The Joyland Bookstore

FEATURED BOOK: Lemon by Cordelia Strube (Coach House)

The numbers are against Lemon – three (sort of) mothers, one deadbeat dad, one cancer-riddled protégé, one tree-hugging stepbrother and a 60% average – but with the right (or wrong) attitude, she just might survive her chaotic family and high school. Cordelia Strube, author of acclaimed novels Planet Reese and Blind Night, takes a darkly comic look at the teenage years.

'Canada's best bet to succeed Alice Munro ... Strube is such a polished storyteller, Lemon's astringent character captivates and charms ... Read Lemon. Then leave it lying about for your sullen teen to discover.' – Globe and Mail

BUY GREAT BOOKS FROM JOYLAND CONTRIBUTORS

Heaven is Small is the funny and profound story of Gordon Small, a degree-clutching slacker and failed fiction writer. Gordon is also, we discover in the first paragraph, recently deceased -- "an event he failed to notice." But when Gordon finds himself suddenly employed at the Heaven Book Company, the world's largest romance publisher, he does notice that things are odd.

Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants — all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.

Through a sequence of possibly intertwined events, Turner creates a challenging portrait of our modern age, drawing solely on the actions of people rather than their appearance.

Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

Holding Still revolves around the interlocking lives of two young women and a man who live in the seedy but gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale: Billy, a former teen idol from the Lilith Fair days; Josh, a shy and sardonic paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a filmmaker coping with her first broken heart. When a freak accident changes everything, each character must decide how to cope with the things they can't control.

A single 117-page sentence unmoors time and space as its legless narrator recounts the war journey that has lead him to his final point of final truth, next to an armless man making stew. As poet and scholar Susan McCabe says in her Introduction, “Roll over, dear Whitman. Here’s our new original.”

Mackinac Island is on the Great Lakes in the American Midwest. Just nine miles round, it has golf courses, expensive restaurants, no cars and plenty of rich people. And for the summer of 2000, it has Bell, a student, employed to serve the wealthy. Bell and her fellow waiters and waitresses sample the delights of this earthly paradise: luxurious yachts, alcohol, horse-drawn carriages; and they can't help but come to know each other intimately. But this knowledge comes at a price.