The Globe & Mail recently published their annual list of Top 100 titles, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Showing their good taste, some LPG publishers had titles that made the cut:
Poetry
Phil Hall's Killdeer, published by BookThug, which recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry.
"Phil Hall’s Governor-General’s Award-winning Killdeer is a literary memoir in the form of a lyrical essay, which he rescues from its excesses and turns into something as adventurous as it is readable. Hall is one of the most inventive, and least pretentious, poets we have. If he’s not a household name yet, he deserves to be." – Paul Vermeersch
Canadian Fiction
The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise, published by Biblioasis.
"A short-story stalwart, Blaise gives us whole personalities and the lived experience of his characters in a handful of pages. He has always explored the interconnections (and disconnections) of cultural and geographical spaces (and people). In The Meagre Tarmac, Blaise addresses himself to India and the stories of Indian immigrants in North America." – Steven Hayward
Published by Coach House Books and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Monoceros by Suzette Mayr.
"In this imaginative, quirky and devastating novel, the first chapter is narrated by the Dead Boy, harassed for being gay. By the end of the chapter, he has hanged himself; the rest of the novel is written by the students, parents and staff affected. Mayr nails the voices of her stable of wildly divergent narrators with aplomb." – Zoe Whittall
Translated by David Scott Hamilton, Nelly Arcan's Exit, published by Anvil Press.
"Exit was finalized just days before Arcan’s suicide at 36. Set in Montreal “in the not too distant future,” the novel opens two years after a guillotine “malfunction” left narrator Antoinette paraplegic, rather than granting her the death by decapitation she then desired. Dark, beautiful, poignant and clever, Exit is a powerful read." – Lisa Foad
The Time We All Went Marching by Arley McNeney, published by GooseLane Editions.
"This small, beautiful book is filled with large themes. Edie and her four-year-old son, Belly, have boarded a train to B.C., leaving Belly’s father passed out in their freezing apartment. On the train, Edie tells Slim’s stories of Depression-era marches to Belly. McNeney layers these stories on Edie’s story with great care. A stunning achievement." – Michelle Berry
Non-Fiction
Taking My Life by Jane Rule, published by Talonbooks.
"In this absorbing posthumous memoir, Rule the realist has illuminated with insight, joyousness, tenderness and even pain the influences that were to shape her as a writer and as a sexual being. Her great openness about relationships, her insistence on the creation of community, her pursuit of truth, are very much in evidence." – M.A.C. Farrant
Little Comrades by Laurie Lewis, The Porcupine's Quill
"In her first book, Lewis, now 80, tells of being raised in Calgary by parents who were members of the Communist Party, though her father was a drunk and abusive. Demonstrating a talent for ironic juxtapositions and uncanny observational skills, she brings the Great Depression and Second World War unforgettably to life." – Elisabeth Harvor
Why Not: Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson, published by Biblioasis.
"These thoughtful meditations on the big questions of life (and death) emerge from mental pain and a writer’s need for whatever helps you make it through the night. I like Robertson's well-read mind, from which he draws on an array of thinkers from Seneca to Nietzsche in the tradition of Montaigne's investigation into what we know about ourselves." – Stan Persky
To see the complete Top 100 list, visit the Globe & Mail website.
