Rathwell’s writing is “a fistful of sentences written with the subtlety of a geisha and the terse certainty of stainless steel.” - John Olson, Author
“There must have been a bad bite. Something had gestated. He wasn’t imagining it. There were wet, frozen pebbles tumbling in his veins. There was a sugary sense of euphoria, a smell of orange blossoms, of piss, of diesel.”
JUMP THE DEVIL by Richard Rathwell 5 x 8 | 146 pages| ISBN 978-1-926716-11-4 | Softcover
With Jump the Devil, Richard Rathwell has masterfully interwoven the plots of five seemingly unrelated storylines to create one coherent narrative that spans the globe and works to blend the seemingly mundane with the profound, deftly providing readers the necessary clues to unlocking the story. Transcending borders, cultures, generations, and social mores, Jump the Devil brings to life the notion of the global village as it exists in the 21st Century.
“There must have been a bad bite. Something had gestated. He wasn’t imagining it. There were wet, frozen pebbles tumbling in his veins. There was a sugary sense of euphoria, a smell of orange blossoms, of piss, of diesel.”
A man in a crawlspace. A woman and her cart. A doctor in an African village. A girl celebrating New Year’s. And an Egyptian Revolutionary in front of a computer screen. These five, seemingly unrelated narratives span the globe, blurring the boundaries between the trivially mundane and the profound. Jump the Devil brings its readers on a cross-cultural voyage which inextricably links the lives of the narrators, asking the reader to decipher the clues tucked away in the pages with a deft subtlety.
Rathwell’s writing is “a fistful of sentences written with the subtlety of a geisha and the terse certainty of stainless steel.” - John Olson, Author
From hitch-hiking across the 49th parallel to plane trips to Montreal, road trips to Halifax, drinking in parkades and jamming in friends’ lofts, Unwanted Hopeless Romantic Morons captures the trials and disenchantment of a disconnected generation. Lost in the vastness of Canada, the “Dead-at-25s” isolated in suburbia are lured somnabulistically to cities where they find further alienation and disappointment.
"The prose flows, liquid with passion..." Levi Asher, Literary Kicks.
172 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-0-9809108-9-6 (pbk.) | Softcover
This book is a response to ongoing literary trends: the treatment of words as images in art writing; the evolution of criticism as a form of creativity; and contemporary literary narrative that treats fiction as the greatest truth.
The FLQ have bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange. The streets are charged and a referendum is called on secession. Frederick E. Bryson captures a defining moment in Canadian history in his latest novel "Crossing to Tadoussac".
"Crossing to Tadoussac" evokes the experience of being a Quebecker in the reader, awakening the historical and spiritual struggles that have formed the province and its people.
438 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-1-926716-00-8 | Softcover
In a remote village of Laos, rival gangs plot to seize control of the land and exploit its resources for their own gain. But when their plans are threatened by Sithana's appearance, a deadly chain of events is set in motion that will test the limits of loyalty, courage, and love. As tensions rise and alliances shift, a web of corruption and deceit is revealed, and the villagers must band together to fight for their way of life.
“For now, there is Baldie Fitzgerald. He doesn't know it yet, but he too will be changed.”
Sarah. On a wall in a house in Florida she collects postcards and photos from a hundred years ago: Baldie, the young man with one short leg; Ora, the girl with a wandering eye; Jack the chairboy: all three come alive under Sarah's probing gaze.
Suddenly thrust into the middle of a battle between evil and more evil that has been raging for centuries she learns of another world co-existing with ours, but invisible to her until that fateful day.
The Award-Winning, Best-Selling Series "Arielle Queen" by Michel Levesque
5 x 8. | 230 pages | ISBN 978-1-926716-32-9 (pbk.) | Softcover
A modern and radical work, Unfictions dramatizes the way in which we react to such an information-rich environment in all of its glorious simultaneity--the beginning of a type of 'New Realism' in letters – reflecting faithfully a society so saturated with events and quotations that it can no longer distinguish between them and their relative meanings.
