Featuring Addresses by Cynthia Flood, Somehow There Was More Here by Danny Goodman, In Our House by the Sea by Kirsty Logan, and Cross Yourself by Lana Storey. Cover art by the Winter 2011 Cover Image Contest winner Alex Lewandowski.
Click on cover for more info FPQ Winter 2011 The Moment
We Came Alive $3.75
Have We Become Extraordinary Yet?
Featuring Psalm 77 by Jack Bootle, Eleven Miles There, Twelve Miles Back by Meghan Rose Allen, Angels Passing by Don McLellan, and Memories of a Carnivore: Adventures in Eating Ethically by Julie Dupuis.
Click on cover for more info FPQ Spring 2011 Have We Become
Extraordinary Yet? $3.75
FPQ Summer 2011 Preorder
Featuring The Oughts by Richard Rosenbaum, The Last Judgement by Maria Meindl, Bright Lights on Broadway by Dave Margoshes, and Obscure Objects by Caroline Adderson.
New wife and mother Julie is a woman struggling to find her place. Her dilemmas, while modest, feel harsh, and reflect the ways in which women were once denied control over their own bodies. Her first steps toward independence bring great pain—and not only to herself.
With sparing, incisive prose, Cynthia Flood unravels what it meant to be a married woman in post-war era Vancouver, creating an evocative and even unsettling experience for the reader.
Father Michael, in his final assignment, has been asked by his Order to help facilitate recovery of an Asian country blighted by war. On the long odyssey into the interior, his driver and translator Trang tells him a story set in a once-famed traveller’s refuge known as the Inn of Tender Embraces. What starts as a simple tale of ill-fated lovers becomes, for Father Michael, a familiar beacon that guides him through the mists of an exotic landscape.
Sometime after the incomprehensible death of his son, Joan Miró has settled into his new job working the overnight shift at a Hasty Market in Toronto. He has plenty of time to think beneath the fluorescent lights of the convenience store: of ghosts and late nights, of downtown living and dying, of customer service and self-preservation, of the beauty of the night sky, and of the attempts people make to connect with one another despite seemingly insurmountable distances. These fragments of life prove as difficult to make sense of as any code — until one night, when an extraordinary series of events suddenly teases a pattern from the dark.
Deep in the heart of Ontario cottage country, Izza Ingram’s biological family disintegrates when her parents become trapped in a moment Izza can barely remember. Lost to their parents, she and her sister Paulie form an unlikely family unit under the guidance of their parents’ friend Doug. In this trio of their own making, Izza, Paulie, and Doug try to navigate the differences between the families we are born into versus the families we choose.
Romance is candlelight on cheekbones, blurring gazes and the press of heels on strange sheets. But what happens a year later? You’re sharing bath towels and bickering over who forgot to buy a light bulb. There is beauty in a familiar hand on the nape of your neck. There is love in waking up under a shared blanket. In Our House by the Sea is about the romance of domesticity.
Memories of a Carnivore: Adventures in Eating Ethically
Part travelogue, part memoir, part diary, Memories of a Carnivore pieces together the fragmented recollections of one woman’s rocky journey toward vegetarianism. From her rural upbringing in francophone Northeastern Ontario to exotic locations, outlandish adventures, and bizarre meals, Julie relives her struggle to make the right food choices for herself and examines the consequences of her decisions. At once raw and irreverent, Memories of a Carnivore frankly discusses issues at the core of today’s social conscience.
On an isolated English beach a man looks back on his school days, recalling the joy and torment of a secret love affair with a boy full of strange ideas, a boy obsessed with the language of the King James Bible. Moments from their relationship return to him: the hidden meetings on the beach, the first attempts at sex, the boredom of a school assembly in summertime, the cruelty of a young English teacher. But most of all he remembers the boy’s words. They’re words that, years later, will haunt him as he tries to come to terms with the person he has become.
In New York City, Ben smokes too much and sleeps with women as a way to deaden his insecurities. With every indiscretion, he fights off adulthood for one more day, until the return of an ex-lover leaves him unsure of everything. Ben’s best friend, Josh, struggles to find the good in his marriage to Maddie, even as he searches for a way to keep from losing her. Ben’s neighbor, Mrs. Aguilera, looks to make peace with those she has already lost.
Gripping tightly to one another like the oddest of families, Ben and his friends embody the place in which they live: a city where everything combines, with a touch of perfect madness, into something more than the sum of its parts.
