This season’s crop of picks from our Staff Writers is concerned with labour, immigration, class, imagination as defiance, Indigenous thoughts on wholeness and love, why art entrances us and how it can make us money, transformative journeys into one’s psyche, and so much more. Here are our Staff Writers’ Picks for Fall 2025 and beyond:

The Art of Solidarity:Labour Arts and Heritage in Canada

Edited by Rob Kristofferson and Stephanie Ross

Between the Lines Books, September 2025

“The Art of Solidarity delves into the rich tapestry of labour arts and heritage in Canada—from protest music and union banners, to murals, community theatre, and oral histories, to workers’ history museums and arts festivals—showcasing how these expressions of working people’s culture have been essential to challenging inequality and fostering solidarity. This inspiring collection highlights the resilience and creativity of labour arts and heritage practitioners who, despite financial and organizational challenges, continue to amplify the voices and experiences of working-class communities. In an economy characterized by growing polarization, inequality, precarity, and uncertainty about the future and meaning of work, labour arts and heritage has a central role to play in providing answers that challenge the prevailing narratives about whose work matters and whose efforts are central to our communities’ wellbeing. This work is more important than ever before.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers

by Marcello Di Cintio

Biblioasis, September 2025

“A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.

In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is ‘a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.’ Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.”

Pick a Colour

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Knopf Canada, September 2025

“From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.

As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.”

IN THE FIELD

by Sadiqa de Meijer

Palimpsest Press, October 2025

“In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer’s follow up to the Governor General’s Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.”

Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge

Edited by Myra Bloom and Kasia Van Schaik

University of Alberta Press, October 2025

“Echoing the pandemic-era phrase ‘shelter in place,’ and extending beyond it, this collection examines how writing can create, illuminate, and complicate ideas about dwelling, belonging, or finding safe harbour. Through an engaging blend of academic essays and creative nonfiction, contributors interrogate the connections between the concepts of shelter and text, centering questions of care, disability, and housing inequality. How does the physical infrastructure of the city interact with literary form and how do stories bring attention to our built environments? Did the experience of lockdown (re)shape our interiorities, imaginations, and reading habits? Can Indigenous and decolonial approaches to land and storytelling and an inclusive practice of shelter-making through narrative enable a more sustainable future? While many of the works and writers discussed in the volume are Canadian, the scope extends beyond national borders to create a transnational dialogue on diverse and non-traditional approaches to topics of land, space, and shelter. Shelter in Text will appeal to literary scholars, particularly those working in the fields of Canadian literature, Indigenous studies, contemporary literature, ecocriticism, gothic fiction, Queer studies, feminist studies, disability studies, translation, and literary theory.

Contributors: Kelly Baron, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Myra Bloom, David Chariandy, Lily Cho, Sophie Feng, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Kristi Leora Gansworth, Sarah Gordon, Shannon Griffin-Merth, Anna Guttman, Heather Jessup, Andrew David King, Caroline Lavoie, Jennifer Lawn, Jessi MacEachern, Kayla Penteliuk, Anil Pradhan, Geneviève Robichaud, Kasia Van Schaik, Holly Vestad, Erin Wunker, and Robert Zacharias.”

Nightmare Jones

by Shannon Bramer, illustrated by Cindy Derby

Groundwood Books, October 2025

“A collection of jaunty and mischievously unsettling poems for middle-grade readers from award-winning poet Shannon Bramer and artist Cindy Derby, who brought us Climbing Shadows (NCTE Notable Poetry Book and Verse Novel, shortlisted for the Rocky Mountain Book Award).

Shannon’s twenty-eight poems in Nightmare Jones send delightful shivers down the spine. Written in a variety of styles and forms, they encompass magic realism and influences from fairy tales, folklore and ghost stories, alongside more contemporary explorations of unusual creatures, misunderstood monsters and commonplace human fears (both ridiculous and sublime!). Cindy Derby’s evocative line and watercolor illustrations inhabit these weird and wonderful works with her characteristic flair for the strange and witchy wonders of the world.

