Quattro Books: 75 books

It’s called a psychomanteum. A room entirely lined with mirrors. It was once used to channel the spirits of the dead, though in our day and age, people have forgotten it. Gaze is told through the journal of someone who has rediscovered this unique device. By methodically documenting his fascination...

Tragi-comedic genius emerges in this first book by Chris D’Iorio, kaleidoscopically vivid poetry that is commoditized with the placid title of Without Blue, innocently confessing a condition of lack-lustre lack. A few disarmingly personal lyrics usher us into a book that seems rather sincere and...

An archaeologist of the human heart, Paul Zemokhol uncovers the memories of his Egyptian ancestors and their lost world by the Nile, and he starkly juxtaposes them with his own plain experiences of Canadian urban life in Toronto and Montreal. Writing in a style that is both lyrical and elegiac, Zemokhol...

Through the rapidly altered perspectives of romantic relationship and the demands of economic recession, Little Empires pursues what it means to own your changing landscape. In a deft and pithy, elegantly nuanced and urbane style, Robert Colman charts awareness within our fragmenting society, where...

Real Gone turns the myth of the Sixties on its head. The protagonist may be a peripatetic young man on an intense search but he knows that the gaff is in. There are sex and drugs, of course, and politics, even a little rock and roll. There is also Rhythm and Blues, and jail and murder; some famous...

The title Night Vision refers firstly to the night vision goggles that enable soldiers to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, and secondly to a vision of the political and ecological night that threatens humankind, but also to the faint possibility, grounded in personal relationships...

A love-you-love-you-not daisy petal game for the 21st century, And the cat says… is a whimsical, delectable treat; a poetry collection which weaves in some strange haircuts, flying carpets and two sets of twins. Oh, and did we mention the horses?

In The Hundred Lives Russell Thornton illuminates the intricate imaginative orders of love at work within an individual life. From poems set in the eastern Mediterranean, with its abiding reverberations of the ancient Greek world, to a series of sonnet responses to the Gospel story of Lazarus, a lyric-narrative...

Immigrant Songs is a posthumous collection of the works of Saro (Rosario) D’Agostino. It includes poems, fiction works that may be chapters of an unfinished novel, and letters. These fragments from a seminal Italo-Canadian writer whose life was cut too short are part of Canadian literary history.

Itessa is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and as her marriage unravels we follow her in and out of denial that her marriage is over and into a world of drugs and fantasies about other men and other lives she could have lived. As she begins questioning her mental stability as well as her identity,...

This is the third anthology of Italian Canadian writers organized and edited by Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni with support from Centro Scuola e Cultura Italiana, Toronto. The first Italian Canadian Voices in 1984 contained the first English language translation of Mario Duliani`s Petawawa memoirs,...

Rough Paradise is a unique and moving novella about identity and growing up Intersex in a violent, unwelcoming, heteronormative world. Terry Tomey was born with an Intersex condition which wreaks havoc with his puberty. He is on the verge of suicide when he meets Darla, the only person who accepts...

In Niagara of the 1960s, a mysterious proxy bride arrives from Italy to marry a candy shop owner with crime connections, only to fall in love with her proxy husband’s teenaged son. Part fairy tale, part gritty realism, The Proxy Bride explores the underbelly of a southern Ontario community steeped in gambling, smuggling and pornography.

What if your best friend’s ghost was still hanging around town? What if your girlfriend mysteriously lost her voice and didn’t seem to care? What if a strangely independent pigeon started following you wherever you went? These are the questions plaguing Cameron Delco as he struggles to get to...