Glorious Frazzled Beings

Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children’s clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors’ gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother’s tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering. A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break.

A 2022 Firecracker Award for Fiction Finalist • A CBC Books and Quill & Quire Anticipated Fall Book • A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Title • A 49th Shelf Book of the Year 2021 Linked short stories about families, nascent queers, and self-deluded utopians explore the moral ordinary strangeness in their characters’ overlapping lives. A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. The linked stories in Householders move effortlessly from the commonplace to the fantastic, from west-end Toronto to a trailer in the middle of nowhere, from a university campus to a state-of-the-art underground bunker; from a commune in the woods to a city and back again. Exploring the ordinary strangeness in the lives of recurring characters and overlapping dramas, Householders combines the intimacy, precision, and clarity of short fiction with the depth and reach of a novel and mines the moral hazards inherent in all the ways we try and fail to save one another and ourselves.

SHORTLISTED for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2021 • WINNER of the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2021 • SHORTLISTED for the Chinua Achebe Prize for Nigerian Writing 2021 • WINNER of the SprinNG Women Authors Prize 2020 • WINNER of the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair 2019 “The Son of the House is a compelling novel about two women caught in a constricting web of tradition, class, gender, and motherhood.” — FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review The lives of two Nigerian women divided by class and social inequality intersect when they're kidnapped, held captive, and forced to await their fate together. In the Nigerian city of Enugu, young Nwabulu, a housemaid since the age of ten, dreams of becoming a typist as she endures her employers’ endless chores. She is tall and beautiful and in love with a rich man’s son. Educated and privileged, Julie is a modern woman. Living on her own, she is happy to collect the gold jewellery lovestruck Eugene brings her, but has no intention of becoming his second wife. When a kidnapping forces Nwabulu and Julie into a dank room years later, the two women relate the stories of their lives as they await their fate. Pulsing with vitality and intense human drama, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut is set against four decades of vibrant Nigeria, celebrating the resilience of women as they navigate and transform what remains a man’s world.

When Jane Munro’s husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband, Bob, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Writing with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating while her own identity is eclipsed by a single word—caregiver. Even a doctor admonishes, “What job could be more important than caring for your husband?” In this portrait of the myriad lives contained in a single life, Munro ultimately finds respite in the power of writing, Iyengar yoga and in the rhythms of the moon—not to heal but to face grief without breaking. A poignant evocation for anyone who has experienced loss, Open Every Window reveals the pain and power inherent in loving and being loved. Framed with short observations of the moon—from a New Moon in Pune, India to the following New Moon in Vancouver, Canada—this memoir will entrance with its lyricism and comfort with the writer’s hard-won warmth and wisdom.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST A propulsive literary page-turner about a family torn apart by a mother’s obsession with a sound that no one else can hear One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire’s life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences. The Listeners is an electrifying novel that treads the thresholds of faith, conspiracy and mania. Compelling and exhilarating, it forces us to consider how strongly we hold on to what we perceive, and the way different views can tear a family apart.

Finalist, 2023 Trillium Book Award Finalist, Writers Union of Canada 2023 Daunta Gleed Literary Award Finalist, 2023 ReLit Award for Short Fiction Twelve exquisitely written stories depicting the search for human connection and the attempt to fit in far from home. All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto’s Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book’s characters — including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner — crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home. With its focus on family, culture, and identity, All the Shining People captures the experiences of immigrants and outsiders with honesty, subtlety, and deep sympathy.

Selected by guest editor Diane Schoemperlen, the 2021 edition of Best Canadian Stories continues not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters. “The best short stories,” writes editor Diane Schoemperlen, “are disruptive in all the best ways, diverse in all senses of the word, always looking back and leading forward at the same time ... they must be written in the world, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of more horrifying news every day.” Submitted and published by Canadian writers in 2020, Schoemperlen’s selections for Best Canadian Stories 2021 feature work by established practitioners of the form alongside exciting newcomers, and stories published by leading magazines and journals as well as those appearing in print for the first time—all of which, as Schoemperlen writes, “bring us news of the world and the shape of things to come.” Featuring work by: Senaa Ahmad Chris Bailey Shashi Bhat Megan Callahan Francine Cunningham Lucia Gagliese Alice Gauntley Don Gillmor Angélique Lalonde Elise Levine Colette Maitland Sara O’Leary Jasmine Sealy Joshua Wales Joy Waller

Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction • A Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award Finalist • A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021 Oil-soaked and swamp-born, the bruised optimism of Huebert’s stories offer sincere appreciation of the beauty of our wilted, wheezing world. From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.