Whiteout
George Elliott Clarke

In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970.

For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

Prophetess
Baharan Baniahmadi

An unflinching allegorical novel that explores trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

In the slums of Tehran, seven-year-old Sara witnesses the horrific murder of her sister Setayesh, an event leaves her in shock and unable to speak. As the neighbourhood frantically searches for the missing girl, Sara is locked inside herself, unable to tell her parents or police all she knows.

Over time, the mute Sara develops a strange allergic reaction, in which hair covers her face every time a man approaches her. One day in school, when an imam gets too close, she faints. After Sara reawakens, classmates show her video of her speaking freely and eloquently while unconscious… in Polish. These are only the first of many unexpected developments in Sara’s life, as she grapples with how to live with her sister’s memory in a world that abuses women from a very early age.

Prophetess is a fearless novel of gripping and surreal turns that push the limits of the imagination in their collision of tradition and nonconformity. Baharan Baniahmadi has crafted a wild, allegorical interrogation of trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

Redemption Ground
Lorna Goodison

In her first-ever collection of essays, poet and novelist Lorna Goodison interweaves the personal and political to explore themes that have occupied her working life: her love of poetry and the arts, colonialism and its legacy, racism and social justice, authenticity, and the enduring power of friendship. Taking its title from one of Kingston's oldest markets, Redemption Ground introduces us to a vivid cast of characters and remembers moments of epiphany—in a cinema in Jamaica, at New York's Bottom Line club, and as she searched for a Black hairdresser in Paris and drank tea in London's Marylebone High Street. Enlightening and entertaining, these essays explore not only daily challenges but also the compassion that enables us to rise above them. They confirm her as a major figure in world literature.

While Supplies Last
Anita Lahey

Anita Lahey writes the kind of rigorously observed, emotionally charged poetry few can match. In While Supplies Last, her first collection in eleven years, Lahey throws herself on the mercy of a changing climate, takes refuge in art and revels in everyday wonders. In the final section, about a forest fire that devastated the Cape Breton village of Main-à-dieu in 1976, she becomes a custodian of local histories. No matter the subject, whether traffic reports during the pandemic, a fossilized baby mammoth, or Toronto’s iconic Don River, Lahey extends the sense of what language can do and say. This is tour de force writing: mischievous, unpredictable, urgent, never boring. In While Supplies Last, Lahey comes fully into her own.

The Human Scale
Michael Lista

Whether investigating a gruesome triple-murder, a fairy tale marriage gone horribly wrong, or a brilliant con artist, Michael Lista has proven himself one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation. In his belief that crime reporting thrives the closer it moves to the human scale—where every uncovered secret reveals the truth of our obligations to each other—Lista builds his compulsively readable narratives from details (fake flowers, a little girl's necklace) others might pass over, details that provide a doorway into the extreme situations he is drawn to. The Human Scale not only includes Lista's most celebrated magazine stories to date, but comes with postscripts that describe his process in writing each piece, and the fallout from publication. Here is long-form journalism in its most hallowed form: brilliant and bingeable.
Press

On Dandelion Daughter:
Three hundred pages of heartbreaking storytelling, right from the start.La Presse

On The Strangest Dream :


On Redemption Ground:

Praise for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People

On After Realism:
“What the stories in AFTER REALISM display in aggregate is a willingness to stretch form and subject to their limits, adapting or rejecting traditional techniques and approaches at will. As a whole, the volume provides a provocative snapshot of the forces dragging CanLit — kicking and screaming — into the 21st century.” - Steven Beattie, Toronto Star

News

JANUARY NEWSLETTER (click for link)
We are thrilled to share the news that Dimitri Nasrallah's Hotline is a 2023 Canada Reads selection! His inspiring novel of perseverance will be championed by bhangra dancer, artist and educator Gurdeep Pandher during the great Canadian book debate held from March 27-30 on CBC TV, CBC Radio and CBC Books. Congratulations to all the finalists! Baharan Baniahmadi's allegorial novel Prophetess is the Toronto International Festival of Author's virtual book club selection for the March 8, 2023 session. Plus poetry readings: Kaie Kellough and Tawhida Tanya Evanson in Montreal and John Barton on Salt Spring Island!

DECEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Our Holiday Gift Guide is here! A short but sweet selection of Véhicule's bestsellers, award-winners, the ever-popular Montreal photo collection History Through Our Eyes and, for the vintage pulp fan, the latest Ricochet bundle! And if you're already looking ahead to spring, check out our Spring 2023 catalogue!

NOVEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Congratulations! Iranian-Canadian author and actor Baharan Baniahmadi's Prophetess won the 2022 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction at the Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards! Tawhida Tanya Evanson won the 2022 Blue Metropolis/ Conseil des arts de Montréal New Contribution Literary Prize for her novel Book of Wings! Véhicule will be at the Salon du livre de Montrél at booth #725 with the AELAQ and participating in several events and panels. And the Fall 2022 Montreal Review of Books is online chock-full of reviews and features!

OCTOBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Launch into fall with us! Letters from Montreal on Oct. 13 at Bar le Ritz, Durable Goods and Wolf Sonnets at The Word on Oct. 15, Black and Blue at Librairie Résonance on Oct. 28, and a special Toronto fall gala event at the Monarch Tavern on Oct. 19!SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Hotline is nominated for the Giller Prize! David Homel's novel A House Without Spirits launches Sept 29! And Letters From Montreal is now available!
Discover

Click here to see Kaie Kellough read from his QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Award winning book Dominoes at the Crossroads

Click here to listen to Rosalind Pepall's interview on CBC's All in a Weekend about Talking to a Portrait: Tales of an Art Curator.

In Periodicities’ fifth series of videos, Sadiqa de Meijer reads a few poems from her new book, The Outer Wards. Click here

Read “The Silence of A.M. Klein,” an incisive essay by our editor Carmine Starnino in the April issue of The New Criterion.



SODEC, Québec  Canada Council for the Arts Canadian Heritage
The Canada Council
Véhicule Press acknowledges the generous support of its publishing program from the Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC).