Essential Prose
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The Morelli Thing
by Frank Lentricchia
Part of the Essential Prose series
The unsolved murder of Fred Morelli, in Utica, New York, in 1947, comes to the fore more than 60 years later when 15-year-old Angel, hacker extraordinaire, has his guitar smashed by Victor Bocca, one of the original suspects in the murder. Angel hacks files that may point not only to Bocca's involvement but also that of the mob. From there, mayhem breaks loose as assassins descend on Utica to silence Angel. In the midst of it is Angel's adoptive father, Eliot Conte, who, along with his close friend Police Chief Antonio Robinson, must try to unravel the mystery of what is going on before more killings take place, including that of Angel himself.
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Holy Fools & Other Stories
by Marianne Ackerman
Part of the Essential Prose series
In the novella, Holy Fools, a man on the verge of suicide answers the doorbell and is arrested for a crime he did not commit. His luck changes when he meets Tolstoy, a Lord and author of long books who is doing time for crimes against shareholders. A dark comedy about the game of life. Two stories complete the collection: Nobody Writes to the Professor and Albert Fine.
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Magnetic Dogs
by Bruce Meyer
Part of the Essential Prose series
Magnetic Dogs is a collection of short stories that examines how displaced individuals – those who have been snatched out of their time and place – struggle to adapt and reinvent themselves in an entirely new context or re-establish themselves in their former situations. In stories that are factual fiction, Meyer examines the composition of Gabriel Fauré's haunting "Cantique de Jean Racine," the 1960s 'scoop' of Indigenous children from Manitoulin Island, the missing diaries of Lewis Carroll that save that author from the charges of child molestation that ruined his career as an academic, the true story of a shade of red and Seventh Century Chinese exploration of the North Atlantic, and the origins and ramifications of a haunting Aztec form of music, borrowed by J.S. Bach, the 'chaconne.' In these stories Meyer constantly questions the ways our perceptions of the past might have been different had small events transpired to make them so.
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Love and Rain
by Carmela Circelli
Part of the Essential Prose series
Love and Rain is a novel whichexplores the nature of love, its pain, and the near impossibility of its enduring happiness. Moving back in space and time from Rome to Montreal in the sixties and seventies, it also traces the individual rebellion and social revolution that marked the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy in the late 1970s. The power of love, music and politics intertwine in a tale that the spells the mysterious alchemy of fate and chance.
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Thieves Never Steal in the Rain
by Marisa Labozzetta
Part of the Essential Prose series
Grappling with her daughter's fatal accident, Joanna finds solace in the conviction that her daughter lives on in the body of another child. Nancy's decision to lose a kidney in order to save her husband's life jeopardizes her last chance for motherhood. All that Barbara possesses and identifies with, including companionship with a ghost, vanishes overnight. Angie takes a drastic measure to lose weight in order to regain her confidence and self esteem. Rosemary, a renowned "agony aunt," falls apart when her husband leaves her, only to find comfort in the strangest of strangers. Love and the supernatural drive these stories about the intertwining lives of five female cousins, who learn that loss-from misplacing keys to confronting death-is a constant force.
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Dead Voices
by F. G. Paci
Part of the Essential Prose series
Dead Voices is a collection of stories that are both seriously realistic and comically whimsical. They have everything from superheroes who get sick on words, to the appearance of dead playwrights, to the visit of saints and sinners from the past, to a hot stove discussion on hockey and love. They're about the modern mind-set and its technological marvels and the older attention to character and virtue.
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Cut Road
by Brent van Staalduinen
Part of the Essential Prose series
A rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories.
Containing a rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories, Cut Road is a masterful exploration of the loss and scars that conflict always leaves behind. Where soldiers abandon too much of themselves in war zones, parents relinquish control of their children, and friends struggle with change and tragedy. From the working soul struggling with grief to the wounded veteran seeking redemption in a coffee shop to the sweaty tree-planter fleeing a burning forest, in this collection no one-least of all the reader-is left unscathed.