288 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-0-9809108-6-5 (pbk.) | Softcover
The Ministry of Ambiance, Fluffy-eared Generals, Special Agent Automatic Turpentine, Katzenberg’s Super Atomic Piston Ring, Mr. Jellybean and Agency men all vie for your thoughts. Welcome to a post-9/11 paranoid world that would have had Hoover dancing in his closet. In the finest tradition of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, comes a strong American author writing in the great American paranoiac’s voice as every page busts forth with a wild and elusive prose that takes the reader on a wild ride where anything becomes a possibility...
Lock 7 is the highest and last lift up the historic Welland canal. In this literary novel, it is also the dominant metaphor for Leo’s final life epiphany. The one that always seems to come too late...
230 pages | 5" x 8" | ISBN 978-1-926716-50-3 (pbk.) | Softcover
THE MATCHSTICK GIRL brings LGBT undercurrents to nineteenth-century Russia, as our young protagonist struggles with class differences, schoolgirl relationships and her search for self-empowerment._x000D_
THE WAR OF NONEXISTENT WOMEN by Jason Price Everett
'Nonexistence' represents the paradox at the pinnacle of the human mind, of evolved intelligence: the ability to conceive of something that is not real and does not exist. The word itself is a tribute to imagination.
The Ministry of Ambiance, Fluffy-eared Generals, Special Agent Automatic Turpentine, Katzenberg’s Super Atomic Piston Ring, Mr. Jellybean and Agency men all vie for your thoughts. Welcome to a post-9/11 paranoid world that would have had Hoover dancing in his closet. In the finest tradition of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, comes a strong American author writing in the great American paranoiac’s voice as every page busts forth with a wild and elusive prose that takes the reader on a wild ride where anything becomes a possibility...
5 x 8 | 302 pages | ISBN 978-1-926716-10-7(pbk.) | Hardcover
God’s Wife and the Synonymous X, Jesse Chase's first novel follows the protoganist on his search for a new cultural and literary theory while he champions an ethics of self-recovery and rehabilitation of personal narrative in a world of masks, capitalism and oppression.
170 pages | 5.5 x 8 | ISBN 978-1-926716-43-5 | Softcover
Set in Montreal, Ensemble takes us through the throes of existential crises as lives and marriages are overturned by a man’s restless yearning.
A philosopher is suddenly forced to face the questions he lectures on when they materialize out of the theoretical and into the practical after he falls for a student in his class. Meanwhile his wife, an accomplished musician is left to deal with the disintegration of their marriage and the new silence that descends upon her life as she dissects her husband’s inner workings and confronts the object of his desire. Told in clinical honesty, Ensemble deconstructs love and relationships in the 21st century.
4.72 x 7.48 | 148 pages | ISBN 978-1-926716-29-9 (pbk.) | Softcover
"This is not just a collection of poems and short stories; it is a granary of artistic abundance! For here, will you find a rich variety of masterfully crafted pieces in a range of style, including those that draw from the African oral storytelling tradition. It is a montage of pieces of literary art, curated in a manner that allows for the ‘strict grammarian’ forms of expression to coalesce with those given to poetic licentiousness."
Whichever your favourite genre is, this anthology of East African literature has delivered something that has not been served to readers in many years. It is a fitting gift to the lovers of literary art in this first quarter of the 21st century.
Who are the Jihadists? The author explores these questions in a sensitive portrait. Recounting the trials of a young man, disenfranchised and disconnected from his surroundings, the Jihadist in this story is not what he appears to be. Is he a Westerner enlisting in the Armed Forces? Or a Muslim extremist? The Author plays on the ambiguity to beg the question. The Jihadist is the tale of a generation struggling to find its place in the world. Our character must confront his desire for reckless abandon—a surrender to chaotic forces which he sees as inherent to Nature and integral to Truth—and wrestle with violent fantasies of revenge, while he considers if vengeance might not be intrinsic to his idea of Justice. All this time, he seeks something “beyond and bigger than ourselves” to give his life its meaning and expatiate existential guilt. He seeks, only to be tempted by the glory promised through War that History offers him.