Shrapnel's Fall Favourites of 2021
Image by Jo Ramsay
Nothing pairs better with fall than curling up with a hot drink and a book. Our editorial director and poetry editor, Jo and Prathna, have listed the titles that they’re most excited to get cozy with as the days get colder and darker.
Rest assured this list has our diverse mix of the experimental, surreal, and humorous. We’ve briefly explained what it is about each book that has us intrigued, and you can learn more and order the books by clicking on the hyperlinked titles.
FICTION
THE PRAIRIE CHICKEN DANCE TOUR
Dawn Dumont
Freehand Books
Proper comedy is all too rare in novels, and Dawn Dumont’s The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour promises hilarious mayhem as a troupe of Indigenous dancers fall ill before a fifteen-day European tour.
John Greyeyes steps up to lead a rag-tag group of replacement dancers through Europe—even though he hasn’t danced in fifteen years, has never left the continent, and a group of expert dancers they are not.
RING
André Alexis
Coach House Books
Ring is the first and probably last romance from André Alexis as he’s quoted saying, "I will never write another romance as long as I live.” Fair enough.
Completing his quincunx series, Alexis invites readers to imagine what they would change about their partners if presented with a magic ring like the book’s protagonist, Gwenhwyfar.
Our editorial director Jo is an André Alexis stan, so this book had no choice but to be included on this list.
GLORIOUS FRAZZLED BEINGS
Angélique Lalonde
House of Anansi Press
This collection of short stories from Angélique Lalonde is tied together by familial pasts once forgotten. These histories reappear and manifest in curious ways, including teeny ghost people, a boy born with fox ears, and a late mother’s online dating profile.
Glorious Frazzled Beings is a tender tribute to collective ideas of home, growth, and the tempestuous bond of family captured through the surreal and haunting.
ALL’S WELL
Mona Awad
Hamish Hamilton
From the author of Bunny comes another darkly comedic novel, this time following a theatre professor with chronic pain who’s determined to redeem herself by staging a performance of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
Drama boils up when the mutinous cast is hell-bent on staging Macbeth instead. We all know theatre kids grow into theatre people, and this particular cast of characters is said to leave readers wondering what on earth they just read as surreal elements twist the book into something more horrifying and strange than anticipated.
LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21st CENTURY
Kim Fu
Coach House Books
For readers seeking a fantastical and slightly nightmarish collection of short stories, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century delivers on its title’s promise.
“A girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare.” Throw in a haunted doll, a sea monster, and a seductive Sandman for good measure, and readers are given a feast of frights and contradictions as the worldly is melded with the otherworldly.
POETRY
OЯACULE
Nicole Raziya Fong
Talon Books
Poetry often inherently possesses a flair for the dramatic, but Nicole Raziya Fonog’s OЯACULE deliberately centers the dramatic and the poetic.
Inspired by Plato and Homer of Classical Greece, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s meditations in The Birth of Tragedy and Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, OЯACULE invites us to listen to ancience chorale, witness cosmological dreams, and touch the veil between existence and the sleep of time in the present.
BEAST AT EVERY THRESHOLD
Natalie Wee
Arsenal Pulp Press
The title of Natalie Wee’s Beast At Every Threshold is perhaps one that invites us to consider the paranoiac fear of marginality—from queerness, to otherness, to borders and diaspora.
What is lurking in lines that seem to divide us? And what is the basis of such fear? If prejudice is a kind of mythological beast, what happens if that beast turned into a revelatory myth instead?
VERSschmuggel / reVERSible: An Anthology of English Canadian Poetry / Poésie du Québec / Dichtung aus Deutschland
Poetry Anthology
Book*hug Press
VERSschmuggel / reVERSible is a poetry translation project that is the result of virtual collaboration between six German poets and twelve Canadian poets.
Following a week-long translation workshop, the poets worked in the three languages of English, French, and German collaborating, translating, and reading as a “laboratory for materiality.” Notable Canadian poets include Canisia Lubrin, Aisha Sasha John, and Lisa Robertson.
PEBBLE SWING
Isabelle Wang
Nightwood Editions
Pebble Swing is where diaspora and flânerie converge. Isabelle Wang traces a disappearing language, the cityscape of Vancouver, and history across geography and memory.
The book’s title refers to the skipping of stones, and Wang maps the concept onto the syllables of maternal language in search of oceanic connections.
ROOMS: WOMEN, WRITING, WOOLF
Sina Queyras
Coach House Books
Returning to a defining moment over thirty years ago when a professor threw a chair at them for submitting an essay on Virginia Woolf, Sina Queyras considers the domestic, feminism, and queerness in the space of a writer’s room.
Inspired, of course, by Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Queyras considers the room from a variety of genres—from tweets to poetry, to criticism—to touch on the writer’s body and mind and the language that transpires in seclusion, both publicly and privately.
Non-Fiction
THIS IS MY REAL NAME
Cid V Brunet
Arsenal Pulp Press
From her very first lap dance in a small-town bar to her work at high-end clubs, Cid V Brunet shares intimate stories from her ten-year career working as a stripper. The memoir explores the camaraderie between colleagues as Michelle navigates a simultaneously toxic and rewarding industry.
Brunet’s voice is fun, clever, and rich with imagery. This is My Real Name disrupts stereotypical sex work narratives, combining lived experience and political discussion with chuckle-worthy observations along the way.
MISSED CONNECTIONS: A MEMOIR IN LETTERS NEVER SENT
Brian Francis
McClelland & Stewart
There’s something about peering into a stranger’s personal letters that feels so intimate, warm, and thrilling—like stepping into the shoes of an archeologist discovering Brian Francis’ luminous and hilarious reflections.
In Missed Connections, Francis reaches back into the past by replying to thirteen forgotten responses to a personal ad he placed in a newspaper when he was still in the closet and looking for love.
A lot has happened to Francis in thirty years. The letters are a starting point from which he reflects upon how his identity as a gay man has changed, the impact of AIDS on the queer people of his generation, and today’s dating app scene.
OUT OF THE SUN: ON RACE AND STORYTELLING
Esi Edugyan
House of Anansi Press
Esi Edugyan is one of the most decorated writers in Canada, and her exploration of Black histories in art begs an important question: “What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins when we grant them centrality?”
With her first major work of non-fiction, Edugyan analyzes not just literature, but also visual art and film as well through the prism of her lived experience. Her discourse of identity and creation is woven with her rich storytelling and necessary questions about culture itself.
TONGUES: ON LONGING AND BELONGING THROUGH LANGUAGE
Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, & Ayelet Tsabari
Book*Hug Press
Twenty-six writers offer personal essays on language and identity in this treasure of an anthology. Accents and vocabularies can build bridges and act as connective tissue in community—or they can isolate and shame.
Kicking off a crucial dialogue about dialogue itself, Tongues explores “the way power and privilege affect language learning, especially the … exclusion often felt by non-native English speakers in a white, settler, colonial nation.”
MADE-UP: A TRUE STORY OF BEAUTY CULTURE UNDER LATE CAPITALISM
Daphné B., translated by Alex Manley
Coach House Books
“As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics.
She rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror.”
Shrapnel is a sucker for a poetic essay collection, and we’re excited that Daphné B’s combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography has been translated from the French by Alex Manley.
GRAPHIC NOVELS
WEEDING
Geneviève Lebleu
Conundrum Press
When Martha’s tea party receives a few unexpected and unwanted guests, she flees to the backyard and begins weeding. Even though Martha is the most popular of the women present, will any of the guests realize that she’s gone?
With bursting colours and vivid visages, Weeding is a biting and funny graphic novel from Geneviève Lebleu that satirizes feminine archetypes in the social landscape of the 1960s. Character disappearances and reappearance are inspired by soap opera conventions, and we love this manifesting in a graphic novel.
SPECIAL TOPICS IN BEING A HUMAN
S. Bear Bergman, illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson
Arsenal Pulp Press
Queer mentors are treasured, and S. Bear Bergman has taken the premise of his advice column, "Asking Bear," and transformed it into a colourful and feel-good graphic novel illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson.
As a trans parent, Bergman serves up “dad advice and Jewish bubbe wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens.” His insights are attuned to struggles of the modern age, featuring practical tips for how to make a good apology or how to get someone's new name and pronouns right as quickly as possible.
While validating the experiences of others and challenging traditional advice-giving, the effect reminds readers that we’re all in this together.
PASS ME BY: ELECTRIC VICE
Kyle Simmers and Ryan Danny Owen
Renegade Arts Entertainment
Set in the glam rock world of 1973, Ed sparks a romance with the androgynous singer of Electric Vice. Complete with platform heels, neon, leather, and plenty of mascara, Ed’s recollections of his glam rock days present an inverted coming-of-age story about understanding queer identity.
This is the sequel to the award-winning Pass Me By: Gone Fishin’ and continues the frame narrative of Ed reflecting on his life as an elderly man struggling with dementia.
SWAN SONG
Sonja Ahlers
Conundrum Press
We adore works that dare to wedge themselves between genres and challenge categorization entirely. Sonja Ahlers’s Swan Song presents a work that’s part art book, part zine collection, part diary, and part graphic novel.
Embodying a black-and-white photocopier aesthetic, Swan Song closes a trilogy of work that’s been accumulated from decades of hunting and gathering through Ahlers’ many overflowing binders.
GENGHIS CON
Yi-Sung Oliver Ho, Daniel Reynolds & Taylor Esposito, illustrated by Chris Peterson
Renegade Arts Entertainment
For readers who fantasize of one day racing in the Mongol Rally comes Genghis Con. In seeking redemption for her grifter past, Alexis decides to take part in a win-or-die race from England into the mountains of Mongolia.
On the road, Alexis must make alliances and fend off enemies while the spirit of a mysterious Mongol warrior haunts her on her journey. So yeah, there are obviously more stakes in Genghis Con than the actual Mongol Rally, but that’s what makes it spicy.
We encourage you to buy these books either directly from the publisher or your local indie bookstore.