Part of TDR's feature on Toronto Books: Spring 2008

Sit back, get your pen out or load up your printer’s black ink cartridge cause it’s on. 

28 books you must have for Spring 2008, in no particular order, from poetry to fiction to graphic novels to rocked out sophomore efforts, it’s the ultimate Spring break.

Toronto Books Gone Wild!

• The Publishers: Coach House, Random House, Anansi, ECW, Penguin, Book Thug, Brick Books, Conundrum, Pedlar, Tightrope, McClelland & Stewart, DC Books, Insomniac, Biblioasis, Exile, and Simon & Schuster.
• Toronto Book Media: NOW, eye weekly, the Globe, the Star, Quill and Quire, Open Book Toronto.
• Toronto Lit Events Listings: Patchy Squirrel.

(April 2008)

1.Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig (Coach House) in her third novel, Helwig tells the love story set against the backdrop of a panic in Toronto over an unexplained sickness working its way through the subways and streets. Read TDR’s brand new interview with Maggie Helwig.

2. The Ravine by Paul Quarington. (Random House) The ravine is a timeless backdrop seeded in the memory of every child. It’s where we bury treasures, smoke our first cigarette, or get lost for hours; escaping the surveillance of the city. Canada Reads winner Paul Quarington’s tenth novel centers around Phil McQuigge, whose marriage is over. He has lost his job as the producer of a wildly successful TV series, and has also lost the star of that series who died on the set under mysterious circumstances which adds to Phil’s depression and guilty.

 3. Stunt by Claudia Dey (Coach House) follows Eugenia Ledoux, as she searches for her missing father. The search takes her to Toronto Island and is studded with tightrope walking, postcards from outer space and the explosion of a shoulder-pad factory. Read the new TDR interview with Claudia Dey.

4. Skim written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, (Anansi). After a successful Toronto launch where they sold an estimated 104 copies, this is certainly one of the must-have graphic novel of the season. Written by this Toronto cousins team Tamaki, Skim is a graphic novel about an outcast at a private girls school in Toronto. Read Nathaniel G. Moore’s review of Skim.

5. A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock (ECW). Award-winning writer and literary critic debuts his darkly comic novel that follows the lives of an extended family over one increasingly desperate week. Read TDR’s interview with Nathan Whitlock.

6. Fond by Kate Eichhorn (Book Thug). What drives the collector? Fond is haunted by an author's compulsion to repeat and the archive's inevitable limits. A finding aid guides the reader through a field of drafts, grids and marginalia, but can it account for this conflicting narrative of desire and its inevitable unraveling? Find out this April during poetry month.

7. The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik (Penguin). With Skinny, Kaslik was short-listed for the Amazon Books In Canada First Novel award, and the recently released US edition spent nearly a month on the New York Times bestseller at the onset of 2008. Her second novel, The Angel Riots, takes readers backstage, into hotel rooms and the minds of two dysfunctional bands on their American tour. The novel’s central conflict is channeled through dual-narrators in Jim, an ingénue violinist from the prairies, and Rize, a volatile trombonist. It’s Toronto’s answer to Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo.

8. Troubled by RM Vaughan (Coach House) An innocent flirtation with his therapist escalated into dangerous sexual misadventure. A confession in poetry that is itself distrustful of the language of confession. Says Vaughan in an interview with Xtra, "My hope is that the book will appeal to anyone who has ever made a huge mistake, been caught in a malevolent system or wondered how their decision-making abilities could be so impaired — which is, I'm thinking, just about everybody. Conrad Black might like it. Maybe I'll send one to his prison."

9. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs (Brick Books). Terry Sawchuck, who played for the Leafs the last time the franchise won the Stanley Cup is considered by many to be the greatest professional goaltender of all time. Wrote editor Stan Dragland in a back jacket synopsis that was not used, but which Dragland humoursly read from at the launch and subsequently surrendered to TDR, "Night Work is couched in language so direct and familiar that readers might find themselves in its grip before pausing to wonder why it grabs and holds like the notorious defensive trap. Controlled and flexible rhythms of speech as high art. Lyric moments gathering a powerful narrative that Aristotle would have recognized as tragedy, supposing he could have wrapped his mind around ice."

10. The Sentinel by A.F. Moritz (Anansi) Environmental pathos is one of the subjects A.F. Moritz has decided to focus on in The Sentinel, along with mortality, love, ethics, civilization, the human body and the natural world.

11. Otherworld Uprising by Shary Boyle (Conundrum). Published in Partnership with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery this brand new graphic novel art book features full colour reproductions of Boyle’s recent series of porcelain figurines, examines the influence of her research into historical porcelain on her drawings, and considers the parallel development of her latest oil portraits. The book also features critical essays by the Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Josée Drouin-Brisebois, and Sheila Heti (who also contributes new fiction). Boyle says the process for coordinated so many different people has been a bit maddening. "Full colour hardcover colour corrects, hiring photographers, you actually need a project manager to keep it all together on deadline. A huge leap from Witness My Shame, which was just me, Andy and my friend who I hired to design it."

