he would witness growing up in west end St. John’s next door to the Waterford Hospital. Or, as it was unabashedly labelled before the advent of political correctness: the Mental.An unfortunate moniker, but one legitimately derived from the original name of the place—the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases—when it opened in 1854. Not until 1972 would it be renamed after the river that runs by it. But in Mooney’s world, which revolved mostly in and around the asylum’s drab, depressing confines in the mid-1970s, it was colloquially the Mental, just as its largely despondent inhabitants were the mental patients.Thus was the oft-surreal environment that unavoidably enveloped Wish and the rest of the Irish Catholic Mooney clan, including the quietly acknowledged other realities of the place—the sad, the tragic, the maniacal. Little did Wish ever consider that any or all of that would come full circle later in life when, as the court reporter for the Daily News, he would be thrust into the middle of his own life story, replete with shocking conclusion.

    The story opens in Halifax in 2009, travels back to the French Shore of Newfoundland during the mid-thirties and the heyday of the Maritime shipping industry, makes its way to wartorn Halifax during the battle of the Atlantic in World War II, then leaps ahead to the bedside of the elder Livvy.Caught between a troubled past, and her present and worsening living conditions, Livvy is forced to pick apart the lies and secrets told by her greedy, prideful father, Durwin Higgs, who judges her a failure, and her formidable Grandmother Creed, who has mysteriously aligned herself with Livvy's father, despite their mutual hatred.Tending to Livvy during her illness is her young next-door neighbour, Gen, a single mother and social-work student. Overnight, a violent scene embroils the two in each other's lives in a manner that will entwine them forever. In The Deception of Livvy Higgs, the inimitable Morrissey has written a powerful tale, the Stone Angel of the East Coast.

    Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they end up in a slapstick sex scene that climaxes with a broken table. The book embraces characters who are flawed, emotional, and who care too much about things that are ridiculous.

    They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in help with their sons―a woman from the Philippines named Ligaya (which means happiness), whom the boys call LiLi. Vero justifies LiLi's role in their home by insisting that she is part of their family, and she goes to great lengths in order to ease her conscience. But differences persist; Vero grapples with her overextended role as a mother and struggles to keep her marriage passionate, while LiLi silently bears the burden of a secret she left behind at home.Between offers readers an intriguing, searing portrait of two women from two different cultures. At the same time, it satirizes contemporary love, marriage, and parenthood by exposing the sense of entitlement and superiority at the heart of upper-middle-class North American existence through a ubiquitous presence in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou comically and tragically tackles the issue of international nannies by providing a window on motherhood where it is tangled up with class, career, labour, and desire

    They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times."The Hunt" was short-listed for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

    She’s been dining out too long, literally and figuratively, on a culture of celebrity worship and empty punditry. She seeks refuge from her better judgment in endless parties, ritual substance abuse, and half-hearted attempts to get herself fired, but in a libertarian newsroom where outrageous spin is the easiest way to sell papers, her bad-girl behaviour just wins her more accolades.Along this path of self-destruction, Max’s past, comic and poignant, keeps intruding: memories of her mother’s brutal death and her hippie father’s crippling breakdown; the reappearance of an aging vegan idealist who briefly played her stepmom on the West Coast commune where she came of age; tender realizations about the bad artist she was supposed to marry and a long-lost boyfriend who seems exotically sane. When a host of prior indiscretions finally catches up with her, Maxime realizes that any chance at happiness depends on uncovering, at last, her one true story.Set during the madness of the Toronto International Film Festival and weaving back and forth between Max’s commune past and her newsroom present, How Happy to Be portrays with razor-sharp insight and bittersweet wit a modern woman’s descent into — and eventual escape from — the deafening pop culture noise of the early twenty-first century. Intelligent, savvy, this novel marks the arrival of a remarkable new fiction talent.