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Notes of a Mediocre Man
Stories Of India And America
by Bipin Aurora
Part of the Essential Prose series
Two brothers come to school and do nothing but tell stories. A man goes to a singles dance. A retired man in India tries to collect his pension. A woman tells the story of her husband's death in partition India. An unnamed narrator offers his "notes" on modern-day America, the culture of success. Some of the stories are set in India, some in America. Some stories are fable-like, others more realistic. Some deal with sex, some are "intellectual" stories. But all stories deal, in one way or another, with small, "mediocre" people, people trying to fit into a world of bigness, applause, success.
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Momma's Got the Blues
by David Sherman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Celebrating the joys of pop music and the musicians who live to play it; while taking an insider's look at what the digital age has done to the artist, the business and the sound.
The golden days of MaryAnne's singing career, of sold-out concert halls and hit records have given way to shabby rooms and paltry CD sales, battered by YouTube and streaming. But, MaryAnne, nearing 60, refuses to retire. When her party-animal single daughter becomes pregnant, MaryAnne rebels against becoming a grandmother and putting her dwindling career aside to help her daughter raise an infant. It's left to her live-in lover to try and sew the family back together while MaryAnne clutches her six-string for dear life.
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Winners and Losers
Tales Of Life, Law, Love And Loss
by Darlene Madott
Part of the Essential Prose series
Winners And Losers: Tales of Life, Law, Love and Loss is a collection of linked short stories that turns a dazzling searchlight on the inner workings of the legal profession, told from the viewpoint of a feisty narrator finding her way through a hostile and competitive law environment. By the end, the reader will have undergone a sprawling journey through a lifetime in practice, where the pit-bull litigator is tenderized through the clients, the work, the failure of her own marriage, by single mothering. Because the protagonist doesn't judge, because she lays out the evidence in her search for the truth in a circling, coyote-like fashion, the reader lives that tracking inquiry along with her.
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Immortal Water
by Norman Brian Van
Part of the Essential Prose series
Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a quixotic search for the mythical fountain of youth. The protagonists sparkle into fullness as each is depicted in his struggle to remain vital while age slowly steals his significance away.
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Waiting for Stalin to Die
by Irene Guilford
Part of the Essential Prose series
Fleeing Stalin's advance into Lithuania, shaken by communism and war, four refugees end up in Toronto in 1949. Vytas, a young doctor who gets into medical school by saving a child's life, is haunted by a lost love. Maryte, a seamstress whose affair with a German officer saved her half-witted brother, struggles to take care of him. Justine, a concert pianist raped during the war, strives to regain her ability to make music. Father Geras, an illegitimate child steered into the priesthood by family, finds purpose in guiding his exiled people. Trying to resume normal lives, longing for their country's freedom, they wait to go home.
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Mouth of Truth
Buried Secrets
by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz
Part of the Essential Prose series
Mouth of Truth is the unique story of a woman trapped in the vault of family secrets, part of her still a hidden child, some 40 years after the Second World War. Following a crisis, she leaves her home and children in search of the truth about her beloved father, a Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story reveals how unhealed childhood trauma of a parent can be transmitted from one generation to the next, destroying families and other relationships in its wake.
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A Boy at the Edge of the World
by David Kingston Yeh
Part of the Essential Prose series
Meet the Garneau boys, triplets from small-town Ontario. Daniel the "eldest" is gay, and moves to Toronto with his best friend Karen to attend university. Eventually, he meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance artist whose grandfather was a book-burning Nazi. A Boy at the Edge of the World is a rollicking dramedy that explores the compulsive and (ultimately) universal human pursuit of intimacy, sex, and love.
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Radius Islamicus
by Julian Samuel
Part of the Essential Prose series
Joseph, the tactician behind the Piccadilly Circus bombing, finds himself in a nursing home in Pierrefonds, Quebec. A visit from a long-lost former fellow cell member interrupts his dalliance with the night nurse, provoking both a crisis and a period of reflection. Did he lose his mind back then as a young man? Or is he losing it now? Why did a systems analyst living on the Kandahar Road in London, with a PhD from the London School of Economics and an enthusiasm for Bobby Darin's hit "Dream Lover" (the Farsi version), bring home fertilizer? Will his former associates give him up with deathbed confessions?
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Faithful and Other Stories
by Daniel Karasik
Part of the Essential Prose series
A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.
