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Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Finalist • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024 Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know. Shortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs. Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. I...
2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist For readers of My Dark Vanessa, a mesmerizing, disturbing, and thoroughly compelling novel about one woman’s role in preserving—or destroying—her famous father’s legacy. In front of me are hundreds of pages of work. Already I feel it leaving me. He will obliterate what is there, replace it, deny I ever wrote a word. But, he cannot take the words I write on my own. Hillary Greene’s father, once a celebrated author and public figure, is now losing his memory and, with it, his ability to write. As her father’s primary caretaker, each day begins with two eggs, boiled and Charlie Rose or some other host on the iPad screen. Her father compulsively ...
Set-Point is a novel about personal, sexual, and physical identity. A voice that is at once brutally honest and humorous follows Luck Frank, a mid-20s aspiring screenwriter living in Montreal who begins work as a digital sex worker, selling data recorded on interactive erotic consoles. She keeps her work separate from her artistic and personal life until a user threatens to release her identity. Lucy struggles with body image, her mother's illness, and her feelings about her new line of work, while trying to sell a series of scripts parodying Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. Segments of the novel take place inside of U:3D, a massive multiplayer online world-building game in which Lucy's project is produced. Unfolding in Montreal youth culture, this debut explores intellectual parody, mental and physical illness, and the relationship between technology and sex.
A satirical campus novel, Dumb-Show shrewdly confronts the cultural politics of masculinity through a narrative that twists the structure of Henry IV. A controversial Canadian professor of political science at a Toronto university rises to power when his political views divide the student body. Two siblings, one a student at the university, develop isolated personal relationships with the professor, and find themselves spiralling to infamy alongside him. Parker?s second novel shadows the rise and fall of a corrupt king, observes a young and lazy boy?s attempt to make a name for himself, and, tearing a hole in the hyper-masculine power narrative, interrogates a woman?s internal search to power. Expanding from the brutal introspection first seen in Parker's Set-Point, Dumb-Show takes brilliant aim
What I remember best about that week in January is trying to keep track of all the lies I told... 1998. Ontario has been hit by a days-long, life-endangering ice storm, and on Regis University campus, with classes cancelled, the students are partying. In the midst of it all, eighteen-year-old Ros's roommate Megan goes missing. As a panicked search ensues, Ros is blamed for not keeping a closer eye on Megan, and the incident casts a shadow over the next two decades of her life. 2020. Ros's former partner, Lukas, the father of her eleven-year-old son, is accused of a sexual assault. The accusation brings new details of an old story to light, forcing Ros to revisit a dark moment from her past. ...
2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist For readers of My Dark Vanessa, a mesmerizing, disturbing, and thoroughly compelling novel about one woman’s role in preserving—or destroying—her famous father’s legacy. In front of me are hundreds of pages of work. Already I feel it leaving me. He will obliterate what is there, replace it, deny I ever wrote a word. But, he cannot take the words I write on my own. Hillary Greene’s father, once a celebrated author and public figure, is now losing his memory and, with it, his ability to write. As her father’s primary caretaker, each day begins with two eggs, boiled and Charlie Rose or some other host on the iPad screen. Her father compulsively ...
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In this narrative in verse, a failed academic with a dead-end domestic labour job disappears into her own consciousness in an attempt to distance herself from her circumstances. Up against poverty and political tyranny that seems to worsen by the day, she finds solace in substance abuse and destructive relationships. But as the boundaries between fantasy, reality, her past, and her present start to break down, she's left to figure out what in her life is within her control and what is simply written in the stars. A meditation on grief, pleasure, free will, and totalitarianism, Scorpion Season is an experimental and genre-bending book of poetry about a strange time to be alive.
Fiction. Cohabitation with John Travolta; a never-ending Canadian Shield; the ghost of Steve Jobs wailing from a cracked iPhone 3; the stories in Parker's LOOKING GOOD AND HAVING A GOOD TIME are sharp, delightful, surprising, and, most importantly, never boring. Parker's characters engage awkwardly with the world around them, while her vivid imagination and sense of humor allow them to reach dizzying heights.
In Just Pervs, Jess Taylor's sophomore story collection, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted and complicated -- no longer are women figures to be acted upon my men; here they have agency over their desires and their bodies. Through the characters in these stories we discover how sex can be many things: it can be gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden, or open, but it is always complicated. Just Pervs explores the strange oppression and illumination that desire can create, the bewilderment of adolescence, the barriers to intimacy we discover within ourselves and the ones that are imposed on us. All while speaking honestly and openly about sex and championing expressions of female sexuality.