Praise for The Dishwasher

"Vivid and moving." —The New York Times Book Review

"Carries you away like a speeding taxi in the harsh, dazzling Montreal night." —Catherine Leroux, Giller-shortlisted author of The Party Wall and Madame Victoria

"Utterly absorbing...[an] engrossing look at addiction, city life, music, and work." —Book Riot

"[The Dishwasher] conjures a vivid and unnerving portrait of a work-world that throbs with stress." —CBC The Sunday Edition

"A compelling coming-of-age novel told at the speed of thrash metal: an unlikely and masterful combination of inventive literary autofiction and an irresistible page-turner...The Dishwasher is a gripping tale of unlikely friendships, a romp through the underworld of late-night Montreal, and a blazing thrash metal ode to the heart of every restaurant, the humble dish pit." —Montreal Review of Books

"A Québécois bestseller thankfully arrives for English readers. One can see how this bleak bildungsroman attracted so much attention in Canada...[The Dishwasher] reads like a cross between the dearly departed Anthony Bourdain and Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, combining the complicated life of a kitchen wretch with a highly literate voice...hypnotizing." —Kirkus Reviews

"Quickly adopted by the kitchen-culture crowd before crossing over to mainstream bestseller lists...There’s no reason to think English Canada won’t soon follow suit with Pablo Strauss’s compulsively readable translation...Larue’s eye is so keen, his grip on his milieu so sure." —Montreal Gazette

"In The Dishwasher, Stéphane Larue invests in plot and character. Chapters are paced like restaurant work: there are quiet lulls for you to catch your breath and torrid rushes where nothing stops moving, the type of chaos where the only way to stay on your feet is to wildly tumble forward...Pablo Strauss’ translation creates a narrator and a world of energy and exhaustion....masterful." —Asymptote

"Captivating...consistently propulsive and acutely perceptive." —Hamilton Review of Books

"Larue recounts his story in an energetic style that will keep the reader emotionally vested in the life of The Dishwasher." —CBC Montreal

"An immersive look at the restaurant world make[s] for a gripping read in The Dishwasher...[a] gripping take on a damaged young man finding his place in a particular subculture, and the precise details make for a work that sits comfortably beside works by Anthony Bourdain and George Orwell." —Words Without Borders

"Highly satisfying and original...utterly propulsive, its effects mesmerizing."—Literary Review of Canada

"A gruff-yet-affable working class lament, seasoned with hangdog determination and bleary verisimilitude. From the bar booths to the slop sinks to the shooting galleries of a painstakingly rendered Montreal, Larue proves himself a more than adept raconteur of blackout debauchery and wage labor drudgery. Think Nelson Algren by way of Bud Smith, such is the hardscrabble exactitude on offer in this wincing grin of a novel. An industrious and absorbing slab of cutthroat cuisine, Québécois death metal, and gambler’s dilemmas." —Justin Walls, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)

"I've never been to Montreal but I have worked in restaurants and Stéphane Larue's The Dishwasher made me feel as if I do know that world in great, mad, detail. More importantly, it goes so beyond being a food industry novel or a novel about metal or gambling, it is a book that is both tender and tough. I appreciate this book for all that it must've taken to create--it is a wondrous thing." —Hans Weyandt, Milkweed Books (Minneapolis, MN)

"The Dishwasher is a tragi-comic adventure through the dark underbelly of a high end Montreal restaurant kitchen that follows a down on his luck 30-something brilliantly talented artist with fabulous taste in music and a little gambling addiction. As much a philosophical dive into life, love, trust, obsession, and heavy metal as just a damn good story, The Dishwasher made me laugh, cringe,shake my head and drool over amazing food. I absolutely just couldn't put this quirky cool debut novel by Canadian author Larue that is just perfect for fans of David Sedaris or Anthony Bourdain." —Angie Tally, The Country Bookshop (Southern Pines, NC)

"Prepare to get your soul scrubbed down and wrung out. This novel from Quebec captures a world that will be familiar to folks in the service and music industry. Vividly painted scenes from the trenches of a barely-functional kitchen during a rush followed by dizzying late-night get togethers make up this portrait of the loneliness of late-capitalism and the strength we can find from art and our allies. Gritty, loud, and compassionate." —Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

