Bookthug imprint: 95 books

Bridge Retakes, the debut novel by Angela Lopes, is a whirlwind millennial tale of love and family and the distances that people will (or won't) go to secure what they want. A Bahian man and a Brazilian-Canadian woman meet on an online dating site. They come from very different worlds—geographically,...

In October 2012, lovers William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances,...

Erin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too. Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept of the "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection...

Nobody Rides For Free: A Drifter in the Americas chronicles former bike courier John Hughes' rambles through Latin America on a bicycle. In this gripping mosaic-travellogue, readers are introduced to banditos, artists, grifters, would-be wives, dope fiends and attacking monkeys: a cast of characters...

Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that,...

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth about the Writing Life is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. These stories, by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, are sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths. Voluptuous Pleasure will take you inside...

Precious Energy, the fourth collection of poetry from Hamilton-born poet and playwright Shannon Bramer, is a uniquely playful collection of vibrantly sad, peculiar, and often funny poems about domestic life, motherhood, and the baffled child that remains within us all even as we grow up and into whatever...

In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later as an adult, he read a story about how Kurt Schwitters' "interior house-sculpture" ("Merz Structure No. 2") was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building...

We sit, hunched over the words that appear on our smartphone screens, altogether unaware of the story of our lives that is going on around us, even as we focus on the minutiae of our social media "friends'" daily activities. These are the stories that draw our undivided attention, and these...

Tuft: "A bunch (natural or artificial) of small things, usually soft and flexible, ...fixed or attached at the base." - OED With Tuft, Kim Minkus takes us on flights of poetic fancy into futures where we "observe the green elite" and "iceplants bloom in the monotony of paved...

Winner of the 2016 Grand Prix littéraire Archambault Written with gritty humour in the form of a confession, Mama's Boy recounts the family drama of a young man who sets out in search of his mother after a childhood spent shuffling from one foster home to another. A bizarre character with...

At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of the modern couple's apartment. In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives...

Double Teenage tells the story of two young teenagers (best friends, Celine and Julie) who are coming of age in the 1990s along the US–Mexico border—a place where nothing seems to happen, but only because what counts as 'something' is defined by far-off centres of power. In their small, desert...

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face...