    You watch three seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in two days. You get a pet turtle. You absent-mindedly paint what ends up looking like your high school’s football coach, but naked. You go backpacking in Australia for a few months. You try speaking with a New York accent in public, just to see if people like that version of you better. The comment still haunts you. An “indoor kind of girl.” You feel like you’re that person, but you’re not that person. In Frankie Barnet’s exquisite and funny debut collection of stories, characters stumble through their daily existence, frequently feeling confused, rejected, bored, disillusioned or misunderstood. Metatron is proud to present these five stunningly imaginative tales, which signal the arrival of a gifted writer. Frankie Barnet is a Montreal- based writer. Her work has appeared in publications such as Joyland, Lemonhound and Papirmasse, and she is the author of the 2012 chapbook Something Disgusting Happening. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Concordia University.“An Indoor Kind Of Girl veers from fading friendships to scheming call centres with an occasional sense of absurdity and also a kind of hyper-real real. Barnet’s narrators have a sharp eye for all that goes around them and they judge their own actions and others’ with a combination of ruthless honesty and vulnerability.”– MELISSA BULL, AUTHOR OF RUE “As I read, everything hit me at once; the quick prose and real characters, the humour of it, and this sort of sadness, loneliness.”– SOLILOQUIES ANTHOLOGY “A very powerful writer”– THE LINK

    He shares a book-laden Victorian house with his loving wife, Zipper. He owns two suits, one of which he was married in. He is a courageous eater, save brussels sprouts. His knowledge of wine is vague and best defined as Napa, good; Australian, better; French, better still. Kir royale is his drink of occasion. For an Englishman he makes a poor cup of tea. He believes women are quantifiably wiser than men, and would never give Zipper the slightest reason to mistrust him or question his love. Zipper simply describes Ambrose as the only man she has ever loved. Without adjustment.Then, just as he is turning fifty, Ambrose is told by his doctor that he has one month to live. Reeling from the news, he and Zipper embark on a whirlwind expedition to the places he has most loved or has always longed to visit, from A to Z, Amsterdam to Zanzibar. As they travel to Italian piazzas, Turkish baths, and other romantic destinations, all beautifully evoked by the author, Zipper struggles to deal with the grand unfairness of their circumstances as she buoys Ambrose with her gentle affection and humor. Meanwhile, Ambrose reflects on his life, one well lived, and comes to understand that death, like life, will be made bearable by the strength and grace of their devotion. Richardson’s lovely prose comes alive with an honesty and intensity that will leave you breathless and inspired by the simple beauty and power of love. The End of the Alphabet is a timeless, resonant exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life.

    Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where - for better or for worse - we see ourselves for what we truly are.

    Since, he's found increasing opportunities to take his show on the road. In An Embarrassment of Critch's, the star of CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes revisits some of his career's--and the country's--biggest moments, revealing all the things you might not know happened along the way: A wishful rumour spread by Mark's father results in his big break; two bottles of Scotch nearly get him kicked out of a secret Canadian airbase in the United Arab Emirates; and for anyone wondering how to get an interview with the Prime Minister and Bono (yes, that Bono) on the same evening, Critch might recommend a journey to the 2003 Liberal Convention.Critch's top-secret access to all of the funniest behind-the-scenes moments involve many of the charismatic and notorious politicians we love to see blush, including fearless leaders Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Paul Martin, and Jean Chr�tien, celebrities such as Pamela Anderson and Robin Williams, and other colourful figures he's met over years of pulling off daring skits at home and abroad. Remember when MP Carolyn Parrish took her boot to George W. Bush's head in an interview? Or when Critch asked Justin Trudeau where the best place to smoke pot on Parliament Hill was before pulling out a joint for them to share? There's more to each of those stories than you know. Though Critch has spent years crisscrossing the country--and the globe--with the explicit aim of causing trouble everywhere he goes, like the best journeys, this one takes him right back home.

    Aidan and Martha Connor now spend alternate months of the year working at an energy site up north to support their children, Cora and Finn. But soon the family fears they’ll have to leave Big Running for good. And as the months go on, plagued by romantic temptations new and old, the emotional distance between the once blissful Aidan and Martha only widens.Between his accordion lessons and reading up on Big Running’s local flora and fauna, eleven-year-old Finn Connor develops an obsession with solving the mystery of the missing fish. Aided by his reclusive music instructor Mrs. Callaghan, Finn thinks he may have discovered a way to find the fish, and in turn, save the only home he’s ever known. While Finn schemes, his sister Cora spends her days decorating the abandoned houses in Big Running with global flair—the baker’s home becomes Italy; the mailman’s, Britain. But it’s clear she’s desperate for a bigger life beyond the shores of her small town. As the streets of Big Running continue to empty Cora takes matters—and her family’s shared destinies—into her own hands.In Our Homesick Songs, Emma Hooper paints a gorgeous portrait of the Connor family, brilliantly weaving together four different stories and two generations of Connors, full of wonder and hope. Told in Hooper’s signature ethereal style, each page of this incandescent novel glows with mythical, musical wonder.