Fiction Books

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

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Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

Praise for Big of You

“Playful hilarity on some pages is matched by striking loss on others. Levine is a maestro of pacing and a magpie of mesmeric diction.”
—Literary Review of Canada

“Throughout, the writing is like a Modernist poem . . . filled with startling images, but also half-thoughts and half-sentences, leaving the reader, like the characters, on the tenterhooks of understanding. Fiction that makes artful demands, and in return, offers substantial rewards.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The stories in Elise Levine’s latest collection, Big of You, are great travellers. They move through time, scene, and setting like water, seamless and fluid, burbling with questions of personal identity and what it takes to change one’s present or put to bed one’s past.”
—Katherine Abbass, The Ex-Puritan

“In Elise Levine’s high-voltage collection, she transports us everywhere from a casino to Europe to outer space. These stories crackle with restlessness, longing, and mischief, as characters peel away layers of identity to glimpse what’s underneath. Fraught, honest and hilarious, Big of You stretches our imaginations and delightfully capsizes our expectations of selfhood, story, and reality.”
—Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger

“In Big of You, Elise Levine is expert at conveying confusion and dislocation in a magic shorthand that is all hers. Each ingenious sentence blends beauty and sorrow in an intimate voice close to your ear. The writing is whip-smart with heart, it’s nutritious, it’s everything you need.”
—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man

“Big of You moves through the contours of grief, the gradients of memory, and the foils of artistic ambition, all in honor of the shattered human heart. These stories are both painfully funny and refreshingly earnest, a feat so striking it feels almost impossible that one writer can have such electrifying breadth. When I read Elise Levine, I lose and find myself anew in her lucid prose. That’s the power of an Elise Levine sentence—she is singular.”
—Alejandro Heredia, author of Loca

Praise for Elise Levine

“Levine uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone . . . [Blue Field‘s] visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivor’s guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it’s like to drown.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Reading [Blue Field] is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text . . . dazzling, textured, tightly woven.”
—Music and Literature

“Elise Levine writes with a new and exciting type of lyric rhythm. These are stories with the beating heart of poems.”
—Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

“Elise Levine’s startling sentences alternate between serrated sentiment and lyrical reverie, offering readers that rarest commodity—genuine surprise.”
—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

“Levine addresses questions of identity and the impact of violence as well as addiction, consent, and society’s exploitation of trauma, and does so in gorgeous, surprising, and utterly gripping prose.”
—Elizabeth Hazen, Baltimore Fishbowl

An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.

Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.

Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.

An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.

Praise for Self Care

“You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus . . . The novel’s title proves piercingly ironic: this is a book about people whose absolute inability to care for themselves is the product of social alienation and a world in which everything—from proscribed gender roles to the ravages of unfettered capitalism—is stacked against them. That the only escape from this cycle of despondency appears to be violent is the ultimate indictment in this bleak, acerbic fable of our benighted time.”
—Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

“Smith’s writing is at its best when he’s skewering the often performative nature of sex, dating, and politics, as well as the solipsistic delusion of 21st-century life. [Self Care is] an uncomfortable, disturbing, and timely examination of relationships between men and women.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A searing indictment of shallow, self-obsessed online culture and the deep disconnects in society, Canadian writer Smith’s latest examines trauma and tragedy and delves into the difference between performing care and actually caring.”
—Booklist

“A perverse, bleak, often hilarious Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment. Smith renders the self-obsessed urban landscape with absolute precision.”
—Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations

“A gripping, unforgettable story about a young journalist and her secret incel lover that explodes the fairy tale of the frog prince. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat.”
—Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don’t Cry

“A millennial tragedy that is also smart, funny, and mercifully free of piety and exculpation. Self Care is a book and an attitude adjustment that CanLit could really use.”
—Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens

“With Self Care, Smith writes with the exacting and intimate observation for which he is known and loved, offering an unflinching play-by-play of protagonist Gloria’s murky interiority as she navigates an insidious but intimate relationship with incel Daryn. Think sharp psychological realism of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” or Graham and Thorne’s Adolescence. Smith’s ability to bravely take readers to the very edge of tenderness in the face of danger leaves one with something more profound than a lesson and more encompassing than a fact. Self Care is a story as hard to look at as it is well-observed. It haunted me and I couldn’t put it down.”
—Aley Waterman, author of Mudflowers

“Consumed this jewel of a novel in a single sitting . . . Upsetting and hilarious by turns, it is a sort of updated comedy of manners, really, about a wellness blogger who dominates an incel. By one of Canada’s closest social observers.”
—Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Praise for Russell Smith

“For me at least, Canada’s most fascinating writer, the author whose new books and stories I most eagerly anticipate, whose fiction I approach with a hopeful curiosity.”
—Jeet Heer

“Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear.”
—Andre Alexis, author of Fifteen Dogs

“Smith writes some of the most luminous prose in Canadian fiction . . . He mines and refines the best of what has come before on the way to making it his own.”
—Montreal Gazette 

“[Confidence is] a poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food, and bar scene.”
—Maclean’s

“Smith . . . is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane. Those gifts are on full display throughout Confidence.”
—Globe and Mail

Beautifully illustrated with a cloth-like spine, this imaginative picture book shares an Inuk child's experience with gratitude and celebrates family connections from the newest siblings to cherished Elders.

A young boy, Kalluk, leaves his camp to tell his grandmother that his mother is about to have a baby. Along the way, Kalluk meets different animals and he asks them why they are so happy. The rabbits say they love to be fast enough to outrun the fox and clever enough to know when to hide. They are happy to protect each other from the winter wind: "I'd give you my tail if I could!" they say. A mother fox tells the boy her pups make her happy (and her pups say their mother makes them happy: "We would give her our tails if we could!" they say. Even the river and the wind have reasons to be happy. Kalluk's encounters with nature make him reflect on his gratitude for all it provides.

On the trip back, Kalluk and his grandmother talk about happiness, peace and choices. They speak to the ravens and get a lift from the wind right to Kalluk's doorstep. And waiting inside is a new baby sister! Holding her in his arms, Kalluk discovers a new reason to be thankful.