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In Pursuit of Truth
by Joseph V. Ricapito
Part of the Essential Prose series
In this satirical take on the goings on in the halls of academia, Christian private-college style, Ricapito tells the story of Bert Russo, a naive professor who learns the hard way that making waves (especially political ones) can lead to dire consequences. In the end, having exposed the hypocrisy and two-faced actions of his colleagues and having lost both his wife and job, Bert is finally at peace with himself.
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Zoo and Crowbar
by David Zieroth
Part of the Essential Prose series
The Wind has mysteriously caused the death of all people on earth-except for Zoo. As the last remaining person on earth, he must deal with this extraordinary situation, and the result is a series of dreams, shocks, hallucinations, events, explorations and the final outcome in the light of his changing understanding.
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The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness
by Jerry Levy
Part of the Essential Prose series
To fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn in her arsonist brother, a failed writer whose fictional character suddenly comes to life, an unhappy insurance examiner who discovers a fallen angel and decides to cash in on his find, or a successful, middle-class man who pines for the poet he once was, nothing is sacred in this collection of stories. Myth and imagination hold equal weight, authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand, and the lines between reality and illusion blur. Characters find themselves trapped, or at least, incapable of restoring their humanity. It may be sobering to observe such forays into darkness but underlying their failures is a tacit suggestion that perhaps they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or simply with some encouragement. And some do; amidst the carnage of those who fail and disappear emerge some who acquire new strength to reconnect with the world.
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Land for Fatimah
by Veena Gokhale
Part of the Essential Prose series
Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali's kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel. In Land for Fatimah, Anjali involves herself in Fatimah's quest to find new land for her scattered community, and is thrown into a web of intrigue that upturns her safe, orderly world. Capturing the warmth and vitality of Africa, illuminating everyday heroism, the novel explores expat life, the forced displacement of the poor and the complexities of development.
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Against the Machine
Evolution
by Brian Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.
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Sometimes It Snows in America
by Marisa Labozzetta
Part of the Essential Prose series
Combining fable, story telling and the grubbiness of harsh reality, Marisa Labozzetta tells the story of Fatma, a young woman from a storied family in Somalia. Brought to the United States as part of an arranged marriage, Fatma must undergo losing her child, drug addiction, abuse and prison before coming out the other side. A tale of someone who never gives up, no matter how bleak her prospects. A novel that allows hope to shine even in the darkest hour.
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Where Seas and Fables Meet
Parables, Fragments, Lines, Thought
by B. W. Powe
Part of the Essential Prose series
A book that is an open door, a current, an open window, a breeze over uncut grass, a dance of morning light on an old ruined sundial, a set of waves flowing up on a strange shore. This is a book that asks why do we give in to the psychotic and invasive Structure (and its many names)? A book that mingles witticisms and provocations so that the reader may settle into his or her soul and reflect. A book that works in associations, echoes, pulses, images, returns, vibrations, thought-experiments, dreams, visions and revisions. This is a book that should have an ellipse on the front page with an image of a shock of light
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The Beautiful West & the Beloved of God
by Michael Springate
Part of the Essential Prose series
In the spring of 2008 Elena, who recently moved to Montreal with her seven year old daughter, Sharon, finds a job in a retail store on Sherbrooke Street. She meets Mahfouz working in his family's fast food outlet on The Main. Partially as an antidote to her chronic loneliness, partially influenced by Sharon's spontaneous affection for him, Elena commits to a deepening relationship. Together the three of them enjoy a wonderful spring. That summer, however, Mahfouz doesn't return from a visit to Cairo, and his father is picked up and held indefinitely for unknown charges on undisclosed evidence. Elena and Mahfouz, no longer in any contact with each other, must separately come to terms with their historical situation, and prepare for a future shaped by forces they struggle to understand.
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Rust Is a Form of Fire
by Joe Fiorito
Part of the Essential Prose series
Joe Fiorito spent 18 hours in total, over the course of three days, on the corner of Victoria and Queen in downtown Toronto watching the city go by and recording what he saw. The rhythms of the city ebb and flow according to the time of day. The declarative sentence is the best brush to paint an objective portrait of the city we live in. It is an example of what happens when you stay in one place and observe a single place or thing for a very long time.
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In Sickness and in Health / Yom Kippur in a Gym
by Nora Gold
Part of the Essential Prose series
This flip book is comprised of two novellas:
In Sickness and In Health - Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be "normal". By age 45 she has a "normal" life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.