"A simple story of a want-to-be-artist that has to come to terms with the reality of his vices and get out of his own way. The pacing and phrasing of this novel is in beautiful contrast to the raw story told. The sense of place is unforgettable. From the behind the scenes look of working in a restaurant to the weight of addiction, I devoured every page as I found myself hopeful for the underdog in this brilliant debut." —Shannon Alden, Literati Bookshop (Ann Arbor, MI)

“The only thing I did last weekend was read The Dishwasher.” —Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Seattle, WA)

"A perfectly crafted story...the narrator’s conquest of his gambling addiction ebbs and flows, marked by success and failure, hope and defeat...The Dishwasher is a thoughtful examination of a young man at the end of his options—a humanizing, emotive, and entertaining tale of personal growth." —Foreword Reviews

"The turbulent, immersive narration is an experience on its own. The result is often breathtaking: five hundred feverish pages that take us to a place somewhere between Dostoyevsky's The Gambler and Anthony Bourdain's KItchen Confidential.... Poignant and magnificent." —Le Devoir (Montreal)

"Feverish writing, Montreal streets and characters magnificently described, mind-bending descriptions of what happens behind the scenes at restaurants--you'll never see them in the same way once you've finished the book--a story that is both a dark tale and an existential suspense story, it all combines to make the book unputdownable.... It may be over 500 pages long, but so moving is the story that once you've started it, you feel the irresistible desire to devour it in a single sitting." —Le Soleil (Quebec City)

PRAISE FOR MY CAMINO

"Scathing, riotous...Warner's writing throughout is electric. It's boisterous, bawdy, turbocharged and entirely entertaining. Apostle John is the best kind of narrator — loudly confident one moment, humble and introspective the next, a man of sage opinions and witty, often heartbreaking anecdotes about [his friends] Budsy and Floss, migration, philosophy, music, and the world at large. Reading the book feels like sidling up to the bar with a highly intelligent and hilarious new companion...My Camino is an energizing read, a book that asks cheeky and powerful questions about what it means to create (or abstain) in the early 21st Century."—Toronto Star

"An energetic caper, full of asides and wordplay ... Laugh-out-loud funny at times ... Very well done, masterfully paced, gruesome and vivid ... My Camino is a novel very much occupied by questions of perspective, vantage points, and knowing, nested inside a series of quite powerful journeys."—Malahat Review

“An original and inherently compelling read by an author with a knack for the kind of narrative storytelling that keeps the reader riveted from cover to cover...” — Midwest Book Review

“An uproarious satire of the art world and a joyful, episodic novel that will appeal to anyone looking for a non-dreary read.”—Foyles

"[A] rollicking, peregrinating tale..." — The Packet

PRAISE FOR PATRICK WARNER

“Warner has a wonderful skill for wielding rhythm and rhyme…engaging and memorable.” —Canadian Literature

“Warner’s poems can be comical, tender, brutal … they are always enlightening in their implied connections, sublime in their musical inventiveness.” —Sunday Independent

“I don’t know if anyone in contemporary poetry is bearing more eloquent, precisely strange witness to the certainty of their doubts than Warner.” —ARC Poetry Magazine

PRAISE FOR THIS WICKED TONGUE

“It’s been a long wait for fans of Elise Levine’s delicious short stories. But the wait was well worth it...[This Wicked Tongue] delivers in spades. From the get-go, Levine demonstrates a boisterous command of language and an ability to seize the reader’s attention...her stories pry us open, revealing our secretly wounded places, finally acting as balm and salvation. Lucky us.” —Toronto Star

“Sit back and let the language, distilled to its most pristine, wash over you with the force and effect of poetry.” —Hamilton Review of Books

“Expertly crafted, impressively original, inherently riveting...very highly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review

“Levine offers a vision and a language so poetically visceral and fiercely poignant—so uniquely intelligent—that story after story I was in awe of her courage and artistry.” —Barbara Gowdy

"Edgy...convey[s] themes of yearning and loss...Levine demonstrates her ability as a wordsmith par excellence." —Winnipeg Free Press

“Elise Levine writes with a new and exciting type of lyric rhythm. These are stories with the beating heart of poems.” —Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