In these poems what makes a person scared might also make them sad, or even make them laugh, as Bramer writes from a place of wonder, empathy, curiosity and reverence for the deep dark woods we all have inside us. If you’ve ever wanted to spend some time in a witch’s garden or wondered what spiders do with our worries, this is the poetry book for you!”

Weird Babies

by Jaclyn Desforges

Gordon Hill Press, Spring 2026

“Weird Babies is a short story collection about weird babies: a miraculous set of reincarnated quadruplets, babies born from the bellies of trout, babies who are destined to molt like tarantulas, babies who hatch from piles of warm clothes. It's also about the weird baby living in each of us—the tenderest part of ourselves that longs, at whatever the cost, to be loved.”

On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation

by Quill Christie-Peters

House of Anansi Press, October 2025

“A brilliant exploration embodied wholeness as a pathway to our collective liberation

Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness—despite pain and displacement—is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.

In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father’s survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh—it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.

This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism—through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond.”

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists

by David Berry

Coach House Books, October 2025

“How artists make a living and how money changes art

It may not be the worst time in history to get paid to make art, but it certainly is the strangest. The institutions and markets that have been supporting the arts are undergoing massive changes, some even disappearing. Meanwhile the tools to make art and find audiences have never been more accessible, and there are more people than ever making art.

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists is an attempt to reckon with the history of money in the arts — from Titian to Taylor Swift — and how that complicated relationship is changing. David Berry analyzes past and present financial dynamics in the arts to show the practicalities of how artists make a living and how that, in turn, affects the reception and perception of artists and their work: the impacts art has on wider society, how economic realities affect aesthetic judgements of art, what kind of people are able to work as artists, and how political and cultural ideas about the nature of art affect what kind of resources are made available to it.

David Berry explores how art has become central to our understanding of humanity by tying art to what makes the world go round: money. Along the way, he challenges popular ideas of what constitutes a successful artistic career and considers what our treatment of artists says about us.”

The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin

by Tracey Lindberg, art by George Littlechild

HarperAvenue, September 2025

“Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience

In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond.

Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of ‘all my relations.’

Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly.”

The Pollination Field

by Kim Fahner

Turnstone Press, August 2025

“Kim Fahner’s The Pollination Field is a poetic foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, but it also includes an exploration of other pollinators—bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and even humans. In these poems, Fahner continues with her poetic observation and documentation of how the human world impacts the environment, but also incorporates myth and feminism in her consideration of how women evolve over time.”

Letters to Kafka

by Christine Estima

House of Anansi, September 2025

“A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story ‘The Stoker’ from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.”

Ajar

by Margo LaPierre

Guernica Editions, October 2025

“The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.”

We Love You, Bunny

by Mona Awad

Scribner Canada, September 2025

“The highly anticipated follow up to the viral sensation Bunny, a brilliantly written, laugh-out-loud funny, dark, and delirious novel set in the Bunny-verse—a world that Margaret Atwood declared ‘soooo genius.’

In the cult classic novel Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackey, a lonely outsider student at a highly selective MFA program in New England, was first ostracized and then seduced by a clique of creepy-sweet rich girls who call themselves ‘Bunny.’ An invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon leads Samantha down a dark rabbit hole (pun intended) into the violently surreal world of their off-campus workshops where monstrous creations are conjured with deadly and wondrous consequences.

When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies’ side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.”

All Things Under the Moon

by Ann Y.K. Choi

Simon & Schuster, September 2025

“Pachinko meets Beasts of a Little Land in this stunning, evocative tale, set in 1920s Korea, of one seemingly ordinary woman—an uneducated villager living under Japanese occupation—who takes control of her own destiny and rises to become an advocate for women’s literacy as a force for change.

’Women need other women to survive.’

In 1924, Korea is an occupied country. In Seoul’s secret, underground networks and throughout the countryside, rebellion against the Japanese Empire simmers, threatening to boil over. Kim Na-Young lives a simple life in the rural village of Daegeori, where she watches the moon rise and set over the pine-wooded mountains, tends to her household alongside her best friend, Yeon-Soo, and cares for her sick mother.

