11:00 - 11:30 :: ABC Life Literacy Good Reads Series with Frances Itani

Good Reads books address the shortage of engaging books for adult literacy learners—books with adult characters, perspectives, themes and subjects—that encourage reading practice, develop literacy skills and increase reading confidence. 

Join author Frances Itani as she reads from her Good Reads title, Missing.
Learn more about Frances Itani

11:30 - 12:00 :: Bird Eat Bird by Katrina Best

A thirty-year-old innocent who still lives with her parents anticipates the experience of a third date; a teenaged vegetarian supermarket cashier struggles to scan a package of offal; an inscrutable pelican in a crowded London park decides to try something different for lunch. Reflecting Best’s life in both Britain and Canada, these artful stories show a warm understanding of the sensibilities, and a beautifully keen ear for the eccentricities and meanings of communication and miscommunication in both societies.
Learn more about Katrina Best

12:00 - 12:30 :: Reinventing the Rose by Kenneth J. Harvey

As a fatherless girl with a mother who persistently encouraged her daughter's artistic temperament, Anna Wells is highly sensitive to the life developing in her when she discovers she is pregnant. Anna's boyfriend, Kevin, considers the time just not right to have children, so Anna moves to Bareneed, an abandoned cove in Newfoundland, where she takes comfort in renovating the interior of her new home and working on a series of paintings detailing roses. All goes well until a car arrives delivering a court summons. Kevin has filed a statement of claim seeking the termination of the embryo as "return of property." Learn more about Kenneth J. Harvey

12:30 - 1:00 :: Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone by Michelle Shephard

Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zonetakes readers on a rollicking ten year journey from New York’s Ground Zero on the night of September 11, 2001, into the mountains of Waziristan, through the streets of Sanaa, behind the wire in Guantanamo Bay and into the homes of warlords and wanted terrorists. With frightening, heart-wrenching, and darkly humourous stories that go beyond the headlines and behind the scenes, join Michelle Shephard as she spends a decade trying to figure out a post-9/11 world.
Learn more about Michelle Shephard

1:00 - 1:45 :: Short but Sweeth

Taste test the debut releases from hot new names in Canadian Literature

Croak
Jenny Sampirisi

Croakis a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mash up of mid-century cartoons, all set to a contemporary pop song.  Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Sampirisi’s grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.  Jenny Sampirisi is the co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing.
Learn more about Jenny Sampirisi

Various Positions
Martha Schabas

This extraordinary debut novel takes us inside the beauty and brutality of professional ballet. Shy and introverted, and trapped between the hyper-sexualized world of her teenaged friends and her dysfunctional family, Georgia is only at ease when she's dancing. In ballet, she finds the exhilarating control and power she lacks elsewhere in her life: physical, emotional and, increasingly, sexual. But a disturbing incident with a stranger on the subway causes her to radically reassess her ideas about physical boundaries—a reassessment that threatens Georgia's ambitions as a ballerina.
Learn more about Martha Schabas

Touch
Alexi Zentner

Sawgamet, a mining boomtown gone bust, a logging village where the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer. Thirty years after his grandfather's pronouncement, Stephen returns home on the eve of his mother's funeral, to reconnect with the stories of his mythic grandfather and to confront the losses of childhood. Introducing a world of wonder and tenderness, where the monsters and witches of the woods are set against singing dogs and golden caribou, Touch is a haunting tale of three generations of love and loss in a town in Northern BC.
Learn more about Alexi Zenter

1:45 - 2:15 :: The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti

How should neighbourhoods change? Is wearing a suit a good way to quit smoking? Why isn’t making the city more fun for you and your friends a super-noble political goal? Why does a computer last only three years? How often should you see your parents? Misha Glouberman’s friend and collaborator, Sheila Heti, wanted her next book to be a compilation of everything Misha knew. Together, they made a list of subjects. As Misha talked, Sheila typed.
Learn more about Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti

2:15 - 3:00 :: Year of the Short Story (YOSS)

YOSS (Year Of the Short Story) aims to unite fellow writers and readers everywhere in one cause—to bring short fiction the larger audience it deserves.  Join short fiction authors Julie Booker, Matthew J. Trafford and Jessica Westhead in a discussion of the YOSS movement!
 