“Each story in This Wicked Tongue is powerful and vivid and packed with an emotional punch to the heart.” —Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Elise Levine’s startling sentences alternate between serrated sentiment and lyrical reverie, offering readers that rarest commodity—genuine surprise.” —Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

“Elise Levine uses language like a scalpel to cut to the nervy core of our inner life. There’s a restless desolation in these stories, perfectly poised against a wily, wry wit. This Wicked Tongue is wicked smart.” —Dawn Raffel, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

“Taut, musical sentences...a stylish, experimental collection.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Levine shines, furnishing a mental space with language that juggles colloquial and classical vocabulary, complete with verbs that feel freshly minted. In other hands, such an inward turn might give rise to feelings of claustrophobia, but here one has the sense of a widening.” —Literary Review of Canada

“Wonderfully dark, eerily atmospheric...sharp, smart, thoughtful, and rendered in Levine's customary powerhouse prose.” —Open Book

PRAISE FOR ELISE LEVINE

“Reading Elise Levine is akin to a wild ride down a dark road at night...Bold and startling...Precipitous and exhilarating.” —Globe and Mail

“As immersive, hyper-vivid and true as fiction ever gets.” —Lisa Moore

“A dazzling wordsmith, a lexical tease, Levine is like a kid let loose in a leaf pile, kicking up words for the sheer joy of watching them spin.” —Toronto Star

“A cutting-edge literary sensation.” —NOW Magazine

“One of Canada’s finest fiction writers…Levine demonstrates a kind of incandescent knowing about human affairs which she deploys in stunningly nuanced passages…A sensitive, cagey dominatrix of literary form and human psychology.” —George Elliott Clarke, Mail Star

“Audacious…There’s hardly a word in [these stories] that doesn’t weigh heavily, or doesn’t have a bristling edge to it.” —Toronto Star

“Levine’s vivid language and unflinching exploration of people living on the edge of society will stay with you long after each story is read … Levine is unafraid to experiment with language, voice, and form. Her explorations of humanity and the adventurous spirit of her work will keep the reader hooked, hesitating to turn the page but unable to resist the pull of her prose.” —St. John’s Evening Telegram

“Levine’s writing is adventurous and brave…Tautly constructed and rigorously controlled…” —Quill & Quire

“Levine is, undeniably, an outstanding wordsmith. Her writing style moves in multiple directions, making high stakes out of small movements while turning panic into poetry.” —Winnipeg Review

“Taut and direct, Elise Levine’s writing compresses the distance between art and audience, drawing a reader experientially through her fiction. Levine is a visceral imagist. Her fiction renders event indistinguishable from emotion, affecting the gut as fully as the mind.” —Ottawa Citizen

“Levine uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone…The novel’s visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivor’s guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it’s like to drown.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Levine’s spare language works brilliantly to capture both the vastness of the open water and the claustrophobic chaos of underwater caverns [as well as] a heightened, stylized canvas for Marilyn’s addictive nature...The result is a tale of self-destruction and hubris...absolutely gripping.” —Numero Cinq

“A vibrant mixture of intimate moments...Blue Field is an exploration of two selves coming together with the sea. Levine’s aquatic language is gorgeous, displaying her literary prowess.” —THIS Magazine

“No reader can make his or her way through these stories and retain any kind of complacency.” —Calgary Herald

“Reading the novel is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text...dazzling, textured, tightly woven.” —Music and Literature

“Levine exposes the roughness and the crude pain of life. It’s a rare writer who can write bluntly about the raw side of life while subtly leaving room for her readers to make their own, often disturbing connections.” —Books in Canada

PRAISE FOR NOSY WHITE WOMAN

"Intimate...Wilson presents a kaleidoscope of complicated women finding their way through parenthood, partnership, and career goals...Wilson has a deft hand for examining how the larger world infiltrates the everyday. Her characters are richly conceived...keenly observed, extremely human stories." —Booklist

"Wilson achieves a rare laudable consistency throughout...While her settings might feel commonplace—kitchen-table dramas, extended holiday gatherings, generational disconnects, neighborly interactions—Wilson adds an extra quirk, an unexpected fleeting detail, a sudden revelation that ensures a satisfyingly lingering resonance with each and every story." —Shelf Awareness

