Bookthug: 99 books

Paul, who is not always the same Paul, but could very well be a similar Paul, another Paul in a long line of Pauls. Paul runs through forests, drinks in student housing, flirts with girls, at times is a girl, loves men, makes friends, jumps from buildings, hurts people, gets hurt, climbs up towards...

Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, RATS NEST builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century. This first full-length book by Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated...

Guinea-Bissau, 2012. Mixing fiction and fact, Sylvain Prudhomme revisits the famous '70s music group Super Mama Djombo, as seen through the eyes of Couto, the laconic guitarist. After learning of the death of the singer, Dulce—once the love of his life&mdashCouto wanders through the capital...

Mallory Tater's This Will Be Good tells the story of a young woman’s burgeoning femininity as it brushes up against an emerging eating disorder. As the difficulties of her disease reveal themselves, they ultimately disrupt family relationships and friendships. These poems deftly bear witness...

Lovers wrote letters. Letters crossed absence, longing, joy, passion, loss and heartbreak. Sometimes letters were answered. Sometimes not. And sometimes not for years, but then – In 1948, in the exhausted aftermath of WWII, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann met in Vienna. They began...

Would it be possible to compose a book that appears to be "about" its author, but is indirectly about something else, like identity or relationships or language? Maybe a book not written by a hero... but by many? This was the challenge taken up by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff in his fourth...

On June 6, 2012, Vickie Gendreau was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In between treatments, between hospital stays and her "room of her own," she wrote Testament, an autofictional novel in which she imagines her death and at the same time, bequeaths to her friends and family both the fragmented...

Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes, the new collection of poetry from Giller Prize–longlisted writer Jennifer LoveGrove, attempts to make sense of a difficult and unsettling world, where one need not look much further than their own communities to witness acts of trauma and absurdity. Here,...

Metaphysical Licks, a hybrid prose-poem/novella riffing on the lives and works of Austrian poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete, is the restless new work by writer and translator Gregoire Pam Dick [a.k.a. Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al., author of Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009)]. With a mix of...

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,...

How to Draw a Rhinoceros, the first book of poems by Canadian writer, scholar, and lawyer Kate Sutherland, mines centuries of rhinoceros representations in art and literature to document the history of European and North American encounters with the animal&madsh;from the elephant–rhinoceros...

In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family's past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons,...

It was a long silence that brought me to the erasure poem. Not mine, but my brother's, during his many months in a coma. I came across a notebook of his—a pocketsized, handwritten field guide of prairie grasses. I read it for companionship, signs of consciousness, attention. I read it for the rhythms...

fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman’s lament, or even a broken elegy, the...