Featuring:
Revery: A Year of Bees by Jenna Butler
Girl Minus X by Anne Stone
All the Animals on Earth by Mark Sampson
Stella Atlantis by Susan Perly
Please help us welcome these amazing new works of fiction and non-fiction into the world on November 19, 2020 at 7:00 P.M.
About The Books
Revery: A Year of Bees by Jenna Butler
"I hope you're okay in there, lovelies. I hope you're warm." After five years of working with bees on her farm in northern Alberta, Jenna Butler shares with the reader the rich experience of keeping hives. Starting with a rare bright day in late November as the bees are settling in for winter she takes us through a year in beekeeping on her small piece of the boreal forest. Weaving together her personal story with the practical aspects of running a farm she takes us into the worlds of honeybees and wild bees. She considers the twinned development of the canola and honey industries in Alberta and the impact of crop sprays; debates the impact of introduced flowers versus native flowers, the effect of colony collapse disorder and the protection of natural environments for wild bees. But this is also the story of women and bees and how beekeeping became Jenna Butler's personal survival story.
Girl Minus X by Anne Stone
As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her five-year-old sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse – fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain of the virus emerges, Dany careens headlong into crisis, determined to save her sister. Together with her best friend and reluctant history teacher, they must flee the city. Along the way, Dany faces a series of devastating choices: Can she make the dangerous attempt to break her aunt out of the prison-hospice? And just how much is Dany willing to sacrifice to ensure her sister and her friends survive?Girl Minus X is a meditation on the gift that is memory and its hidden costs, pitting a fear of forgetting against a desire to erase the past.
All the Animals on Earth by Mark Sampson
In a world subtly like and unlike our own, buttoned-down HR manager Hector Thompson is sure of two things: he hates both change and science fiction. But then lurid green streamers drift from the sky in an escaped experiment and birds and animals fall to the ground as their bodies stretch and change and grow. It’s an apocalypse. Or is it?Now Hector works in a company with detail-oriented pigeons for project managers while shifts of dependable dogs work round the clock in orange safety vests building housing for earth’s newest inhabitants. In a dizzying mix of imagination and wry social commentary, author Mark Sampson creates a believable world with an unbelievable future and takes his readers on a road trip across a remarkable vision of America as his Everyman finds his role in this strange new reality.
Stella Atlantis by Susan Perly
With the dead you can go anywhere.When novelist Johnny Coma's daughter comes back from the dead as a talking octopus, will he be finally be able to write her story? Will his estranged wife, renowned war photographer Vivienne Pink, even believe him? In Stella Atlantis, the stunning follow-up to her visionary desert novel Death Valley, Susan Perly returns to the lives of these troubled artists, haunted by the death of their young daughter, Stella, killed on the sidewalk outside their home, as they search for healing in separate cities and with new lovers. Moving in and out of Toronto, Amsterdam and Barcelona, across the Mediterranean to Ibiza and out to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Perly’s prose enacts grieving itself in the twinned stories of Johnny and Vivienne. Playfully dark and filled with beautiful flights of imagery, this is a story of fathers and daughters, of love lost and love reborn, of the redemptive power of art, the transformative power of the sea and how we can dare to reach for radiance and redemption.
About The Authors
Jenna Butler is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road (NeWest Press, 2013), Wells (University of Alberta Press, 2012) and Aphelion (NeWest Press, 2010); an award-winning collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge the of Grizzly Trail (Wolsak and Wynn, 2015); and a poetic travelogue, Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard (University of Alberta Press, 2018).Butler's research into endangered environments has taken her from America’s Deep South to Ireland's Ring of Kerry, and from volcanic Tenerife to the Arctic Circle onboard an ice-class masted sailing vessel, exploring the ways in which we impact the landscapes we call home. A professor of creative writing and environmental writing at Red Deer College, she lives with seven resident moose and a den of coyotes on an off-grid organic farm in Alberta's North Country.
Anne Stone is the author of three novels, Delible (2007), Hush (1999) and jacks: a gothic gospel (1998). She is currently at work on a collection of short fiction. She spent her childhood in Toronto, lived in Montreal, and now makes her home in Vancouver, where she teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Capilano University.
Mark Sampson is the author of five previous books: the novels The Slip (Dundurn Press, 2017), Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Press, 2014) and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007); the short story collection The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015); and the poetry collection Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016). Mark has published many short stories and poems in literary journals across Canada, including in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, PRISM international, The Nashwaak Review, The Puritan, This magazine and FreeFall. He is a frequent book reviewer for Quill & Quire, Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ) and other publications. Born and raised on Prince Edward Island, he currently lives and writes in Toronto.
Susan Perly is a fiction writer, former radio journalist and war correspondent. She is the author of the novels, Death Valley and Love Street, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
In an earlier life chapter, Perly reported for CBC Radio from conflict zones, such as the Iran-Iraq War in Letters from Baghdad, from the Guatemalan refugee camps of the Mexican jungles, and from Argentina and Uruguay during their military regimes. In the 1980s she was part of an international commission investigating the torture and disappearance of journalists and artists in those countries. Her on-site engagements in the fields of tyranny have informed her fiction.
Perly lives in her hometown Toronto with her husband, poet Dennis Lee.