But the occupation touches every Korean life—even Na-Young’s. In the wake of a tragedy that stuns the village, Na-Young’s father arranges her marriage to a man she’s never met, and Na-Young and Yeon-Soo decide to flee, taking their fate into their own hands. That decision sets them on their own collision course with the occupying forces, resulting in a violent encounter that will alter both of their lives forever—in shockingly different ways.

Taking us from a small village to the bustling corridors of Seoul, where women and girls can learn to read and write in multiple languages and members of the revolution pass coded messages through the back rooms of teahouses, Ann Y. K. Choi weaves a masterful tale of a woman taking command not only of her own identity but her own destiny.

A sweeping journey through historical Korea and an utterly compelling portrait of one woman’s remarkable life, All Things Under the Moon is both a stunning literary achievement and a beautifully written tribute to the sacrifices women make for each other.”

The Antifa Comic Book: Revised and Expanded

by Gord Hill

Arsenal Pulp Press, August 2025

“With fascism in our midst, Indigenous artist Gord Hill revises and expands his brilliant graphic history of fascism and anti-fascist movements

When it was first published in 2018, Gord Hill's The Antifa Comic Book was heralded for its searing imagery documenting the history of fascism and anti-fascist movements over the last century. In the years since its publication, the term ‘antifa’ has been co-opted by the right to falsely describe far-left political extremism and even terrorism. But the role played by antifa movements in fighting fascism and racism around the world remains as relevant and important as ever.

For this expanded edition, Gord Hill adds new material depicting more recent flashpoints of fascist activity, including the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, the murderous spree by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, the infamous 2022 Canadian convoy protests, and Islamophobic and anti-migrant sentiment in a growing number of fascist governments in Europe. At the same time, Hill depicts the important work being done by anti-fascist individuals and organizations to combat this worrisome trend, made all the more crucial by Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Powerful and inspiring, The Antifa Comic Book is an important reminder of fascism in our midst and what can be done to stop it.

The book includes a new foreword by Mark Bray, historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

Starry Starry Night

By Shani Mootoo

Book*hug Press, September 2025

“From celebrated writer Shani Mootoo comes an innovative and revelatory work of autofiction about family secrets, trauma, race, class, and loss.

In Starry Starry Night, Mootoo gives us the singular voice of Anju Ghoshal, a young girl living in 1960s Trinidad. Through Anju’s innocent and clear-eyed observations, the reader becomes both a witness to and a participant in her negotiations of an unexpectedly new and complex life, spanning from the ages of four to twelve.

Set against the backdrop of a politically exciting time in Trinidad’s history, just before and after it gained independence, we meet Anju’s beloved Ma and Pa and her socially advancing family. While preoccupied with their own dramas, the adults around her often fail to recognize the needs of the children who depend on them.

Beautifully crafted and rich with sumptuous detail, this unique narrative coalesces into a portrait of a child who, despite her privileged appearance, must ultimately fend for herself because her safety depends on it.”

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road

by Ken Wilson

University of Regina Press, October 2025

“Reflections from the lone traveller for whom a highway was never the intended destination

Walking the Bypass recounts Ken Wilson’s singular experience of walking alongside the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Regina Bypass, all while situating the highway within the ongoing history of settler colonialism in southern Saskatchewan.

Through a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital as well as the Global Transportation Hub, a sprawling warehouse park the Bypass was intended to serve. He offers a new perspective on these heavily travelled yet untrodden spaces in a region dominated by industrial agriculture and high-speed transportation. Reflecting on the profound transformations to the land since the arrival of settlers in the 1880s, he wonders whether it’s possible to form a connection with the land through walking—even on the gravelly edge of the freeway.

In vivid and sincere prose that captures the thoughts of a man trudging along the roadside, Walking the Bypass explores how walking can transform non-places into places and enable settlers to forge a relationship with the land around them.”

