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Aaron Cordic and Samantha Riske are a couple of twenty-something hypochondriacs living in east-end Toronto. While Aaron works part-time at a bathroom supply store, donning surgical masks, plastic gloves, and a backpack full of sanitary products, Samantha hides herself away in their apartment, tip-toeing around naked and spying on the neighbours. Between paranoid trips to the doctor and extremely intimate examinations of each other's bodies, they’ve managed to eke out an isolated and highly sterilized existence.

Well into his forties, Derrick Rowe finds himself chasing stray women and stealing cash from the bookstore he manages. Having decided it’s time to stop spinning his wheels, he’s recently turned to robbing banks. Meanwhile, he bails his friend Jack Lofton out of jail, a burly fellow in an alcoholic free-fall of his own. Rowe soon enlists both Lofton and a tough young clerk at the bookstore in another heist, setting the stage for an armed bank robbery, a drive-by shooting, and further complications for all.

Malcolm Bidwell is young, smart, and ambitious—and he’s just been hired by mistake by newly elected Premier Steven Davis as his “go-to guy” for every political mess that needs cleaning up. And there are plenty of messes—from a cabinet minister caught in a vice sting to the premier’s animal cruelty charge for killing a crow. Negotiating his way through the treacherous and wickedly funny corridors of power, Malcolm is forced to make difficult choices: between what’s right and what’s expedient, and between his old friends and his new career.

Vector Sorn—intellectual and athletic prodigy—witnesses the tragic death of his mother when he is just fourteen years old. For the next four years, he does his best to maintain a sense of purpose, and at eighteen sets his sights on Quest University. The night before he departs, his grandparents give him his mother’s journal, a tome filled with daily entries dating back to her own youth. When he finally brings himself to read it, a decades-old secret is revealed and Vector vows vengeance.

An inexperienced CSIS agent, Lucas Young, infiltrates a collective of performance and conceptual artists dubbed “Apollo’s Army.” After assuming the identity of an experimental poet, Lucas joins the group on a cross-country tour of Canada in the summer of 2010. Along the way, this 21st century troupe of court jesters crash a poetry reading in Banff, represent a fictional country in a multi-cultural parade in Calgary, resurrect Louis Riel as a guitar-god in Saskatchewan, heckle debaters at an arts symposium in Winnipeg, and storm a Toronto printing press to publish their manifesto.

From the author of the novels Love on the Killing Floor and Dragging the River, Trevor Clark’s new collection of stories covers broad territory, from an addict’s confessions to the corruption of academia, in such diverse locales as Jamaica and the UK.

Two voices, two families, two interweaving narratives with thirty years dividing them. In 1972 Birdie Cormack enters a highly controversial experiment in Toronto. Her story unfolds piece by fascinating piece, mostly by way of a compelling series of letters written to her parents. And in 2002 Jeremy Jacks returns to the West Coast after a failed bid to become a writer back east.

As bass player for the ’80s one hit wonder, Rock Viper, Edgar Martin toured the world, had sex with groupies and made thousands of people deaf. But the band broke up years ago and Edgar’s now middle-aged, out of work and desperate for cash. His luck seems about to change however when his old manager calls and offers him a hot new gig. There’s just one thing – the band plays children’s music while dressed as giant forest creatures. Edgar would be the bee. Edgar swallows his pride and takes the gig. After all, it’s just one show.

A naïve and unbalanced teenage girl with claims of extraterrestrial origins only wants two things in the whole world—family and fame—but she can’t help getting entangled in the lives of the eccentric and troubled humans she meets along the way: Alisen Eden, a pill-popping, unemployed waitress who finds the girl strangely familiar; Neil Manson, the neurotic psychology grad student Alisen is trying to seduce; a horror film director with delusions of grandeur; the charismatic and libidinous leader of a mysterious UFO-worshipping cult; and the stoic stranger known only as 19.

The short stories in God`s Autobio, Rolli’s debut collection, are impossible, quite probable, and everything in between. There’s a story about a man with a ridiculously huge coupon; about an elderly woman who befriends a frenzied robotic chimpanzee; an overzealous, if increasingly masochistic butler; plus twenty-three other surreal, sublime, and satirical creations by Canadian writer/poet/artist, Rolli, recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award, and one of the winners of the 2008/2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.