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<p>Fiction Pick, <i>Broken Pencil Magazine</i></p> <p><i>Suburban Pornography</i> is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped--minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems--people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyond their grasp, something authentic to knock them out of their malaise. Their frailties and obsessions are front and centre.

<p>Winner, ReLit Award (Novel)</p> <p>CBC Books' "Writers to Watch" Pick</p> <p>Nate’s nervous mother chews gum at warp speed and has a bob that resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. His icy father dabbles part-time in the death trade at a funeral home after working for a decade in the insurance racket. His older sister Holly is always lurking in the shadows or away at school. Nate, a creative, messy, and anxious teen, has chosen Randy Savage as his hero.

<p>ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015</p> <p>Winner, Type Books Award</p> <p>In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, <i>Hysteric</i> is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn.

<p><i>Toy Gun</i> continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel <i>Stupid Crimes</i> (1992) and continued in <i>Krekshuns</i> (1995). Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, <i>Toy Gun</i> is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban centres.

<p><b>Shortlisted for the City of Hamilton book award</b></p> <p>At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.</p> <p>Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising.

<p>Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they’ve both been harbouring, the secret that has shaped and defined Spat’s tumultuous life.

<p>Winner, Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University’s First Book Competition</p> <p><i>Nondescript Rambunctious</i> is a genre-busting thriller with a beating, human heart. More than a simple story of a killer and his victims, the novel takes the reader into the life of a family, the days of a community, and the very real possibility that evil is everywhere—maybe even inside us.

<p>Best of 2010 Pick, <i>Uptown Magazine</i></p> <p>Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store.

<p>Finalist, Giller Prize </p> <p>Winner of 2 Saskatchewan Book Awards (Best First Book; City of Saskatoon Book Award)</p> <p>Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award (Book of the Year)</p> <p>Winner, Canadian Authors’ Association-BookTV Emerging Writer Award</p> <p>Finalist, Amazon/ Books in Canada First Novel Award</p> <p>Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug-dealing and small-time thievery on the outer edges of Saskatoon. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely protagonist.

<p>Finalist, ReLit Award </p> <p>Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection</p> <p>First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, <i>Salvage King, Ya!</i> is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called <i>Salvage King, Ya!</i> “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s narrator, is the “heir reluctant” of the family business (the salvage company of the book’s title) and an aspiring NHL defenceman.