By David James Brock

W&W SpringCover 2018FINALCollected.qxp_Layout 1 11/6/17 10:34 PM Page 1 WOLSAK & WYNN Catalogue Spring 2018 dedicated to publishing clear, passionate canadian voices. Wolsak and Wynn is an eccentric literary press based in the heart of Hamilton, Ontario. With steel mills on one side of us, the Niagara Escarpment on the other and Toronto somewhere off in the distance, we spend our time producing brilliant, highly individual and sometimes provocative books. With over thirty years of publishing behind us, we’ve won a number of awards for our books, from the Governor General’s Award for Poetry to the Pigskin Peter’s Award for Nominally Narrative Canadian Cartooning. Wolsak and Wynn publishes poetry, fiction and non-fiction for nearly every taste. About our imprints: Buckrider Books features cutting-edge poetry and genre-bending fiction that challenge everyday literary conventions. On the outskirts of the mainstream, we feel these books represent the best that contemporary literature has to offer. James Street North Books focuses on telling the stories of Hamilton, and the area around it, by the authors who live here. From histories of our institutions to collections of poems that capture the essence of our neighbourhoods, these books know our city intimately. Poplar Press is devoted to books you want to read, rather than the books you perhaps should be reading. Whether the stories involve young heroes fending off giant centipedes or childhood memories of snails escaping the cooking pot, along with a recipe for the snails, these books will keep you turning pages. • www.wolsakandwynn.ca/ • facebook.com/groups/wolsakandwynn/ Follow us on • twitter.com/wolsakandwynn • instagram.com/wolsakandwynn/ sociAl mediA: • pinterest.com/wolsakandwynn/ • wolsakandwynn.tumblr.com/ • youtube.com/user/wandwynn Wolsak and Wynn gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada for their generous support. Adjacentland By Rabindranath Maharaj Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day. In this disquieting new work from award-winning novelist Rabindranath Maharaj, a man awakens in a strange institution called the Compound with no memory of his past. Struggling to make sense of his surroundings, he is skeptical of the administrators who try to convince him he is mad and dangerous, and suspects he has been the subject of recurring experiments, which have caused episodes of amnesia. In dreamlike prose Maharaj weaves a story of fragments, where our narrator comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As the narrator searches for clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. With a motley group of inmates from the Compound, the narrator decides to make his way there, but during the journey he discovers a terrible secret about himself and his companions. excerpt is may sound desperate but a man with little to remember is forced to remember everything. But you, my friend, already know all of this. Are you disa ppointed that I am here, referring to you? If so, you will be even more distraught to know that I have determined – from your manner of evoking accusations in an abstract and indirect way – that you are secretive and sly. Here is this sentence, for instance: “Once we shared the same thoughts and Other Title of Interest beliefs, complimented each other’s views, made fractions whole but all of that was ripped in half. We each went our separate ways, walking away from ourselves, never looking back.” In another letter, torn into four pieces so I had to Death Valley fit them together was this line: “I have disguised my writing and it is my hope By Susan Perly that by the time you determine my identity you would have understood enough 978-1-928088-10-3 to forgive me. We are the only ones le. Trust no one. Least of all yourself.” 312 pp. $22 2016 Fiction Rabindranath Maharaj is the award-winning aut hor of three short story collections and five novels, includingThe Amazing Absorbing Boy, which won the 2010 Trillium Book Award and the 2011 Toronto Book Award, and was voted a CBC Canada “Hypnotic in its Reads Top 10 for Ontario. In 2012, Maharaj received a Lifetime Literary Award, weirdness, Death administered by the National Library and Information System Authority as part of Valley laments a the commemoration of Trinidad’s fiieth independence anniversary. In 2013, he was world that has awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, which honours significant played host to the contributions and achievements by Canadians. Cold War, the atomic bomb, and wars big and small from Vietnam to Iraq.” – Toronto Star 978-1-928088-56-1 5.5”x 8.5” Paperback 350 pp. $22 May Fiction Frontlist : Fiction 2 In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo By Claire Tacon sometimes you don’t know what you need until you go looking for something else. When Henry Robinson’s daughter Starr is born with Williams Syndrome, he swears to devote his life to making her happy. More than twenty years later, Henry works at Frankie's Funhouse, where he repairs the animatronic band that Starr loves, wrestling with her attempts at living outside the family home. Hi s wife wishes he would allow Starr more independence and turn his attention a little more to their own relationship and their other daughter, who is pregnant. As tensions mount Henry’s young co- worker, Darren, reveals he needs to get to Chicago Comic Con to win back his ex-girlfriend, so Henry packs Starr (and her pet turtles) and Darren (still dressed as Frankie the mascot) into the van for a road trip no one was prepared for. Told in multiple points of view, we hear from Henry, Darren and Starr as they all try to find their place in the world. In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo is a charming, tender and oen funny story of a father struggling to let his daughters grow up and of a family struggling against hard odds, taking care of each other when the world lets them down. excerpt I see the ad early in the day. A Frankie’s Funhouse fiy miles out of Chicago is converting a Niy Trio Set to Digital One. ey’ve got an old Franny Feathers, Starr’s favourite character, as is. Hasn’t worked right since the “Spooky Good Time” show was loaded in last Halloween. $1900 – fire sale rate – pick it up by the end of the month. Buyer beware, she lurches more than a stick shi in January. ey’ve had her oﬀ-grid for the past three months, draped with a spare curtain. My wife’s already drawn the line in the sand. We’re running out of basement Other Title of Interest square footage. ere’s Frankie on vocals, Tops the Turtle on stand-up bass and e Rattlers on drums. In the middle is Starr’s mic stand, a barbell weight threaded onto the base for extra stability. An old desktop is oﬀ to the side, with a The Capacity for Infinite three knob panel – junked pani c buttons from elevators – that lets her run the Happiness system. Green plays the music on her computer through the speakers, yellow By Alexis von Konigslow makes the band play along, red shuts it all down. 978-1-894987-97-4 320 pp. $22 2015 Claire Tacon’s first novel, In the Field, was the winner of the 2010 Metcalf-Rooke Fiction Award. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award, the CBC Literary Prize and the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and has appeare d in journals and anthologies such as The New Quarterly, SubTerrain and Best Canadian Short “At this novel’s heart Stories. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia is a mystery, one and is a past fiction editor of PRISM international. Claire is a lecturer at St. Jerome’s that can sustain University and runs the fiction podcastThe Oddments Tray with Chioke I’Anson. propelling the story forward and back. It’s Arcadia for the connected age.” – Globe and Mail 978-1-928088-57-8 5.5”x 8.5” Paperback 224 pp. $20 May Fiction 3 Frontlist : Fiction Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City By Tanis MacDonald When you are an outsider, everything looks like a garrison. Poet and scholar Tanis MacDonald has taught creative writing for twenty years all across Canada: in small community workshops, large university classes and everything in between. The question she’s heard the most is “How can I be a writer?” and she realized early on that this question had nothing to do with putting words on a page. Out of Line is her answer to this question. In this wide-ranging work MacDonald looks at our societal preconceptions about the artist lifestyle and examines how real artists fit into the everyday world. Along the way she walks the reader through the steps that must be taken for an idea to make it from a concept to a finished piece and what happens once the work is out in the world. Out of Line opens up the arts to everyone who might dream of creating. excerpt I wrote this book because the questions that my students were asking me were oen variations on How do I learn to be a writer? is is a broader question than How do I write? and more complex than the writing exercises I could teach in class.

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