Mind the Gap

by Alice Zorn

NeWest Press, April 2026

“Mind the Gap is the beautifully crafted second short story collection from award-winning writer Alice Zorn. With an uncompromising lyric voice, Zorn travels through Mexico, Morocco, Texas, England, Austria, Tunisia, and northeastern Quebec in these seven short stories and one novella, each following a compelling narrator on a quest — to find someone who does not wish to be found, to discover the truth behind family secrets, to expiate guilt, to make new bonds, to realize a dream. Away from home, facing a new mirror, characters leave selves behind and discover new selves. Alice Zorn shines once again in this exploration of friendship, love, art, work, gender, and cultural identity in this spectacular collection of travel fiction.”

The Blackhole Kids

by j.l. oneill

Guernica Editions, October 2025

“After the death of his best friend, Benji, Bastion must cope with surviving within a radical punk counterculture while navigating addiction, loss, mental illness, and self-acceptance. The Blackhole Kids follows Bastion as he struggles with his grief and attempts to find solace through musical therapy via clubs, basements parties, train stations, and sidewalk surfing. When Bastion is approached by Alex, the frontman of Benji’s old band Sick Sad World, Bastion’s chaotic life becomes entangled in the lives of the other blackhole kids populating a crowded dilapidated squat. As the stale beer and harsh chemical highs lose their thrill, Bastion fights for sobriety. He helplessly loses friends and lovers to the underlying, and often psychological, rot consuming their subculture.”

The Hunger We Pass Down

by Jen Sookfong Lee

McClelland & Stewart, September 2025

“AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER. From the bestselling author of Superfan comes a haunting novel about the demons passed down through five generations of women in a Chinese Canadian family, and what it might take for them to finally break free of the past. Will you break your mother's curse before it consumes you?

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online business, a resentful teenage daughter, a screen-obsessed son, and a secret boyfriend, she can never get everything done in a day. So it’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning to find the counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, and orders are neatly packed and labelled. But she doesn’t remember staying up late to take care of things. As the strange pattern continues, she realizes someone—or something—has been doing her chores for her.

Alice knows she should feel uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who has started to share shocking stories from their family history—beginning with the horrors that befell her great-grandmother, who was imprisoned as a comfort woman in Hong Kong during the Second World War. But the family’s demons—both real and subconscious, old and new—are about to become impossible to ignore.

Set against the gleaming backdrop of contemporary Vancouver, The Hunger We Pass Down is a devastating, horror-tinged novel about how unspoken legacies of violence can shape a family. It follows the relentless spectre of intergenerational trauma as it is handed down from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break the cycle—heroism, depravity, or both.”

Bread of Angels

by Patti Smith

Knopf Canada, November 2025

“A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairy tales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.

The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night.’

She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again—the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.”

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times

by Saeed Teebi

Scribner Canada, September 2025

“A vital, fearless memoir explores what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment, the effects of the genocide on Palestinian art and imagination, and that to even claim a belonging to the land from a country thousands of miles away is an act of subversion—a book that Omar El Akkad says ‘so perfectly contextualizes and humanizes so much of what has led us to this awful moment, and one that will be remembered long after.’

Imagination is a more powerful force than hope.

Acclaimed author Saeed Teebi was at work on his first novel when the attacks on Gaza began in late 2023. The violence and cruelty of the attacks, accompanied by the assent and silence of international governments, stunned many across the globe, like Teebi, into a new state of permanent horror.

What does it mean to be of the Palestinian diaspora in such a moment? What does it mean to be of a people who have sustained such a large-scale assault not only on their homeland, but their entire identity? What is the role of art, of language—of imagination—in asserting one’s identity, when that very assertion is read as an act of subversion?

In this incisive work, Teebi explores, with searing, razor-sharp prose, the effects of genocide on the bodies, minds, and imaginations—of Palestinians especially, and humanity in general.

