Alternately melancholic and hilarious, this book chronicles Pyle’s bonkers experiences while attending hair school, his evolving relationship with his mother, how the Ramones affected his young teen brain, a life-changing car accident, and other situations from a creative life lived fully, providing oodles of salacious dish. You’ll discover how a punk rock pen pal led to a career in showbiz and how to put out the same record over and over again.

Photography, performing and writing music in bands, recording and producing numerous other artists, writing about music, and scoring for film and TV are all part of Pyle’s distinct observer’s eye — one that sees all creative media as aspects of the same stream.

Available from ECW Press

Don Pyle is a Toronto artist, working primarily in music, sound, photography and writing. The band Long Branch, in which he has played with Sally Lee, Lisa Myers, and Laura Pitkanen since 2014, released their second album, Arc of the Sun, in July 2025. He has released numerous records with other bands he has been a part of, including Phono-Comb, Greek Buck, Black Heel Marks, The Filthy Gaze of Europe, Fifth Column, King Cobb Steelie, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. His early photographs of the beginning of punk in Toronto, starting at age 14 in 1976, were the foundation of his first photography exhibition, Trouble In The Camera Club, at The Beaver in Toronto in 2008. He’s written about music for Eye, Now and Exclaim! magazine, and was the sex advice columnist for a local paper for a year. He recently signed with ECW Press for the publication of his third book, Rough Description

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Post-war Riverton has little to offer Richard, a mild-mannered loner working a dead-end job at Eddy & Dowd Safe Deposit Company. When he meets Marlon, a smooth-talking confidence man, Richard finds his partner in crime. Passions ignite between the men, and together, they hatch a plan to rob the vault at Eddy & Dowd—a once-in-a-lifetime score that will fund their escape to the Big City, where they can live and love as they desire.

Their plans are complicated by Gloria, a recent divorcée scheming her own route to wealth; Frank Todd, a disgraced ex-cop desperate to restore his reputation; and the paranoid Mr. Dowd, a tycoon scrambling to hold onto his crumbling empire. As Richard and Marlon race towards their destiny, reckless violence threatens both their plans and their devotion to each other.

Inspired by the iconic lexicon and unsparing storytelling of Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith, The Longest Death weaves a twisted morality tale about what it means to love someone at any cost.

Available from Anansi Press

Kevin Jagernauth is a pop culture critic who has written about cinema, music, and literature for over twenty years. Born in Ottawa, he currently resides in Montreal. The Longest Death is his first novel.

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An aspiring archivist determined to begin a “serious” life after an undistinguished undergraduate career takes up residence in the Italian countryside. Here, he becomes the all-purpose assistant to the Baronessa, known to her friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and naturally flamboyant woman of ninety-two. Amid a chaotic and colourful milieu of gin-swilling princesses, incomprehensible handymen, roaming boarhunters, nuns, and other local wildlife, our young man does his best to catalog the villa’s extensive collection of art and antiques—although he notices that things seem to go missing from right under his nose.

Despite himself, he tumbles into an affair with a married man, complicating his future plans considerably. And when the Baronessa loses someone close to her, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the acceleration of Coco’s great and final plan: to locate the love of her life and be reunited before it’s too late. Told with the signature wit, charm, and humanity that made the author’s first novel, Less, an international phenomenon, Villa Coco is a dazzling, sun-soaked ode to life itself, a meditation on how seriously we ought to take ourselves, and a bawdy Mediterranean ballad about becoming who we’ve always wanted to be.

Available from Penguin Random House

ANDREW SEAN GREER is the bestselling author of seven works of fiction, including Pulitzer Prize winner Less and its companion Less Is Lost. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O. Henry award for short fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in Venice.

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In Scotland, 1933, Bobby MacBryde is on his way to the Glasgow School of Art, after years grafting at Lees Boot Factory. As he sets off to his future, on his first day he meets Robert Colquhoun, a quiet man with loose dark curls, who will never leave his side again.

Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow—its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city—all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.

Stunningly reimagined, The Two Roberts is a profoundly moving story of devotion and obsession, art, and class. It is a love letter to MacBryde and Colquhoun, the almost-forgotten artists who tried to change the way the world sees—and paid a devastating price.

Available from House of Anansi

DAMIAN BARR is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and journalist. His memoir Maggie & Me, won Stonewall Writer of the Year and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year. His debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, was shortlisted for six major awards. He hosts the internationally syndicated television show Big Scottish Book Club, now in its sixth series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Brighton, England.

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National Trust houses and landscapes might seem to embody conventional family values, but for generations some very different stories were hidden away. These belong to owners now considered queer for defying the norms of sexual orientation or gender identity – sometimes blatantly, occasionally as open secrets, but most often very discreetly.