Yom Kippur in a Gym – Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can't accept her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, is planning suicide. Rachel worries about losing her job. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.
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Weather Permitting & Other Stories
by Pratap Reddy
Part of the Essential Prose series
The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants - spirited people who are prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands to pursue their dreams of a better life. But often times there's a reality check , and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges of cultural shock, paucity of jobs, lack of Canadian work experience, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Though the accounts are fictional they show the determination of new immigrants to survive on alien soil.
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Count on Me
by Ann Cavlovic
Part of the Essential Prose series
Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents' bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan's meddling in their parents' lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else's money.
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The Mezzogiorno Social Club
by Ercole Gaudioso
Part of the Essential Prose series
From Black Hand criminals to stand-up cops, from innocent victims and ordinary people to schemers and dreamers: a novel that chronicles one hundred years in the lives and relationships of those who have lived in New York City's Little Italy. A multi-generational, multi-dimensional tale that digs deep into the minds and hearts of this vibrant neighborhood.
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Through the Sad Wood Our Corpses Will Hang
by Ava Farmehri
Part of the Essential Prose series
At the age of twenty, Sheyda Porrouya's life is almost over. She was born in Iran on the day staunchly orthodox mullas declared the birth of the Islamic Republic and set about summarily purging the country of all things Western and un-Islamic. To make matters worse, as she matured, Sheyda seemed increasingly unable to distinguish between fairy tale and reality. She began to exhibit disturbing behavior. When Sheyda is accused of killing her mother, she is immediately jailed and sentenced to death by hanging. The narrative jumps back and forth from Sheyda's childhood to her current life in one of Iran's most notorious prisons, where she awaits either release or execution.
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Wordwings
by Sydelle Pearl
Part of the Essential Prose series
In 1941, 12-year-old Rivka Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto with her grandfather and two sisters in a synagogue because housing is scarce. When German soldiers slash her grandfather's beard, Rivka is compelled to write in between the pages of a library book by Hans Christian Andersen. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Underground Archive--a compilation of Warsaw Ghetto experiences, asks her to contribute her stories to the archives and Rivka agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings of their own.
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Allegiance
by Michael Springate
Part of the Essential Prose series
Victor makes an ethical commitment. The reverberations of that choice surface in Canada, Egypt and Greece. Moving from a lecture hall in Montreal to a detention centre in Alexandria, from a descent into the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa to a vista high over the ports of Piraeus, from tequila blurred moments of ecstatic dance to the rigours of contemporary musical composition, an overlapping narrative emerges to question current allegiances and the history of rational law.
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Stone Woman
by Bianca Lakoseljac
Part of the Essential Prose series
Stone Woman is a saga of Blossom's unconventional family of five women, whose lives are bound by a Vietnam-War draft dodger David, immersed in the Yorkville subculture of the hippie daze of Toronto. During the 1967 Art Symposium, a giant block of marble intended for a sculpture disappears from High Park, and the mystery of the theft becomes the focus of speculation in the Toronto arts community. The novel draws the reader into a web of liaisons?into David?s love affair with Blossom?s mother Liza, his covert dealings with her friend Anna, as well as the mysterious Helena. The intrigue culminates in the convergence of their loves and tragedies, and quests for social and cultural change inherent in the tumultuous milieu of the period. The story is brought to the present through the lives of the women?s daughters who discover that their family secrets have been sculpted literally into an art form that imparts a sense of homecoming and alludes to a more hopeful future.
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Tracie's Revenge & Other Stories
by Wade Bell
Part of the Essential Prose series
In this stunning book, Wade Bell writes on the level of Raymond Carver and Roberto Bolano. He knows exactly what to leave out to make a short story great. This is a book everyone who loves great fiction and short stories will want to read. He is the master of endings and like Alice Munro keeps us guessing until the final sentence. These are stories to dwell on and ravish in. Read just one and you will be hooked! - Robert Hilles (Author of A Gradual Ruin and Partake).
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The Light of the Soul
Neruda, The White Raven, The Black Cat
by Pietro Corsi
Part of the Essential Prose series
Beginning with dangerous thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped from the mind of the protagonist who returns and sees his old hometown as it once was. Additionally, there is the suffering caused by migration. Like the hunter who, after a few years of living in Canada, returns home to enjoy the fruit of a pension - and realizes the reality that awaits him is no longer his reality. In a moment of despair, he goes into the woods and takes his own life.
