Unknown Actor, by Jason Christie

When poetry meets theatre in the mind of Jason Christie, a smashing performance results! Then as the curtains close, Christie sneaks off the stage, through the scenery, and out into the wilds of the Internet — and straight into the footlights and teleprompters of human experience. Like a method actor in character long after the credits have rolled, off set, off his rocker, Christie runs wild from Goethe’s Faust to Burton’s, through 1984 and B movies from the ’80s and back again. Beneath his offerings to the actor — questionable acting lessons, dubious plot treatments — lurks a deep unease at our accepted practices of looking at each other, kid. Get out the popcorn and turn on your mobile device. This is going to get dramatic.

- excerpt from Insomniac Press

The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, by Elizabeth Bachinsky

With her signature eye for irony and sensuality, Elizabeth Bachinsky's latest book of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, balances a youthful playfulness with observational maturity. Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. Her vision is unapologetically bold, finding the erotic in everyday moments and keenly capturing the complicated truths of life in a powerfully candid style.

- excerpt from Nightwood Edtions

Whirr & Click, by Micheline Maylor

"Micheline Maylor's many-textured poems explore the liminal space where finite life and infinite time expand and contract into one another. In a duet of contrasts, memory, coming of age, danger, the erotic, and love twine into elegy and wonder. Time plays a featuring role and acts to freeze moments exactly as they arrive and simultaneously stretches experience into ungraspable infinity. Whether fierce or tender, direct or oblique, the poems in Whirr and Click are bold in their exposures and generous in their doorways. The final long poem, "Starfish," is one of the most moving and memorable elegies I have read. One finishes the poem, and the book, feeling one has come to know many people, including oneself." - Stephanie Bolster

-Frontenac House

The Politics of Knives, by Jonathan Ball

('Nook Note: Okay. So this one is not exactly hot off the press, released in September 2012, but it recently enjoyed its Calgary launch at filling Station's 20th Anniversary Collective Retrospective on April 25th, so let's call it new!...)

If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.

- excerpt from Coach House Books

Under the Keel, by Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey’s first collection in a decade has something for everyone: Love and marriage and airport grief; how not to get laid in a Newfoundland mining town; total immersion baptism; the grand machinery of decay; migrant music and invisible crowns and mortifying engagements with babysitters; the transcendent properties of home brew. Whether charting the merciless complications of childhood, or the unpredictable consolations of middle age, these are poems of magic and ruin. Under the Keel affirms Crummey's place as one of our necessary writers.

-excerpt from House of Anansi

Click here to read the Quill & Quire book review.

The Canadian Writer's Market (19th edition)

The essential guide for freelance writers, now completely updated and revised. The Canadian Writer's Market is the authority on who publishes what and how best to bring your work to their attention. It offers practical advice on everything from manuscript preparation to copyright law, from information on pay rates to writers' workshops.

This useful guide also includes comprehensive and up-to-date listings for: consumer magazines; literary and scholarly journals; trade, business, and professional publications; daily newspapers; book publishers; literary agents; awards, competitions, and grants; writers' organizations and support agencies; writers' workshops, courses, and retreats.

Good Prose, by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd

Good Prose explores three major nonfiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs. Kidder and Todd draw candidly, sometimes comically, on their own experience--their mistakes as well as accomplishments--to demonstrate the pragmatic ways in which creative problems get solved. They also turn to the works of a wide range of writers, novelists as well as nonfiction writers, for models and instruction. They talk about narrative strategies (and about how to find a story, sometimes in surprising places), about the ethical challenges of nonfiction, and about practical aspects of making a living as a writer. They offer some tart and emphatic opinions on the current state of language. And they take a clear stand against playing loose with the facts. Their advice is always grounded in the practical world of writing and publishing.

Architectures of Possibility: after innovative writing, by Lance Olsen

...theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing gestures as temporality, scene, and characterization; offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and/or expands the very notion of narrativity; visits a number of important concerns/trends/obsessions in current writing (both on the page and off); discusses marketplace (ir)realities; hones critical reading and manuscript editing capabilities; and strengthens problem-solving muscles from brainstorming to literary activism. Exercises and supplemental reading lists challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory.

Writing your way: creating a writing process that works for you, by Don Fry

Writers write the way they were taught, which may not suit them at all, making their writing slow, painful, and not what they want to say. Writing Your Way shows you how to create your own unique writing process that magnifies your strengths and avoids your weaknesses. It shows you a multitude of ways to do the five key stages: Idea, Gather, Organize, Draft, and Revise. You can then design your own collection of techniques that work for you. You'll write clearer, faster, and more powerfully, with less effort and suffering. The second half of this book shows you how to create and modify your own voice, one that sounds like the real you, that sounds the way you want agents and publishers and readers to experience you.