12. Skin Room by Sara Tilley (Pedlar). The debut novel from playwright Tilley alternates between Sanikiluaq, Northwest Territories (now Nunavut), and St. Johns, Newfoundland. The voice also alternates between 12-year-old Teresa Normans who crashes into Inuit culture, and her later life as a 23-year-old adult in the harrowing final phase of coping with the tragedy of her year in Sanikiluaq. Read TDR's new interview with Sara Tilley.

13. I. V. Lounge Nights: An anthology of the last five years edited by Alex Boyd and Myna Wallin (Tightrope). Every other Friday night for the last ten years, published and promising writers have been reading their work at the IV Lounge. Five years ago poet Paul Vermeersch passed the hosting duties along to Alex Boyd and he's been bringing the series to Toronto ever since. Says Boyd about the collection "The idea for I.V. Lounge Nights, as a new anthology to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series, came out of a conversation with Myna Wallin, we sort of hit on the idea together, Myna suggested Tightrope books, and it has all come together fairly recently," Boyd says. The editors proceeded to cull material from Toronto authors who had impressed them at the series, as well as emerging and established authors, local and otherwise, so the book "reflects the series." The editors are "immensely pleased with the quality of work submitted," and feel it’s a great way to celebrate the series." 

14. The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation by Abigail Carter (McClelland & Stewart). A memoir of the grief-stricken journal of a 9/11 Canadian widow, the family turmoil that follows and the road to recovery.

15. Dead Cars in Managua by Stuart Ross (DC Books). In this his sixth full-length poetry collection, divided into three "discrete poetry projects" Ross works through claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, muses on Bill Berkson, Joe Brainard, and observes the power of language to say what it does not mean exactly with great and moving precision.

16. The New Layman’s Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney (McClelland & Stewart). As a poetry collection, its primary question is: What are the rules? Specifically, what in our culture is available for irony, and what needs to be protected? What is sacred and what is spiritually expendable? What benefits from formal packaging and what doesn’t?

17. Open Slowly by Dayle Furlong (Tightrope). Young lovers tangle, tumble and dance their way through the urban landscape in this debut collection of poetry.

18. The Debaucher by Jason Camlot (Insomniac). Montreal poet gets lyrical and bawdy in this his third collection of poetry. "The debaucher understands/each moment is just once./His understanding is chronic."

19. Augustine in Carthage and Other Poems by Alessandro Porco (ECW). In Porco’s second poetry collection he subverts the very communication of history, remixes some classic English poems and ends the collection with a 21-part series titled "We So Seldom Look on Nantucket."

20. The Dream World by Alison Pick (McClelland & Stewart) explores the mystery concealed within the world we know and recognize, written over a five year period during a move from the mainland to Newfoundland and back again.

21. Asylum by Andre Alexis (McClelland & Stewart) a novel set in Ottawa during the Mulroney years that arrives a decade after the author's debut novel, Childhood.

22. Diana: A Diary in the Second Person by Russell Smith (Biblioasis). In the Introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, Smith explains that this book came out of his repeated attempts at seduction. Smith’s pornographic novel explores female desire. The unnamed narrator – gorgeous, sophisticated, bored, underemployed – embarks on a series of intense urban encounters in an unnamed city. Her desire is limitless: passionate, playful, intense, humorous and without reserve.

23. Blert by Jordan Scott (Coach House) In this debut collection, the poet undertakes a "poetics of stutter", and his life-long linguistic stigma becoming a creative filter. Read Nathaniel G. Moore’s review of Blert here.

24. The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla (Anansi) Malla’s work has already garnered attention from the Pushcart and Journey Prize juries, and he has contributed to CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera as well as McSweeney’s. Read TDR’s interview with Pasha Malla.

25. The North End Poems by Michael Knox (ECW) In his second collection of poetry, Knox explores the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steel town warehouse worker in his bruiser bard style tender rendered in gritty lyric sequences that reveal the nuance of masculinity in both familial and social spheres.

26. The Selected Gwendolyn Macewen Edited by Meaghan Strimas (Exile). Collecting the poetry of a Canadian poetry treasure, 21 years after her death in this brand new career-spanning edition. Read TDR's new interview with Meaghan Strimas.

27. Hagiography by Jen Currin (Coach House). These poems push life’s barely hidden strangeness into the light, and present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event. In Hagiography, mind and sense and the world they move through are interwoven to create a mysterious, familiar, vexing and continuously fascinating human drama.

28. Concertina by Susan Winemaker (Simon & Schuster). A memoir in three parts, Concertina spans five years of the author's life as she makes the extraordinary transition from culinary expert to professional dominatrix. Taking the reader into the secret, hidden world of suburban sado–masochism, Toronto-bred Winemaker introduces readers to an array of colourful characters, before breaking the code of domination: falling in love with a client.

Nathaniel G. Moore is TDR’s features editor.