"Sensitive and subtle, MacLeod is a writer through whose deliberately partial and quotidian pieces shimmers life’s unspoken complexity." 
--Giller Prized Nomination Citation 

Two long-distance runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drug store bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshold in an attempt to save a life and a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she’s caught in far more dangerous currents. An autoworker who loses his family in a car accident tries to separate his life from the internal combustion engine forever.

Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod’s long-awaited first collection of short stories, offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies for a city and community on the brink. These are stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of love and beauty and fragile understanding.

Light Lifting, by Alexander MacLeod, Chapter 1``

“Joe Coomer introduces his characters one by one, each so finely drawn it's like meeting them in person. Try reading two pages without a chuckle, and I guarantee you'll be the first to make it.” —The Sanford Herald 

It’s where you sit down that determines everything in life. One Vacant Chair is a hilarious and gripping novel by New York Times Notable Book of the Year author Joe Coomer, whom the Washington Times calls “a marvelously creative comic writer.” As the owner of several antique stores in Texas, Joe Coomer has an affinity for old chairs. So much so that the main character of his latest novel, Aunt Edna, paints portraits of them. Not people in chairs, just chairs. At the funeral of Grandma Hutton—whom Edna has cared for through an agonizingly long and vague illness—Sarah begins helping her aunt clean up the last of a life. This includes honoring Grandma’s wish to have her ashes scattered in Scotland—although she had never left the state of Texas. “We were two fat women, eighteen years apart, a chair artist and a designer of Christmas ornaments, who only knew we had troubles and a hot summer to get through,” says Sarah. But as it turns out, there is a great deal more to her quirky aunt’s troubles than Sarah could possibly imagine. As the novel turns from the oppressive heat of Texas to the cool, misty beauty of Scotland, she learns of her Aunt Edna’s remarkable secret life and comes to fully understand the fragile business of living and even dying. 

One Vacant Chair, by Joe Coomer, Chapter 1

"An engaging tale, peppered with memorable scenes and lovingly drawn characters." -- Sarah Steinberg, Quill & Quire 

Joan is on the brink. Cough drop addict, school bus driver, mixed race daughter of a Maoist English father and a Chinese-Canadian mother, Joan struggles for meaning after a friend’s death reveals a secret life. Migration Songs is a lost letter from your past, an intimate experience full of humour and grace. 

Migration Songs, by Anna Quon, Chapter 1

Thom is a computer geek whose hacking of a certain Washington-based software giant has won him a little fame but few job prospects. Erik is a smalltime con man, a fast-talker who is never quite quick enough on his feet. Their roommate, Tree, is a confused clairvoyant whose dreams and prophecies may not be completely off base.

After a freak accident floods their apartment, the three are evicted—but they have to take their couch with them. The real problem? The couch—huge and orange—won’t let them put it down. Soon the roommates are off on a cross-country trek along back roads, byways, and rail lines, heading far out of Portland and deep into one very weird corner of the American dream.

Couch, by Benjamin Parzybok.  Audiobook from Iambik: http://iambik.com/books/couch-by-benjamin-parzybok/

Excerpt from Couch by Benjamin Parzybok

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