The Trouble With Brunch

What do your Eggs Benedict say about your notions of class? Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class. Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity. The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it's also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn't so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it's that brunch could be so much more.

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do. Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

Science is a useful metaphor for understanding our lives, but it is often shown to be as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. This lively, thoughtful, and refreshingly speculative debut collection turns scientific method around to question science's faith in certainty, exploring the alternate meaning of "hypothetical" as something that is merely "supposed to be true." Under the poet's wide-angled, open-hearted gaze, scientific investigation begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question. Leigh Kotsilidis lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she works as a freelance graphic designer while completing her MFA in studio arts.

WINNER OF THE ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD 2022 WINNER OF THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARD 2022 Words like radio waves, bouncing off the spectres of mortality, middle age, and the mundane. Arriving at middle age was a decisive experience for David O’Meara, standing equidistant to the past and future with its accompanying doubts and anticipations, inviting re-evaluation of past goals, confronting personal loss, and the death of his father and friends. These are the masses on radar, indistinct but detectable existential presences encroaching, and in the center of the radar is the lyric 'I' sweeping its adjacent experience. Poems like "I Carry a Mouse to the Park Beside the Highway," "I Keep One Eye Open and One Eye Closed," and "I Sleep as the Volcano Ash Falls like Snow,” usher the reader through thematic corridors of memory, fracture, and recovery. Embracing uncertainty and incorporating seasonal forecasts, humour, trivia, satire, politics, the environment, loss, and the mundane, these poems are a detection system signaling a paradox of meanings.' "Masses on Radar exhibits a stunning mastery of poetic craft. O’Meara has the talent and technique to turn almost anything into riveting poetry, but these poems do not coast: they dig deep, bringing to vivid life a remarkable array of subjects, experiences, emotions, and interior worlds. These poems summon quotidian encounters, sometimes conferring them with unexpected beauty, sometimes breathing new and sudden problems into them. O’Meara’s sparse language lifts the veil on our human failings, the limits of our vision, and in so doing satisfies." – Archibald Lampman Award Judges

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARD A joy ride set on a crash course with the past. Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s always found a way to hit the road. Years ago, when she abandoned her oil field job, she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars in far-flung towns. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge outside the big city where people pay to party in the wilderness. And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighbourhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north in the dead of winter to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her past The Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel by the author of the Amazon First Novel Award–nominated The Milk Chicken Bomb. Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before, and you'll love being along for the ride.

Alexandra Leggat, the author of Moondogging and numerous book and music reviews, puts on the page the remarkable texts that she is renowned for performing at spoken word events all over Toronto.

Winner of the 2013 Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence Shortlisted for the 2013 Toronto Book Award The Toronto streetscape: how it looks, lives and changes over time, documented in over 400 photographs. For over thirty years, Patrick Cummins has been wandering the streets of Toronto, taking mugshots of its houses, variety stores, garages and ever-changing storefronts. Straightforward shots chronicle the same buildings over the years, or travel the length of a block, facade by facade. Other sections collect vintage Coke signs on variety stores or garage graffiti. Unlike other architecture books, Full Frontal T.O. looks at buildings that typically go unexamined, creating a street-level visual history of Toronto. Full Frontal T.O. features over four hundred gorgeous photos of Toronto's messy urbanism, with accompanying text by master urban explorer Shawn Micallef (Stroll).

Born out of the popular blog Kale & Caramel, this sumptuously photographed and beautifully written cookbook presents eighty recipes for delicious vegan and vegetarian dishes featuring herbs and flowers, as well as luxurious do-it-yourself beauty products. Plant-whisperer, writer, and photographer Lily Diamond believes that herbs and flowers have the power to nourish inside and out. “Lily’s deep connection to nature is beautifully woven throughout this personal collection of recipes,” says award-winning vegetarian chef Amy Chaplin. Each chapter celebrates an aromatic herb or flower, including basil, cilantro, fennel, mint, oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme, lavender, jasmine, rose, and orange blossom. Mollie Katzen, author of the beloved Moosewood Cookbook, calls the book “a gift, articulated through a poetic voice, original and bold.” The recipes tell a coming-of-age story through Lily’s kinship with plants, from a sun-drenched Maui childhood to healing from heartbreak and her mother’s death. With bright flavors, gorgeous scents, evocative stories, and more than one hundred photographs, Kale & Caramel creates a lush garden of experience open to harvest year round.