A striking debut collection by one of Montreal’s brightest young writers.

Quietly, Loving Everyone, Curtis McRae’s debut collection of stories, assembles a meditative and often profound cycle of portraits pulled from everyday Canadian life. A young boy raises James Dean from the dead, only to find out the cult icon is not the playmate he’d hoped for. A university student riddled with ulcers silently spirals after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. A young girl takes a road trip with her older sister to Cape Cod, and years later reconstructs the tragic circumstances behind what she remembers. A couple goes on a date at an old porn theatre that is the last remaining vestige of a neighbourhood that has moved on. McRae plays witness characters at those crucial beginnings or ends of relationships, with lovers, friends, family, and most importantly themselves.

This book bundle includes:

Four Days
The Damned and the Destroyed
I Am Not Guilty
The Ravine
Perilous Passage
Whispering City

Haven't read the first 12 books in the series? Buy that bundle here.

The spirit of the interrobang, a punctuation mark merging the questioning and the exclamatory, informs Mary Dalton’s compelling investigations of home and identity in this, her sixth poetry collection—in extraordinary poems of aging; of despised plants once revered; of rites and sites of community abandoned. The “flared mouth” of Dalton’s acclaimed musicality gives voice to lost souls and a lost sense of the earth. The collection’s unique mix of bleakness and beauty is also reflected in various riddle and riddle-like series with their ambiguity, open-endedness, playfulness, and unexpected linguistic shifts. Interrobang movingly fuses notions of exploration —of glancing at things slant—with an emotional range that feels new and visionary. This is a steely, brilliant book from a major Canadian poet.

The past decade has seen a rise in documentaries, memoirs and podcasts that revisit the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. With movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp challenging long-standing narratives around female celebrities, it’s no surprise so many believe the representation of women in the media has improved. In her scathingly witty collection of essays, Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women, Lisa Whittington-Hill argues otherwise. Pop culture’s treatment of women, writes Whittington-Hill, is still marked by misogyny and misunderstanding. From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it. A work of searing relevance, this candid and often cathartic debut marks Whittington-Hill as a cultural critic of the first rank.