Over the course of three instalments, Q&Q presents the titles we’re most excited about this fall. This week’s instalment features short fiction, graphic novels, and poetry. Nonfiction will be featured next week. The first instalment featured fiction.

Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2024. All information (titles, publication dates) was supplied by publishers. Books that have appeared in previous editions of the preview but whose publication was postponed are not included. 

SHORT FICTION

Bad Houses
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Arsenal Pulp Press, Sept.

Acclaimed writer, photographer, and cartoonist John Elizabeth Stintzi blends the absurd, the surreal, or the deeply unlikely into these short fictions that are ultimately about our messy, mundane humanity. Playing with the tropes of horror, folklore, and legend, the unrealities of Bad Houses hold up a funhouse mirror to our lives. –Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster
Damian Tarnopolsky
Freehand Books, Sept.    

From the author of Goya’s Dog comes an intricate, idiosyncratic, and varied collection of short stories that intensely observe the human psyche and relationships – including the familial – and explore love, art, and death.
–Attila Berki

Mark Kalluak’s Traditional Stories from Arviat 
Mark Kalluak
Inhabit Media, Sept.

Gathered, written, translated, and illustrated by community leader and Inuktitut specialist Mark Kalluak, this collection of traditional Inuit stories and beliefs – origin stories, cautionary tales and explanations of taboos – from Arviat, the second-largest community in Nunavut, is published in a bilingual (Inuktitut and English) edition. –AB

Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984
Gary Barwin
Assembly Press, Sept. 

New and previously uncollected stories are brought together with some of the more playful works from the previous collections of Gary Barwin, the multi-hyphenate artist and writer with 26 previous books to his name. –Cassandra Drudi 

Strange Water
Sarah Moses
Guernica Editions, Sept.

Translator Sarah Moses’s fiction debut is a collection of 75 very short pieces that explore the sonic and linguistic as much as the narrative. Playing with individual words, their resonances, and their physical layout on the page, Strange Water draws out the stories that lie between meanings, between understandings, between tongues, between places. –AWB

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction
Sonia Sulaiman, ed.
Roseway Publishing/Fernwood Publishing, Sept. 

From two women tunnelling to Israel from Australia, to young men dying while swimming in the Mediterranean off the coast of Gaza, this diverse collection of speculative fiction by Palestinian writers from Canada and elsewhere innovatively explores Palestinians’ experience both in their homeland and around the world. –AB 

A Way to Be Happy
Caroline Adderson
Biblioasis, Sept.

The characters in these stories from veteran of the form Caroline Adderson range from thieving addicts to a Russian hit man to a middle-aged man facing a routine colonoscopy. Through these varied characters and their disparate conflicts, Adderson explores happiness – how we find it and what it means when we do.
–CD

Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction
Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, eds.
Kegedonce Press, Oct.

Zegaajimo is Anishinaabemowin for “scary story,” and this collection from Kegedonce Press gathers short horror and thriller fiction from 11 Indigenous authors across Canada. –CD

GRAPHIC NOVELS

The Wendy Award
Walter Scott
Drawn & Quarterly, July

Success, award nominations, comments sections, and a bit of cocaine – what could go wrong? The fourth instalment of acclaimed cartoonist Walter Scott’s Wendy series, The Wendy Award continues his satirical look at the art world and those who live in it. –AWB

we see stars only at night
Cole Pauls
Conundrum Press, Oct.

This pocket-sized comic from cartoonist Cole Pauls is based on work originally created for a 2023 group show at the Nanaimo Art Gallery. Expanded into a book-length work, we see stars only at night offers a surrealistic landscape of Tahltan shapes, culture, and motifs. –CD

POETRY

Great Silent Ballad
A.F. Moritz
House of Anansi Press, Sept.

Over seven sections that examine different aspects of the human experience, A.F. Moritz uses his verse in this 22nd collection to show that poetry is both the height of human conversation and the antidote to the suicidal nature of present-day civilization. –CD 

South Side of a Kinless River
Marilyn Dumont
Brick Books, Sept.

The first collection of new poetry in almost a decade from the celebrated Cree and Métis poet Marilyn Dumont (author of A Really Good Brown Girl) examines the struggles for Métis identity and, in particular, maps aspects of Métis women’s history. –AB

Total Party Kill
Craig Francis Power
Breakwater Books, Sept.

Novelist and visual artist Craig Francis Power’s poetry debut uses the metaphor of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons – from which the title Total Party Kill is drawn – to examine addiction and the struggle for sobriety. Alternately humorous and deadly earnest, Total Party Kill is an autobiographical quest from rock bottom to recovery, shaped by skill, chance, teamwork, and creativity. –AWB

This Report is Strictly Confidential
Elizabeth Ruth
Dagger Editions/Caitlin Press, Sept.

Acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Ruth’s poetry debut is simultaneously a commemoration and an exposé. Based on the real experiences of an aunt who lived in a public residential hospital, Ruth explores illness, family secrets, and lives lived out of sight, out of mind. –AWB

DADDY
Jake Byrne
Brick Books, Oct.

What is created when the systems around us come undone? How does patriarchy, or trauma, relate to leather daddies, or to pleasure? DADDY is a poetic conversation about the values and valences of vulnerability in an anxious age. –AWB

Conversations with the Kagawong River
sophie anne edwards
Talonbooks, Oct.

Poet sophie anne edwards spent several years on the Kagawong River on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island, learning how to listen to its flora, fauna, weather, and water. She installed a series of alphabets made of wood and paper and documented how the resulting poems shifted over time, whether within a few seconds or over a few months. –CD

No Credit River
Zoe Whittall
Book*hug Press, Oct.

This memoir-in-prose-poems recounts years of personal heartache that coincided with our collective experience of pandemic isolation. Zoe Whittall reflects on anxiety, loss, and generational ideas of trauma, and how these bear upon her own creativity. –AWB

Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961–2023
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart, Oct.        

This collection of 600-plus pages is the literary heavyweight of the season. Paper Boat brings together the best of the remarkable poetic oeuvre of Margaret Atwood across six decades – from her earliest work to brand-spanking new poems. –AB

Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
Erina Harris
Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn Publishers, Oct.  

Using both traditional and experimental forms, the Edmonton poet Erina Harris exuberantly plays with fairy tales, myths, nonsense, and nursery rhymes to explore gender, women’s history, queerness, and the role of art to upend traditions and bring about change. –AB