bipolar bear
Catherine Kidd
September 2006
Poetry / Performance
ISBN 10: 1-894994-07-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-07-1
6x7 inches · 88 pages
$16.95 CDN / US
includes DVD

Following on the heels of Kidd's successful stageshow and award winning book / CD Sea Peach, which she has toured to the Edinburgh Fringe among other locales, comes her new book / DVD bipolar bear. Featuring almost all new material, it contains a story about meerkats, imaginary numbers and counting sheep, blue orbs, an iguana's flying leap from a window which provokes police intervention and choice, and the illogical and suicidal tendencies of human commerce as told by a philosophizing polar bear. Part Dr. Seuss for adults and part spiritual quest, Catherine Kidd's unique brand of performance literature has impressed audiences across the globe.

Catherine Kidd's writing has been published in three other conundrum press releases: everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy, psittacine flute, and Sea Peach. She has performed her writing all over the globe: from New York to the Edinburgh Fringe, from Bavaria to Singapore to the Toronto Harbourfront World Stage, from Volapük Oslo to Ladyfest Bristol and many points in between. To make ends meet her voice can be heard on numerous commercials, including back up for Celine Dion. She has written jingles for Maybeline and once spent eleven hours in a shower with Halle Berry.

"Catherine Kidd's performance style makes me think of Dr. Seuss meets Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom meets David Suzuki meets Vaudeville meets Patti Smith. Yeah, it is that good. It's a musical theatre crash course in punk rock zoology."
-- Calgary Spoken Word Festival Blog

My Own Devices: Airport Version
Corey Frost
October 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-18-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-18-7
New Format Reprint
Travel / Short Stories
5.5x7.75 inches · 224 pages
$16 CDN / US

My Own Devices: Airport Version is a series of stories in which the main characters, all of whom are named Corey Frost, are left to their own devices in Japan, Brazil, Sumatra, St. Petersburg, Macau, Montreal, New York, and elsewhere. The devices include various phones, cameras, tiny cars and mini-disc recorders, as well as a backpack full of witty, occasionally satirical literary gimmicks. These are playful post-modern tales of travel grounded in the art of the short story. Frost has proven himself a writer of many talents and My Own Devices was the book which established his reputation. This new expanded edition is perfect for reading on an airplane, train, bus, or ferry. It includes new stories from Lesotho, Turkey, and Angkor Wat, as well as new postcard projects, timelines and ephemera.

"Frost is a writer to watch, both for his refined sense of story development and for the sheer oddness of his literary imagination.... Frost is an analytical writer somewhat in the way Beckett or Gogol were, minutely dissecting everyday occurrences until they take on a far more surreal and expansive quality."
- Montreal Review of Books

"Part Dave Eggers, part Chris Ware, and eight parts Corey Frost, it's as playful as building a snowman, and not as wet."
- Montreal Mirror

Corey Frost has toured his multi-media performances on the Perpetual Motion Roadshow in Canada and the US, and in Europe and Australasia. Most recently his writing has appeared in The Walrus and Matrix. His book of performance pieces is The Worthwhile Flux. Currently he is pursuing a PhD and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Gilded Lilies: Comics and Drawings
Jillian Tamaki
October 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-19-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-19-4
6x8 · 124 pages
Graphic Novel / Visual Art
$20 CDN / $17 US

Gilded Lilies is artist Jillian Tamaki's first book and collects many of the incredible illustrations she has done for high profile magazines (New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, CBC, The New Yorker) as well as new drawings and comics. It reprints her mini comic City of Champions, a stream-of-consciousness ode to the city of post-Gretzky Edmonton. Tamaki paints a portrait of a city populated by "cautious optimists" and "resigned cynics" and filled with accidental street theatre. The feature comic is The Tapemines, an 80 page wordless scroll about feral children in forests of cassette tape. Other comics celebrate her Brooklyn neighborhood. Her inspirations include German expressionists Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, as well as Japanese and Inuit printmaking. Although gifted with the brush Tamaki's comics and drawings are character driven and focus heavily on observational narrative. Her unique style often celebrates the inherent beauty in the grotesque. Gilded Lilies is a break out book from a huge talent.

Jillian Tamaki's work has appeared in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Bitch, Bust, Ascent, and CBC Arts Online. With her cousin, Mariko Tamaki, she's currently expanding the comic Skim into a graphic novel for Groundwood Press (an imprint of Anansi). Raised in Calgary, she graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2003. Her work has been exhibited at the Giant Robot store and gallery. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Visit her online at www.jilliantamaki.com.