"The people in Martha Wilson’s stories are self-aware and grounded, often with an affinity for nature — they garden, love animals, bake muffins for the farmer’s market. Good people, curious and intuitive. The stories defy easy summary, because each involves dozens of resonant incidents and insights." —Toronto Star

“Martha Wilson is one of those authors who gives the impression of knowing all our secrets and liking us anyway. She writes with wit and compassion about ordinary people dealing as well as they can with life’s immensities – growing up, getting married, becoming parents, watching their own parents age and die. Halfway through this wonderful collection of stories, I knew I would recognize Martha Wilson’s voice whenever I encountered it. And I hope I will encounter it often.” —K.D. Miller, author of Late Breaking and the Rogers Writers’ Trust-shortlisted All Saints

“Resonates in that narrow space where everyday life drips with meaning and the quiet world around us breathes its secrets. Nosy White Woman both elevates the ordinary and strips back its facade to reveal the often uncomfortable truths it hides.” —Charlie Lovett, New York Times-bestselling author of The Bookman's Tale and The Lost Book of the Grail

“Nosy White Woman is a collection of compelling stories replete with delicious contradictions. Filled with sardonic, sly humour, the stories can be as touching and fleeting as daily life. The book catches today's zeitgeist, while the style is at once traditional and decidedly contemporary. I looked forward to every spare moment I could find to read this terrific collection.” —Antanas Sileika, author of Provisionally Yours and The Barefoot Bingo Caller

“If I say morally subtle, I’m worried you won’t get how thrilling these stories are. And oh, they are thrilling. Martha Wilson plumbs the smallest moments of everyday life—of aging, marriage, parents and children—to unclog the biggest questions. In her gloomy and hilarious way, she makes familiar dramas, insults, and injuries—what one narrator calls “the small tragedies”—sparklingly fresh. If you’re looking for crescendo and certainty, though, then don’t read this absolutely quietly perfect book that I devoured through the night with a headlamp on because that’s how good it is.” —Catherine Newman, author of Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy

“Martha Wilson’s curiosity about the world is wide-ranging and generous. In these fine stories, she brings a tender, courageous and precise attention to her characters’ foibles and concerns, while charting the places where ordinary lives intersect with and react to the political.” —Kim Aubrey, author of What We Hold in Our Hands

Praise for Mostarghia "

Fascinating and timely...anybody who wants to think deeply about what happens when people are forced to leave their homelands will want to pick this book up." —Book Riot

"Intimate, a filial cri de cœur...The book is run through with dark humour, and some of the most fatalistic scenes are also wryly funny...The condition of nostalgia is both dissociative and cleaving, and it is this tension that Ombasic most adeptly conveys." —Montreal Review of Books

"Strikes a great balance between the ebb and flow between unemotional observations that provide context for the lasting divides in the Balkans, and a humanization of the victims of conflict....[Ombasic writes] with a tender care that evokes a sadness mixed with levity, anger mixed with love." —The Walleye

"After her father dies, Ombasic seeks to resolve all that was unresolved between them in life. Her memoir ripples with the tension of these two great hearts each trying to shoulder an outsized burden... Subtly and with lyricism, Ombasic unpacks her father’s role in her history alongside the role of their hometown, Mostar, not to mention the Balkans, religion, communism, war, displacement, and nostalgia.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

"Tender and unsparing...this fragmentary remembrance in the second person effectively creates an intimate universe of two..." —Toronto Star

"With great candor, Ombasic shares how her experience as a refugee differed from her father’s...Through beautiful prose and impressive attention to detail, Ombasic paints a loving yet honest portrait of her father in all his complexity." —OpenCanada

"An overwhelming homage, clear-eyed and drenched in tenderness, Mostarghia is driven by Maya Ombasic's strong, sensitive voice, which allows us to glimpse the reverse side of the shadow of exile. Magnificent." –Le Devoir (Montreal)

"In an unadorned style, which contains emotion by restricting itself to facts, the author recounts her years during the war, then her exile in Switzerland, then Canada. The book's strength stems in large part from its ability to show the concrete daily consequences of a war from which the family suffers without participating in it directly, to showcase the absurdity of the issues--ethnic, religious, territorial--from which children and parents feel themselves estranged." –Le Monde (Paris)

"The book, its title inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia, is a daughter's love song to her father and the tale of her salvation, her refusal to be defeated by depression in order to move on." –l'Humanité (Paris)