This is at once a memoir of one family’s displacement, a scathing indictment of global complicity in the face of brutality, and a profound rumination on art and imagination as a means of defiance. It is an astonishing work of resistance by a major intellect, and it is both urgent and timeless.”

Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability

by Therese Estacion

Book*hug Press, April 2026

“I am trying to meet my legs in the silent space between us. But they cannot speak. They have no story to tell without me.

Every day I go home. Sit on the couch and remove them from my body. They stand there, still as a statue, and wait for me to open my mouth.

In this revelatory collection of lyrical essays, Therese Estacion explores a number of vital themes relating to her life as a disabled person. Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.

Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by the author’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche.”

The Book of Interruptions

by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi

Buckrider Books, October 2025

“In The Book of Interruptions Khashayar ‘Kess’ Mohammadi has brought together a collection of poems written with scalpel-like precision. Infused with ‘pre-emptive violence’ these poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history, with lines often placed at the crossroads of Perso-Islamic and Western thought. Moving between an Iran that is marked with ‘tulips from the martyr’s blood’ and Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is a ‘ghost, anecdotal,’ Mohammadi writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art, and for pleasure, and for words that invite us all with “gentle patterns of light against light against light.”

Oxford Soju Club

By Jinwoo Park

dundurn press, September 2025

“The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean.

When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: ‘Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.’ In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph.

Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves.”

Gold Star

By Emma McKenna

Book*hug press, April 2026

“In this candid and moving collection, Emma McKenna explores the multifaceted themes of bodily autonomy, capturing the empowerment of queer femme identity.

Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.

Examining the way sexism and sexual violence exist as a spectre throughout the lives of women and girls, Gold Star also contemplates issues of child abuse and neglect, reproductive health, and the complex decision to be child-free. Never shying away from the weight of its vital subject matter, this is an urgent and unflinching feminist exploration of embodiment.”

What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall and Future

The Art of Solidarity:Labour Arts and Heritage in Canada

Edited by Rob Kristofferson and Stephanie Ross

Between the Lines Books, September 2025

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers

by Marcello Di Cintio

Biblioasis, September 2025

Pick a Colour

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Knopf Canada, September 2025

IN THE FIELD

by Sadiqa de Meijer

Palimpsest Press, October 2025

Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge

Edited by Myra Bloom and Kasia Van Schaik

University of Alberta Press, October 2025

Nightmare Jones

by Shannon Bramer, illustrated by Cindy Derby

Groundwood Books, October 2025

Weird Babies

by Jaclyn Desforges

Gordon Hill Press, Spring 2026

On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation

by Quill Christie-Peters

House of Anansi Press, October 2025

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists

by David Berry

Coach House Books, October 2025

The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin

by Tracey Lindberg, art by George Littlechild

HarperAvenue, September 2025

The Pollination Field

by Kim Fahner

Turnstone Press, August 2025

Letters to Kafka

by Christine Estima

House of Anansi, September 2025

Ajar

by Margo LaPierre

Guernica Editions, October 2025

We Love You, Bunny

by Mona Awad

Scribner Canada, September 2025

All Things Under the Moon

by Ann Y.K. Choi

Simon & Schuster, September 2025

The Antifa Comic Book: Revised and Expanded

by Gord Hill

Arsenal Pulp Press, August 2025

Starry Starry Night

By Shani Mootoo

Book*hug Press, September 2025

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road

by Ken Wilson

University of Regina Press, October 2025

Mind the Gap

by Alice Zorn

NeWest Press, April 2026

The Blackhole Kids

by j.l. oneill

Guernica Editions, October 2025

The Hunger We Pass Down

by Jen Sookfong Lee

McClelland & Stewart, September 2025

Bread of Angels

by Patti Smith

Knopf Canada, November 2025

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times

by Saeed Teebi

Scribner Canada, September 2025

Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability

by Therese Estacion

Book*hug Press, April 2026

The Book of Interruptions

by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi

Buckrider Books, October 2025

Oxford Soju Club

By Jinwoo Park

dundurn press, September 2025

Gold Star