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The Shining Fragments
by Robin Blackburn McBride
Part of the Essential Prose series
A heartbreaking arrival in a new country. Thrust too early into adulthood. Will he survive Canada's turbulent streets?
Toronto, 1882. Joseph Conlon has never felt more alone. Parentless after his mother dies on the voyage from Ireland, the frightened eight-year-old witnesses his sister's abduction and is abandoned at the train station. But once he's placed in a Catholic orphanage, Joseph discovers a gift for drawing and friends that begin to fill the hole in his heart.
Falling for a mercurial girl acrobat, his desire to win her affection drives him to find her after she runs off for a life on the stage. And as he leaves the institution and grows to manhood, the young immigrant endures dangerous work, anti-Irish bigotry, and lying about his faith to survive… only to have his longing for family lead to tragedy.
Will Joseph ever reach the place where he belongs?
In this poignant and lyrical story, author Robin Blackburn McBride follows one boy's emotional and colorful journey. Deftly depicting a compelling era while exploring the intensely personal challenges of the human experience, McBride's inspirational tale of hope and courage will touch you deeply.
The Shining Fragments is a meticulously researched and rendered historical family saga. If you like complex characters, richly authentic settings, and stories of resilience, then you'll love Robin Blackburn McBride's immersive novel.
Buy The Shining Fragments to witness the strength of the human spirit today!
"Tales about orphans left to find their way in the New World are many, but few are as engaging as this story." -Historical Novel Society North America, Editors' Choice
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That Summer in Provincetown
by Caroline Vu
Part of the Essential Prose series
This story follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they struggle through major events of the 20th century. From the War of Independence against the French colonial power to the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a family's resilience in the face of tragedy, as told through the voice of a young girl attempting to understand family scandals within an historical context. At the novel's core is the death from AIDS in the early 1980s of the narrator's half French, half Vietnamese cousin Daniel, a beautiful rebel who is stricken down following a summer escapade in Provincetown. His family of three generations of physicians cannot bear to call the disease by its true name. Daniel dies alone in his Montreal hospital room.
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A Feast of Brief Hopes
by Bruce Meyer
Part of the Essential Prose series
There are unseen forces in our lives that shape who we are and what we become. How we respond to those forces determines our futures. These stories examine how characters respond to the unexpected. Do we carry our memories of the beautiful moments of life with us into death? And, ultimately, what do we value in life that defines us--from a hat to the shadow of a figure in a window reminding us of what we have lost or need to hold onto?
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Max's Folly
by Bill Turpin
Part of the Essential Prose series
Max has been a freelance reporter dodging bullets in Latin America, a small-time newspaper editor who delights in infuriating his publisher and, finally, a flack for a communications company -- the elephant's graveyard for journalists. But none of this compares with the terrors of assisted living, so instead Max risks everything on something he's kept secret until recently: his increasingly unreliable ability to travel in time. He set out to search the past for his late wife and settle down with her again. In turn satirical and poignant, replete with dark humour, sarcasm, wise-cracking characters and laugh-out-loud funny bits, this is a debut novel that is going to ring some bells and stir some pots.
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Ukrainian Portraits
Diaries From The Border
by Marina Sonkina
Part of the Essential Prose series
At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Canadian author Marina Sonkina flew to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer in a refugee camp using her knowledge of Russian and some Ukrainian. The suffering on a massive scale was beyond what she could possibly expect. "Putin's destruction of Ukraine left me with dismay and utter helplessness. The world order as we knew it, after WWII, was unraveling in Europe in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing about it. Evil always shouts loud; goodness is quiet. But when I came as a volunteer to a transition refugees centre at the Polish-Ukrainian border, I saw an outpour of good will on an unprecedented scale. This book is a celebration of magnanimity that lives in the heart of each of us and comes forth when called upon. It is also a homage to the millions of destitute Ukrainian women, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and the lives of their children with patient courage, moral grace, and faith in the ultimate victory of goodness over evil."