Wired for Story: the writer's guide to using brain science to hook readers from the very first sentence by Lisa Cron

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets-and it's a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. (Summary)

Science can reveal new perspectives, but just as often it shows us what we already know. The study of narrative as a powerful force that can do more than entertain is a perfect example of how neuroscience validates what writers -and readers- already sense: we are hardwired to love a story because it allows us to make sense of the world. Cron (Extension Writers' Program, UCLA) draws on her extensive experience in publishing, story consultancy, and television to elucidate not just how to write well but how to tell a story. While the brain science element can come off as a bit gimmicky as Cron shares her "secrets," it's the only flaw in a marvelous examination of key writing concepts such as plot, tone, theme, timing, conflict, subplot, and setup. Cron shows how these elements work to keep the narrative unfolding while moving it along, with patterns and parallels connecting the reader to the whole story. Practical, useful, and well organized, this enjoyable book provides a framework of questions for writers to ask themselves. This book will be well received by both aspiring and established writers. (Library Journal Review)

The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets by Jeffrey Skinner

A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry.

Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self.
Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self. [...]
Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate.
Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification.
Yo, poem.
But let's not get carried away. It's your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that's what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle."

Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

"Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. Did no one ever tell you this? That is the writer's life. Never imagine you've left the level of the sentence behind. Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed. The rest will need to be fixed. This will be true for a long time. The hard part now is deciding which to kill and which to fix and how to fix them. This will get much, much easier, but the decision making will never end."

A widely admired writer and teacher of writing for more than 25 years, Klinkenborg gives a distillation of that experience in an indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means to be writing.

45 Master Characters: mythic models for creating original characters

by Victoria Schmidt

Want to make your characters and their stories more compelling, complex, and original than ever before? 45 Master Characters is here to help you explore the most common male and female archetypes--the mythic, cross-cultural models from which all characters originate. Explore a wide variety of character profiles including heroes, villains, and supporting characters. Learn how to use archetypes as foundations for your own unique characters Examine the mythic journeys of heroes and heroines--the progression of events upon which each archetype's character arc develops--and learn how to use them to enhance your story. Complete with examples culled from literature, television, and film, 45 Master Characters illustrates just how memorable and effective these archetypes can be--from "Gladiators" and "Kings" like Rocky Balboa and Captain Ahab to "Amazons" and "Maidens" like Wonder Woman and Guinevere. Great heroes and villains are necessary to bring any story to life; let this guide help you create characters that stand the test of time.

Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's puzzles, codes, "Signs and Symbols"

by Yuri Leving

Since its first publication in 1948, one of Vladimir Nabokov's shortest short stories, "Signs and Symbols," has generated perhaps more interpretations and critical appraisal than any other that he wrote. It has been called "one of the greatest short stories ever written" and "a triumph of economy and force, minute realism and shimmering mystery" (Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years). Anatomy of a Short Story contains: - the full text of "Signs and Symbols," line numbered and referenced throughout the book - correspondence about the story, most of it never before published, between Nabokov and the editor of The New Yorker, where the story was first published - 33 essays of literary criticism on the story, bringing together classic essays and new interpretations - a round-table discussion in which a screenwriter, a theater scholar, a mathematician, a psychiatrist, and a literary scholar bring their perspectives to bear on "Signs and Symbols". Anatomy of a Short Story illuminates the ways in which we interpret fiction, and the short story in particular.

Just Write: here's how!

by Walter Dean Myers

What makes a writer? The desire to tell a story, a love of language, an eye for detail, practice, practice, practice. How well should you know your characters? Do you need to outline before you write? How important is length? Now Walter Dean Myers, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, walks you through the writing process.

Short Films: writing the screenplay

by Patrick Nash

A complete guide to short film screenplays, from finding and developing that exciting idea to information on the technical revolution in digital filmmaking and distribution. Every award-winning short film begins life with a clever idea, a good story, and a screenplay. Here Patrick Nash analyzes the process of writing short film screenplays and gives advice on story and structure, plot and pace, generating ideas, screenplay format, dialogue and format, and character design. He helps readers ensure that their writing will be fresh by discussing common clichés and stereotypes; conflict, obstacles, and stakes; eliciting emotion; and how to hook the viewer. The specifics of loglines, outlines, and synopses are also covered, as well as rewriting, length, practicalities, and budgets. The book also includes a number of award-winning scripts and interviews, advice and contributions from their award-winning screenwriters and a discussion of the benefits to writers of writing short screenplays.

Unstuck: a supportive and practical guide to working through writer's block
by Jane Anne Staw

Writing tools: 50 essential strategies for every writer
by Roy Peter Clark