New Metonymy Titles

In Fall 2021, we published two titles by local writers.

Personal Attention Roleplay is Helen Chau Bradley’s debut fiction title: an at once eerie and invigorating collection of stories, it spans Montreal neighbourhoods, swimming pools and gym mats, and the dark open road on a tour gone awry. Though their stories are diverse in points of view, length, and form, “Chau Bradley is adept at creating complex characters with inner lives and motivations that feel unique to them, while still being relatable, flawed, and human,” as Billie Gagné-LeBel wrote in a feature article in the Montreal Review of Books.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s second book, The Good Arabs, was our first title of theirs, and it is also genre-defying, containing a short story at the centre of a poetry collection. El Bechelany-Lynch and Chau Bradley both include all-dialogue pieces in their work, and in The Good Arabs these occur as a refrain throughout the collection. The book’s “thoughtful, mutable, quality,” as a McGill Daily review put it, extends through its mapping of Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. 

Earlier, in Spring 2021, we published our first collection of short stories, A Natural History of Transition, by Portland-based author Callum Angus. Cal launched the collection virtually in a number of places, partnering with bookstores and brilliant readers and interviewers in a number of locations to discuss the ongoing nature of transness, the myth of nature as fixed and unchanging, and the element of horror in his work. Again, the collection varies in length and style — the “eight tales show a staggeringly virtuosic range” according to a Gertrude Press review — but readers comment as well on its cohesiveness.

At the beginning of 2021 we published our first picture book, the long-awaited Dear Black Girls, written by Shanice Nicole and illustrated by Kezna Dalz. A brightly illustrated, celebratory ode, this book was sought after by booksellers, community groups, libraries, and a bunch of very tiny readers, some of whom were captured reading the book in extremely heartwarming images which were passed along to the creators.