These stories are set against the queer history of the National Trust itself, such as its foundation in 1895 against the backdrop of Oscar Wilde’s trials; hidden queer influences within the Trust in its early days; and the role of homophobia in its reorganisation in the 1960s; and the evolution to inclusivity and understanding in the twenty-first century.

Available from Bloomsbury

Michael Hall has published several books on architecture, country houses and collecting, including Waddesdon Manor: The Biography of a Rothschild House (3rd ed., 2012), George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America (2014) and Art, Passion and Power: The Story of the Royal Collection (2017). A former Architectural Editor of Country Life and Editor of Apollo, he was Editor of The Burlington Magazine from 2017 to 2024.

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A woman’s personal trauma and anxiety are intertwined with the lives of the feral dogs abandoned in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As a lesbian love affair unravels, the secrets of a gift-giving crow are revealed. The life of a veterinarian is told through the animals that she has loved and that she has tried to save. A dying man dreams of returning as a vulture after death. The plight of sea turtles on the brink of extinction weaves through a mother’s devastation over the loss of a daughter.

Available from Arsenal Pulp Press

Nadja Lubiw-Hazard (she/her) is a Toronto-based writer and veterinarian. She is the author of the novel The Nap-Away Motel (Palimpsest Press) and two children’s books. As a manuscript, The Life of a Creature won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.

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Spitz has brought his indefatigable energy and five decades of experiences in the fields and hollows of rock ‘n’ roll to bear on his five-year journey to reexamine one of popular music’s greatest stories. There are myriad revisions to the conventional narrative which underscore just how in control of that narrative the band has been up to now—small example: no, Muddy Waters was not mopping the floors at Chess Records when the Stones showed up.

As with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Spitz’s greatest gift is for the big picture. He knows where the magic is, and why it is. He is as clear-eyed a connoisseur of the show business, the spectacle and the collateral damage of this whirlwind as anyone alive. That lucid gaze pierces a lot of incrusted bullshit, but the ultimate goal is to connect with a creative force whose power shows no signs of fading, over sixty years on.

At its heart the story is about two gentlemen, Mick and Keith, and their unique, fraught, alchemical bond, often tested, never sundered – The Glimmer Twins. The bandmates, like Charlie Watts, who found their groove in relation to this double star made the trip intact, while those who struggled, like Brian Jones and Mick Taylor, were chewed up and spit out.

This is a story with many dark corners, including a surprising number of deaths. But whether Jagger and Richards sold their souls to the devil at the crossroads for blues greatness, or just squeezed their heroes for every drop of inspiration, in the end their connection to their music and to each other put them in a category of one, where they very much remain.

Available from Penguin Random House

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Ten years later, Alex and Ben find each other again—she’s conquering Montreal’s contemporary art world, he’s running a thriving restaurant in Ottawa. But their success feels hollow. As they excavate their shared past, they must confront the ghost of Rob’s disappearance and the trauma that pushed them apart.

Pulsing with the raw energy of basement punk shows and DIY creativity, late-night manifestos and first heartbreaks, Temporary Palaces is a blazing debut that captures a generation caught between idealism and survival, art and activism, the dreams that define us and the compromises that save us.

Available from House of Anansi Press

Jeff Miller is the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, and he frequently publishes criticism. Jeff holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in Nova Scotia.

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Moving seamlessly between quiet melancholy, wry humour, and the supernatural, Super Castle Fun Park is a novel that defies expectations: a tragicomic, very human story about isolation, ghosts, technology, and our deep, abiding need for connection.

Available from Arsenal Pulp Press

Daniel Zomparelli (he/him) is the author of the poetry books Jump Scare,Davie Street Translations, and Rom Com, co-written with Dina Del Bucchia (all published by Talonbooks). His story collection Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person (Arsenal Pulp Press) was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the ReLit Short Fiction Award. He co-edited Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp Press) with David Ly. Born and raised in Vancouver, he now lives in Glendale, CA.

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Loch Baillie pens an unfiltered queer Bildungsroman that traces both a geographical and emotional journey from his birthplace in New England to where he comes to settle in Quebec.

Available from Goose Lane Editions

Loch Baillie is originally from Massachusetts, Loch Baillie (he/il) is a queer writer and editor based in Quebec City, Canada. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, ice, dove parachute (Cactus Press) and Citronella (Anstruther Press), as well as the collection River Running (icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2026). Loch’s writing has appeared in magazines such as Maclean’s, yolk literary, and Ahoy. He is an associate poetry editor at Plenitude Magazine and a board director for the the Quebec Writers’ Federation. From 2o22-2025, Loch served as poet-in-residence for the Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. He is currently pursuing his MA in English literature at Université Laval

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