Shut Up You Re Pretty

Winner, Trillium Book Award In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides on shaving her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humor, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed. Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

From the author of Happy Birthday or Whatever, an outright hilarious and heartfelt collection of personal essays about everything from underwear to musical theater. ANNIE CHOI HATES MUSICAL THEATER. SHE THINKS SANDWICHES ARE BORING. She likes camping, except for the outdoors part. At fifteen, her father made her read the entire car manual before allowing her to sit in the driver’s seat. Her neighbor, who has no cur­tains, is always naked. And she once chased down a man who stole her handbag. All this is to say that Choi is one part badass and one part curmudgeon, with a soft spot for savage bears. Mostly she wants to ask the world: WTF?! Written in Choi’s strikingly original and indignant voice, Shut Up, You’re Welcome paints a revealing portrait of Annie in all her quirky, compelling, riotous glory. Each of Choi’s personal essays begins with an open letter to someone (babies) or something (the San Fernando Valley) she has a beef with. From the time her family ditched her on Christmas to her father’s attach­ment to the World's Ugliest Table, Choi weaves together deeply personal experiences with laugh-out-loud observations, all of which will delight and entertain you.

Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence and a timid foot in two distinct cultures. In these stories, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada, as a daughter questions her father's love at an IKEA grand opening; an aunt remembers a safari-gone-wrong in Kenya; an uncle's unrequited love is confronted at a Goan Association picnic; a boy tests his faith amidst a school-yard brawl; and a childhood love letter is exchanged during the building of a backyard deck. Singularly and collectively, these stories will move the reader with their engaging narratives and authentic voices. "This charming collection of stories resides between a suburban childhood in Canada and inherited, often mythic, tales from Goa that belong to the elders. Characters decide on love with rings lost at sea and soothe babies with stories of elephants in mountains. The voices in these stories are from people who seem far away and yet are inside us. Prepare to be delighted." --Kim Echlin, author of Under the Visible Life "The stories in Derek Mascarenhas's Coconut Dreams remind one of the high stakes in a child's world, the way that danger looms just fractionally outside safety. Like all proper enchantments, these vignettes are dark, light, strange, and vivid such that they delight and charm in equal portions." --Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner. "In this evocative collection, Derek Mascarenhas takes up the fictional Pinto family and turns it gently in his hands, revealing new truths--and new questions--with every shift in point of view. A moving, multifaceted debut." --Alissa York, author of The Naturalist

AUTHORS’ DISCLAIMER: We are not in any way experts on parenting children with disabilities. Our goal is simply to share strategies that have worked for each of us in the event it may help those in a similar situation. If you’re different from us (i.e., you are bright or of the perfect persuasion), we advise you not to try the following at home. On a “perfection-preoccupied planet,” sisters Gina and Patty dare to speak up about the frustrations, sadness, and stigmas they face as parents of children with disabilities (one with Asperger’s syndrome, the other with bipolar disorder). This refreshingly frank book, which will alternately make you want to tear your hair out and laugh your head off, should be required reading for parents of disabled children. Shut Up About Your Perfect Kid provides wise and funny advice about how to: • Find a support group—either online or in your community • Ensure that your child gets the right in-school support • Deal with people—be they friends, family members, or strangers—who say or do insensitive things to you or your child • Find fun, safe, and inclusive extracurricular activities for your child • Battle your own grief and seek professional help if you need it • Keep the rest of the family intact in moments of crisis

Lowe Carter and Faith Williams could not be more different. Lowe comes from money, very old money. Faith scrapes by, living paycheck to paycheck, sending what little she has left to her mother and little sister. Lowe is just starting her obligatory two-week visit with her parents when she collides, literally and figuratively, with the beautiful Faith. What better way to spend two weeks of hell than in the company of a hot, sexy woman? The only problem is that employees like Faith are forbidden to fraternize with residents and their guests. Join Lowe and Faith as they sail on The Escape, the world’s largest private residence on the water.

2022 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Shortlist A humorous coming-of-age novel-in-stories and a sharp-edged look at how silence can shape a life, from the winner of the Journey Prize. A Chatelaine Summer Reads pick. “But wait, what happened to the girl?” “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t tell him that what will happen to her is what happens to every girl. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina doesn’t say anything when her best friend begins to pull away, or when her crush on her English teacher intensifies. She doesn’t say anything when her mother tries to match her up with local Halifax Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, or when her worried father starts reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. (“How can your dad be happy when his only daughter is unsettled?”) And she won’t speak of the incident in high school that changes the course of her life. The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the nineties to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret. And whether she’s pushing herself to deliver speeches at Toastmasters meetings, struggling through her MFA program, enduring the indignities of online dating, or wrestling with how to best guide her students, she will discover that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply moving, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the fraught relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

Shut Up/Look Pretty is an anthology featuring Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale and Amber Sparks. This book will be released in January 2012 and is available for pre-order now.Things About Me and You, a collection from Lauren Becker, is about a mailman who buries the mail, young girls with more bravado than self-awareness, a wrong daughter in a right family, uneven relationships, and beginnings and ends of friendships, with a singular theme of connectedness its presence, its absence, and the inevitability of both.Erin Fitzgerald's This Morning Will Be Different features a car salesman, a high school senior, a failed dictator, a ghost, an army of undead, a Rapture-ready televangelist, a hoarder, an identity thief, a dead elf, several frustrated suburban parents, and Lindsay Lohan--everything you wanted to be when you grow up.Kirsty Logan's novella Local God is sort-of love story about four boys in a terrible punk band at Stirling University. Local God has a bit of queer lust, a bit of sex and a lot of swearing.What Passes For Normal, by Michelle Reale, is filled with stories and prose poems that exemplify the difficulty of being human. Whether here or abroad, these characters feel the shaky ground beneath their feet , holding on as best they can. Vulnerability, dysfunction and disappointment inform these pieces, for sure, but hope, tenacity and defiance can be found there, too.The five stories in A Great Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World explore death and what follows. These stories are by turns gothic, sweet, funny, fanciful, tragic, playful, and even gruesome. Whatever the tone, whatever the tune, these stories are all written in the language of loss: that ancient tongue the dead have left their loved ones to make sense of.

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies. They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community. Their poems demonstrate how the world is both beautiful and cruel, a truth that inspires overwhelming anger and awe -- all of which spills out onto the page to tell the story of a challenging, complex, nuanced, and joyful life. In Burning Sugar, verse and epistolary, racism and resilience, pain and precarity are flawlessly sewn together by the mighty hands of a Black, queer femme. This book is the second title to be published under the VS. Books imprint, a series curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya, featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.