Are you sick of conventional structures, bored by plain old prose, or unsatisfied by approachable narratives? Maybe you just want to read something outside of your usual comfort zone, or you need a new, niche read to fuel your individuality complex? Look no further, because we’ve curated this mini list of five books that defy genre, mix mediums, and which will challenge your brain to engage with the written word in new ways. Plus, they’re all published by local indie presses, so you can be certain that what you’re reading is far from mainstream!
The Cobra and the Key by Sam Shelstad (TouchWood Editions)
We love a cheeky how-to disguised as a story. Longlisted for the 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, The Cobra and the Key is a novel about a Value Village cashier who lives with his uncle and has recently been left heartbroken, but he knows his luck is about to change. Why? He has sent the manuscript of his debut novel to a celebrated indie publisher and he will soon be a successful novelist, he is certain.
Drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Clarise Lispector, The Cobra and the Key takes the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. Before long, you’ll be ready to knock on some publishing doors with a manuscript in your hands. Are you ready to get serious about your writing?
Out now!
Little Fortified Stories by Barbara Black (Caitlin Press)
Summer in BC is perfect for soaking in the sun, frolicking in the sand and surf, and treading the soil of the land. It’s enough to inspire the artist in you! And this collection of short stories set in different parts of BC proves how this place can ignite the literary imagination.
Author Barabra Black’s childhood in Vancouver inspired “My Tiny Life,” about a narrator who “lives in” a tiny book her father made about how to survive in the woods. Throughout this story, Black describes the flora and geography of her Vancouver childhood.
Set on Vancouver Island, “The Tide Rises” is about climate change and was inspired by the author’s proximity to the rising ocean. The story is centred around oystercatchers (birds) and based on her observing them and then thinking of rising oceans in the future and how they could threaten this area and her home.
“Feral, Flora and Spore” was written on south Pender Island on a solo writing retreat in a cabin in the woods. Black explores how speech and language might be based on landscape or the natural world.
This collection is full of wit, wonder and weirdness by an author whose writing has been described as “like Kafka on crack” by the Vancouver Sun. It doesn’t get more experimental than that.
Out now!
Chambersonic by Oana Avasilichioaei (Talonbooks)
If you like music (who doesn’t!), you will enjoy this collection of poems, essays, performance scores, and audio recordings, all of which come together to imagine the book as an acoustic chamber. The space comes alive with rehearsals, scores, and a reverberation of adjoining environments – aural, social, physical, visual, political. Chambersonic thematically and formally reflects on the practice of soundmaking, combining poetic and experimental music techniques in ways that will appeal to readers and listeners alike.
Available September 17, 2024. Pre-order below!
Teeth: Poems by Dallas Hunt (Nightwood Editions)
Cree author and academic Dallas Hunt grapples with the realities Indigenous communities face and the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still, his poems seek joy in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples and have been described as a “gorgeously spare collection of anti-colonial incisor poems.”
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”
Out now!
lettuce lettuce please go bad by Tiziana La Melia (Talonbooks)
Combining poetry and visual art, lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out a poetics of rural embodied language.
Using vegetables, fruits, and other foods to think through complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crises.
Out now!