Praise for The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form

“His deep analysis of great works of fiction is more like the study of, say, quantum physics...comprehending the underpinnings of our existence in relation to the evolution of storytelling creates perspective that leads to mindfulness, an understanding of what resonates in the human psyche—what words, what phrases, what desires...it empowers [writers] to create works of deeper, more effective meaning, works that engage on both conscious and subconscious levels.”— Orca

“The collection is a fascinating journey through literature, philosophy, form, and the connection we all feel when we encounter incredible writing.”— Fiction Writer's Review

Praise for Douglas Glover

“Glover is a master of narrative structure.” — Wall Street Journal

“So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into … the author’s poetic grace.” — The New Yorker

“Every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays” — The Globe & Mail

“Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart … a direction for future literary criticism to take.” — The Denver Quarterly

“Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny.” — Maclean’s

“Passionately intricate.” — The Chicago Tribune

“Few experiences in life are as great as reading towering writers like Jane Austen and Alice Munro. As a critic, Douglas Glover does something astonishing: he makes that experience even better. By reading Glover you become a better reader, more alive to the nuance, music, and sheer richness of the best writing. He's a critic who elevates reading itself into an art form.”— Jeet Heer

“Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Impressive, enjoyable, and highly instructive … This is not literary craft reduced to statistical formulae and write-by-the-numbers word-bytes. Glover’s admirable ability and patient willingness to cast a careful—not cold—eye on what makes sentences hum and flow is fueled by a vital, infectious fascination with words, enabling him to reveal the inspired, alchemical, verbal concatenation at work in the most alluring and memorable fiction writing.” — Review of Contemporary Fiction

“For the budding writer, Attack of the Copula Spiders offers an excellent primer on the basics; the practiced writer will glean so much more from Glover’s wonderful literary experience.” — The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Douglas Glover, the award-winning Canadian writer of fiction, short stories and essays carries within him a huge sense of duty both to the craft of writing and to the language … I stand before it in awe … This is a book for all writers and for any creative writing class syllabus.” — Telegraph-Journal

Praise for New Brunswick

"Immediately evident in Neilson's writing is an attentive musicality...Extensive and grounding imagery...[His] sharp observations entice. New Brunswick rings in tone and tribute as a moody historic elegy." —Quill & Quire

Praise for Shane Neilson

“Shane Neilson’s Meniscus is an example of that rare and defining moment in a poet’s career when subject and language meld into authentic poetic voice.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Neilson’s ability to make the bipolar mind comprehensible, a place that needs to be understood, in ‘Manic Statement’ is perhaps the book’s greatest success. It never lapses into cliché and even manages to slip in a bit of wit.” —Canadian Literature

“Neilson’s use of language is stark, but this off-kilter beauty is arresting . . . Although the territory Neilson covers in his debut tradebook is undoubtedly dark, there are still many worthwhile moments to be forged in its depths.” —Northern Poetry Review

“[Neilson] dares to dream.” —The Prairie Journal

Praise for The Story of My Face

“Quietly powerful, with considerable emotional depth: an intriguing account of tortured faith and thwarted desire.” —Kirkus Reviews

“One of the most compelling, unsettling novels I’ve read in ages, which should appeal to fans of classy thrillers and literary fiction alike.” —Sarah Waters

“[Page’s] writing, mostly in the present tense, is lit with an immediate sense of period, summoning images which are by turns softly painterly, sharply filmic or as murky as those first television images of the moon landing.” —Aisling Foster, TLS

“Incredibly evocative and haunting . . . it keeps you reading, wanting to uncover both Natalie’s past and that of Tuomas Envall.” —Clare Heal, Sunday Express

“An elegantly compelling story of how a young girl’s obsession forever changes the lives of those around her.. a disciplined exploration of the complexity of human motivation and our need for redemption.” —Lynne Van Luven , Vancouver Sun

“A most impressive achievement.” —Jessica Mann, Daily Telegraph

“A compelling and unpredictable journey . . . beautifully written, rolls on at a rapid pace and delivers a satisfying punch at the end.” –Christine Pountney, Toronto Star

“A moving, absorbing story . . . Kathy Page writes beautifully.” —Helen Dunmore (author of A Spell of Winter)