Begging Questions was honed to perfection over 15 years, and is the highly anticipated new book of stories by Seán Virgo, winner of the CBC, BBC, and National Magazine awards for short fiction.
In these stories, Virgo engages questions left hanging by public and private lives in a world whose foundations have shifted beyond prediction: questions of identity and belief; the emigré phantoms of memory; the frail oppositions of beauty to experience.
"Virgo is fearless: he wills his curiosity about people to draw him into situations where lesser writers fear to tread." Toronto Star
"A writer at the peak of his form!" Books in Canada
"Implicit in his fiction is a reverence before both the miracle of consciousness and the miracle of nature." Times Literary Supplement

Far from Nothing is the fast-paced story of thirty-five-year-old Rudolf, manager of a car dealership. He is also a student about to graduate in philosophy from the university, and he and his wife work day and night hoping for a better life. Rudolf also keeps up a heart-wrenching relationship with the chic Wanda. There are no limits to their relationship, and everything is open. Then there is Nina, who studies logic but is secretly a prostitute. And Alfred, owner of a car-leasing company, seemingly upright, but secretly an embezzler. All these characters conceal something. But love, money and power turn everyone inside out so radically that Rudolf sometimes believes we only think we exist...
"The bravery of the author is, at the end, when he returns the reader to the beginning, giving him the chance to fathom how many human dilemmas have been raised ... this book is a must read!" Nation

In Ontological Necessities Priscila Uppal investigates the emotional and philosophical struggle fundamental to notions of being in the 21st century. From poems that explore questions of identity (who is anyone, anyway?) to those that attempt to examine human relationships with the onslaught of horrors depicted daily in the news, this collection uses surrealist and absurdist language in subversive and startling ways to grapple with the increasingly absurd world we all occupy. Written with the verve of the uninhibited artist but with a clarity of thought and expression more akin to the scientist or scholar, these poems are utterly contemporary and utterly aware of the past; a necessary tonic for our times. Ontological Necessities also includes a radical, post-9/11 translation of the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Wanderer," dragging our political and artistic past into the present and future, and back again.
"Priscila Uppal is certainly one of the most engaging young poets writing in English in Canada today." World Literature in Review
"Unquestionably a writer of strong vision and bold strokes." The Toronto Star
"Outstandingly successful ... Uppal writes with a spare and sure effectiveness that is totally convincing." Books in Canada

Lanzmann and Other Stories marks the national appearance of a startlingly gifted writer. Ranging widely in subject matter -from a musician’s destructive narcissism to the strange effects a persistent Norwegian has on a bachelor’s love life - the stories in this collection also vary in style, from the elegant and insightful to the highly adventurous. Inventive, deeply comic, and sometimes very unsettling, this is an assured and solid debut, completely engaging in its adventurous maturity.
"Lanzmann and Other Stories is smart and funny and crass and intelligent. There is sour humour in these stories and bitter discovery. Tarnopolsky is full of form and new feeling. Highly recommended." - Michael Winter
"Full of sex and music, cynicism and beauty, absurdity and perfect order, cities and conversation and perversity, Tarnopolsky’s elegant stories are darkly brilliant reflections of our darkly glittering age." - Stephen Marche

In Technicolored Jason Guriel explores the nature of the 20th century icon, both filmic and poetic. Unspooling like a lost canister of film, this book offers fresh takes on Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and Brigitte Bardot, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, Béla Lugosi, alongside William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Frank O’Hara.
It is hard to believe this is a first book of poetry, not only because these poems have appeared in virtually every journal in the country, but also because they have a precision of tone and image characteristic of older, more seasoned poets. Readers will enjoy revisiting their favourite screen idols and poetic staples while being introduced to a new voice on the Canadian literary scene that is sure to dazzle us as he too is exposed on the black and white of the page.
"His literary daring is the fresh heart of this gripping poetry which rolls over you like a warm evocation of life; and life that is being experienced for the first time ... a wave, like a violin’s scream of beauty." - Austin Clarke