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Eye
by Marianne Micros
Part of the Essential Prose series
Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros' collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph transformed into a heifer, a young soldier who returns home to discover that his brother is a changeling, an ancient temple uncovered during the construction of a church, a betrayed woman lost in a labyrinth, a wise woman confronting changes to her position when modern technology comes to her village. Some stories show that people still seek refuge in myth and folk beliefs; the ways of the past are not gone. The paving of a village does not destroy the power of the evil eye or the ability to repel it. A temple in honour of the old gods comes again to the surface. An unfinished musical composition for piano magically completes itself whenever it is played.
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Fatal Light Awareness
by John O'Neill
Part of the Essential Prose series
This is a beautifully written novel. It's a road trip with POV one man's fantasy life while he searches for "weight" in his everyday life. Readers will see themselves mirrored in the protagonist's most petty and picayune thoughts and acts, perhaps men more than women, most of whom never even guess the depth and breadth of male lust. The weight of desire. We have an antihero who is a revolting man. A stalker and a peeping Tom, he's also weak, selfish, self-absorbed to the point of near-insanity and describes the unravelling of his tidy married childless life this way: "I'm just trying to parlay lust into a lifestyle".
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Muskoka
by Julian Samuel
Part of the Essential Prose series
A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father's glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.
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Catch and Release
by Liana Cusmano
Part of the Essential Prose series
About coming out and coming of age.
In Catch and Release, twenty-one-year-old Lucca looks back on her childhood and adolescence as she comes to terms with both her sexual orientation and her mental illness. When she falls in love with the brilliant and beautiful Adèle, Lucca is forced to acknowledge not only that she is not and never has been straight, but also that her relationship with a teacher in high school was not as harmless as she might have thought.
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The King of the Sea Monkeys
by Mark E. Cull
Part of the Essential Prose series
The King of the Sea Monkeys is a novel in two parts. Because the protagonist suffers from a traumatic brain injury, the first part is fragmented, finding its way in the larger narrative in disorderly pieces. The novel is centered on a young high school teacher: too idealistic at work; too childish at home: living a fairly normal life, but unable to navigate the waters. This "normal" life disintegrates when he is involved in an altercation at a convenience store which ends in a shooting. He survives a terrible injury but the world of the protagonist is undone. Issues of traumatic brain injury are examined and the existence of God comes into question. We find ourselves asking what the framework of a real life is.
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Head Games
by Erika Rummel
Part of the Essential Prose series
A Latino bar in Toronto, 1978. The men can't take their eyes off Lisa, but there is something about her. She is a little too intense, a little too needy, a woman with too many games playing in her head. Don, a realtor with a murky South American past, is unfazed. He listens patiently when Lisa tells him she is looking for her father, a wealthy man living in Argentina. Or so she says. Determined to find her roots, Lisa goes to Argentina. It's a journey born of longing for love and the desperate need for something solid to hold on to. Don offers to come along. He is on a mission of his own, looking for his run-away daughter, Asu, a Quechua girl he adopted in Argentina. Or so he says. Soon Lisa acquires a second escort: Santos, a man with connections to the spirit world. He does seances with Lisa because only the saints can help her. Or so he says. Is Santos a charlatan, or a shaman fighting the eternal battle of good against evil? Lisa's search for her father dead-ends. Instead she finds love.
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McKinley's Ghost & the Little Tin Truck
by Anthony M. Graziano
Part of the Essential Prose series
McKinley's Ghost & the Little Tin Truck tells the story of the Millers, a fictional family struggling among the real events of the early 20th century: the end of the Progressive Era, The Great War and influenza pandemic, prohibition, voting rights for women, the conservative take-over, the Red Scare, xenophobic hatred of immigrants and other "inferiors," lynching and race riots, union-busting, the elevation of "business" in government and the resulting unparalleled corruption, a wild stock market, spiraling income disparity, the Great Depression, national despair and the seeds of the next world war.
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Tales From the Bottom of My Sole
by David Kingston Yeh
Part of the Essential Prose series
When a long-lost sister shows up as a trans man named Luke, a series of precipitous events throws the lives of boyfriends Daniel and David into turmoil. While David attends an extravagant family reunion in Sicily, Daniel's ex Marcus plans the world-premiere of his one-man show. The couple's vertiginous exploration of sex, intimacy and love comes to a head when a shocking revelation tests their commitment and future together.