CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023 THE TORONTO STAR 'MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR' ‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity. An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She’s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home. And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city. Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment. "Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker’s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art." – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time "In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo." – Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats "Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any." – John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts

It was love at first scene: the West Coast's innovative Theatre SKAM and Sean Dixon were a match made in heaven. AWOL offers up for the first time three of the fruits of their three-year-and-counting union. In Aerwacol, a couple flees personal tragedy on a manual railroad car headed across the prairies, meeting odd characters along the way. Billy Nothin' is an existentialist cowboy play inwhich horse trainer Billy None loses the 'cowboy way' so entirely that his best friends don't even recognize him any more. And dystopian romance District of Centuries tells the story of a suburban type seeking his long-lost brother in a downtown housing project designed to crumble so fast that inhabitants come to believe they're hundreds of years old.

"Catalogue d'oiseaux began as notes sent to poet Aaron Tucker's long-distance partner. Not initially intended for publication, the writings moved, over time, into a long, lyrical, confessional love poem. Following the couple on travels across the globe--from Berlin to the Yukon, Porto to Toronto--this poem is expansive, moving sensually through small, intimate spaces and the larger world alike. Traced through art, architecture and the cultural life of varied cities, Catalogue d'oiseaux lives between geographies and chronologies as a kaleidoscopic gathering of the many fractals that make up a couple's life. This is a stunning work; a celebration of the depth of adult love, and the elemental parts of life that make it so."--

"It's 1934, and Toronto is stalled in the Great Depression. Pickpocket Mona Kantor is scraping by on small change, while Eli Morenz, city reporter for the Daily Star, struggles to wring news stories out of the subdued metropolis. When a chance photo drives Eli into the Jewish underworld Mona inhabits, he finds he's stumbled onto the story of his life." - From the publisher.

These essays form a saucy picture of how Toronto sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants.

Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is dominated by water. Like most cities, though, Toronto has mismanaged its water, from the decades-long transformation of the city's creeks into sewersheds to the alteration of Toronto's waterfront. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto's water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city's surface water. In HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, 30 contributors examine the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and call into question the city's past, present and future engagement with water.

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very different mayors, Toronto managed to so quickly oscillate from one extreme to another, and how the city might proceed from here. Some Great Idea includes behind-the-scenes tales from the Miller and Ford campaigns, and explores recent turning points like the city's core service review and the mayor’s con?ict-of-interest trial. Through personal history, keen reportage and revelatory analysis, it shows how the fundamental principles of diversity and democracy that have made Toronto such a vibrant, dynamic 21st-century city can produce an unlikely politician like Ford. And how those same principles have vividly and repeatedly insisted that such politicians are only part of a larger, messier and more productive urban politics. This is a story about both Toronto's past and present, how the city has relentlessly and collaboratively reinvented itself. But it's also a story about Toronto's future, and what that future might mean for all global cities. This is a story that says you can ?ght city hall. Edward Keenan serves as senior editor and lead columnist at The Grid magazine in Toronto, Ontario. An eight-time finalist at the National Magazine Awards, he has written for and edited at Eye Weekly, Spacing magazine, and The Walrus.