Now Available in Diamond's September Previews Catalogue.

Nog A Dod:
Prehistoric Canadian Psychedooolia
Edited by Marc Bell
September 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-16-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-16-3
Graphic Novel / Visual Art
6.5x8 inches
288 pages / 96 in colour
$25

Nog A Dod is a landmark in Canadian Oddball Art Publishing. It documents nearly a decade of work by a loosely affiliated group of primarily Vancouver artists who draw with and about each other. Like their contemporaries and friends in the Royal Art Lodge, they work on each other's drawings, create small run books and ephemera, and collaborate so closely that it is sometimes difficult to tell where one begins and another ends. Their work falls somewhere between children's book art, comics, psychedelia and fine

art. It is loose, expressive, and unpredictable. Nog A Dod focuses on some of their greatest self-published achievements: The Book Of Sweden, Bucktooth Magnifying Glass, Ultra Sommy, Strawbaby, Flip Flop Prophets, Volvo Rollbars, Knoze Clippah, Pee On The Owl, Long Time Journey and many more. And while many of these artists are widely popular in their native city, few have seen the greater extent of their work. Nog A Dod is the first book to document this vibrant scene, and should be of interest to anyone who has been seduced by their fellow "doodlers" Marcel Dzama and Paper Rad. Editor and designer Marc Bell is at the forefront of this movement and this book attempts to define and give shape to it. Bell has gone to great lengths to secure quality reproductions of the original bookworks, in many cases far superior to the original photocopied versions. 

The book documents hundreds of unique mini-books by artists including Bell, Peter Thompson, Jason McLean, Amy Lockhart, Owen Plummer, Tommy Lacroix, S.P. Ehman, Scott Evans, Julie Voyce and Mark Connery.

Marc Bell lives in Vancouver, BC where he divides his time between his own cartoony Fine Artwork and more recently his editing of otherwise obscure material. In addition to Nog A Dod, Marc is guest editing sections of the upcoming "Japanada" issue of the Ganzfeld, including a long overdue survey of Mark Connery's brilliant Rudy comics. His own recent print projects include The Hobbit with Peter Thompson (Picturebox Inc) and Pile Of Bacon, a selection of drawings prepared for Kramer's Ergot 6 (Buenaventura Press). Marc is represented by the Adam Baumgold Gallery in NY.

Ryan Arnold
October 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-20-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-20-0
Short Stories
5x7 inches · 120 pages
$15 CDN / US

These enchanting tales encompass a world where people find themselves in everyday situations, like licking hardwood floors or stabbing a helpless squirrel with a stick or partaking in a wild vigilante cock-fighting shakedown.

Let's just say the content of these eleven stories is amazing and will make you a better, wiser person. If it doesn't, we suggest purchasing another copy of the book and trying again.

Everyone is a coward. Spiders, heights, failure, love -- we're all afraid of something. Not Ryan Arnold, though. He's not afraid of anything. Okay, maybe he is afraid of one thing. The expensive, low-profile lawsuits that will inevitably bankrupt the publisher upon release of these stories.

"Snappy, wry, lurid and surprisingly tender stories. With writerly legerdemain and with great humour, Ryan Arnold makes an exhilarating debut. The cast of characters in The Coward Files will lurch and lick and cringe and chip their way into your sense of what's new in fiction."
-- David McGimpsey

Ryan Arnold is a Vancouver-based writer. His stories have appeared in Matrix and Career Suicide. Most recently he has been a weekly entertainment columnist for The Globe & Mail.

The Encantadas
Robert Allen
September 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-17-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-17-0
Poetry
7x5 inches • 160 pages
$15 CDN / US
Artwork by Luc Paradis

What began as a series of poems about the Galapagos Islands (The Enchanted Isles) and a tribute to Herman Melville has become a lifelong obsession for Robert Allen. Originally serialized over four books and two decades his epic long poem The Encantadas will now be published in its entirety by conundrum press. The poem contains three narrative threads and is in fact a kind of novel. The first section tells the tale of an oceanographer named Jack who undergoes rapture in the deep ocean but must return to the swamps of Quebec's Eastern Townships to confront his past. The second section concerns Teddy the tap-dancing turtle who is Jack's body double. In the final section Jack returns to the seas to smuggle wine. The poem is structured in a nine-line three-stanza form echoing the work of Allen's mentor in the seventies A.R. Ammons but also poets such as Wallace Stevens and Christopher Dewdney. Important formal elements of the poem are quick cuts, interruptions, discontinuities and abrupt changes in speaker. The Encantadas is a tour de force from one of Canada's most accomplished poets.  

