Coach House Books: 208 books

Fidget is writer Kenneth Goldsmith's transcription of every movement made by his body during 13 hours on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997. It is a hypnotic work, strangely compelling and disorienting at the same time; you'll never think about your body in the same way again. Originally commissioned...

Isolated brings together two inventive, disturbing plays by one of Canada’s most intriguing dramatic voices. In Recovery, people around the world are addicted to a mysterious substance. Large recovery centres are set up, promising refuge, treatment and healing to millions of addicts. But...

Winner of the Best of the Edinburgh Fringe Prize Althea: Do you believe in your own death? Every moment you are alive is endless and the present goes on and on with you inside it. Of course the end is truly coming, but it’s so far off, and in the meantime the spring bulbs need bringing out...

Demons, ogres, werewolves - men have all the fun. Not here. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan's The Monster Trilogy turns the tables and offers up three monstrously evil women in three explosive monologues. In The Susan Smith Tapes, the infamous young mother who drowned her three sons tries...

Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s...

Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we...

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest. Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life,...

Inspired by Flaubert’s Three Tales and Stein’s Three Lives, a grappling with time, form and embodiment. Recite your poem to your aunt. I threw myself to the ground. Where were you in the night? In a school among the pines. What was the meaning of the dream? Organs, hormones, toxins,...

All Tom's friends really are superheroes. There's the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see...

Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the...

In Greenland, the discovery of a new island off the nation's coast mirrors a growing rift between the island’s discoverer and his family. In Iceland, set against the backdrop of the banking crisis, a confrontation between a real estate agent and a tenant takes an unexpected turn. A young woman's...

It’s 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, Venice’s four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting — Albrecht Dürer's The Brotherhood of the Rosary — across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pusterwald, they...

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It’s 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man...

People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know if you’ve spotted an...