Julie Booker’s Up UpUp is acollection of twenty short, wildly whimsical and yet razor-sharp stories. Booker grabs the reins from writers like Lydia Millet and Miranda July and reminds readers, that words have the power to enlighten and move us—but most of all, to delight.

The forlornly funny stories in Jessica Westhead’s And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled and the obsessed.  As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart. 

Skewering urban culture even as it conjures up the magic in the mundane, the stories of The Divinity Gene map the frailty of the human heart. Masterfully original and deeply human, this collectionintroduces Matthew J. Trafford—a bold and evocative new writer.

3:00 - 3:30 :: The Lost Dream by Steve Simmons

Mike Jefferson wasn’t the only Canadian boy who dreamed of making it to the NHL, and his parents aren’t the first to do whatever was in their power to make their child’s dream come true. But somehow, what started as a fantasy turned a promising young hockey player’s career into a harrowing crime story. Veteran hockey journalist Steve Simmons digs beneath the surface of this story to answer questions that have left Canadians shocked and fascinated. Fast-paced, gripping, and full of insight into the game, The Lost Dream reveals the dark side of the national sport we love so much.
Learn more about Steve Simmons

3:30 - 4:00 :: The Water Man's Daughter by Emma Ruby-Sachs

The violent death of a Canadian water company executive in a black township of Johannesburg weaves together the stories of three conflicted women: a South African anti-privatization activist; the water executive's daughter, Claire, and the officer leading the murder investigation. The Water Man's Daughter, like its characters, is fierce and tender, thought-provoking and emotionally rich.
Learn more about Emma Ruby-Sachs

4:00 - 4:30 :: Natural Order by Brian Francis

“A mother always knows when something isn’t right with her son.”  As a young woman, these words are burned into Joyce Sparks’ mind. Years later, faced with an uncertain future, she sifts through her past, dusting off unsettling memories of her son and the secrets about him she has kept hidden from her everyone—even from herself. From the youthful dreams of a small-town teenage girl to the final, bittersweet stages of life, Natural Order is a timeless story that embraces the traditions we hold close while ushering in a changing world.
Learn more about Brian Francis

4:30 - 5:15 :: Short but Sweet

Taste test the debut releases from hot new names in Canadian literature.

A Cold Night for Alligators
Nick Crowe

A Cold Night for Alligators takes the reader on a breathtaking ride through the seedy, sensual Florida Everglades, unravelling a mystery at the heart of which lies a devastating family secret. Populated with unforgettable characters and a suspense-filled story at its heart, A Cold Night for Alligators is a first novel about loss, hope and the ties that bind family together.
Learn more about Nick Crowe

Match
Helen Guri

Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven’t ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet.  This debut collection explores Robert’s transition from lost and lonely, to loved. Equal parts love story, social parody and radiant display of lyrical gymnastics, Match announces the arrival of a daring, forthright and stubbornly original new talent.
Learn more about Helen Guri

 
I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore
Anne Perdue

These darkly humorous stories take dead aim at how easily our desire to be good is undermined by a desperate need for love. Beautifully imperfect, well-meaning yet easily sidelined, the characters in these eight stories catapult off the rails of ordinary life before raising themselves up — if only for a moment — in oddly heroic ways.
Learn more about Anne Perdue

5:15 - 5:45 :: Joyner's Dream by Sylvia Tyson

Joyner’s Dream is the sweeping multi-generational story of a family and its dubious legacy: an abiding love of music coupled with a persistent knack for thieving. Beginning in England in the 1780s, continuing in Halifax at the time of the Great Explosion, and ending in Toronto in the present, eight larcenous generations from all walks of life – craftsmen and highwaymen, aristocrats and servants, lawyers and B-movie actors – are connected by music, a secret family journal, and a long-lived violin. When branches of the family reunite and lingering secrets are revealed, we come full circle in a hugely satisfying and surprising tale.
Learn more about Sylvia Tyson