Robert Allen is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose including the novels Napoleon's Retreat and The Hawryliw Process and the books of poetry in which The Encantadas was serialized: Magellan's Clouds, Ricky Ricardo Suites and Standing Wave. Born in Bristol, England he was educated at the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He is the editor of the literary journal Matrix and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal.

"Lively and unquestionably gifted...."
- The Globe & Mail

"A work of sustained, unrelenting, unmercifully protracted brilliance."
- Montreal Gazette

The Portable Conundrum

May 2006
ISBN 1-894994-14-0
$15 CDN/US
Tenth Anniversary Anthology
Andy Brown Editor
Bibliography and appendix
4.25x7 inches, 304 pages

Featuring in chronological order: Catherine Kidd • Andy Brown • Liane Keightley • Amanda Marchand • Peter Paré • Golda Fried • Howard Chackowicz • Billy Mavreas • Dana Bath • Lance Blomgren • Valerie Joy Kalynchuk • Victoria Stanton • Vincent Tinguely • Meg Sircom • Corey Frost • Marc Tessier • Hélène Brosseau • Marc Ngui • Stéphane Olivier • Gilles Boulerice • Suki Lee • Julia Tausch • Joey Dubuc • Chandra Mayor • Shary Boyle • Joe Ollmann • Maya Merrick • Nathaniel G. Moore • Elisabeth Belliveau • Richard Suicide • Marc Bell • Robert Allen • Jillian Tamaki

Being an unabridged compendium containing within its yellowing pages the summation of a decade of publishing from one of Canada's most innovative publishers. Everyone who has published under the conundrum press imprint (over 30 contributors!) has provided new material especially for the book.

Of the size and weight to keep in your pocket and be truly portable.

Featuring fiction, comics, essays, posters, drawings and everything in between, this anthology harkens back to the superior quality of the products of yesteryear. In fact, the tear-inducing nostalgia contained within will be enough to melt any cynic's heart.

Supplemented with an exclusive introduction by millionaire boy-publisher Andy Brown.

samples

There were articles in The Quill & Quire, eye, The Calgary Herald, The Montreal Review of Books, and this from the HOUR.

"Brown was able to develop the most challenging and original list in Canada, achieving that rarest of things among the small press: sales... Stretching from fiction to graphic novels to artist editions, the breadth of Conundrum's taste and foresight (both Montreal-bred and beyond) is captured in The Portable Conundrum anthology."
-- eye

"For such a small book The Portable Conundrum packs an impressive amount of material... conundrum publications often defy categorization in the traditional sense, whether through format, style, or content."
-- MRB

"The Portable Conundrum is an anthology of new work by everyone ever published by the press. All around, Brown won accolades for creating a unique outlet for these artists' offbeat work and helping to unite Montreal's anglophone creative community... At the heart of it, Conundrum plays a crucial role in Montreal's anglo arts community."
-- Maissoneuve

Beauty is a Liar
Valerie Joy Kalynchuk

METRO SERIES
May 2006
ISBN 1-894994-15-9  
4.25x7 inches • 112 pages
Novel
$14.95 CDN/US

Valerie Joy Kalynchuk's Beauty is a Liar is the follow-up to her first Conundrum book, All Day Breakfast, which the Globe and Mail called "a disarming stream-of-consciousness novel". It received rave reviews for its brutal honesty. Her new book, which blends poetic verse, staccato prose and collage, veers back and forth between Winnipeg and Montreal, exploring a young woman's troubled past and eventual redemption. Kalynchuk gives us an anti-nostalgic take on childhood, filled with ballerina prodigies and views of canola fields blunted and defeated against the rain. Her heroine perpetually loses her bus pass, receives lessons from an ordained blob of dough, and remembers the time she watched a prairie storm approach from miles away.

"Kalynchuk has one of the most unique literary voices I have ever encountered."
– Jon Paul Fiorentino

"Valerie's stories do not so much follow plot lines as naturally conform to the grim poetry of greasy fingers, violence and broken homes."
– Broken Pencil

"A veritable symphony of dysfunction, conveyed in first-person semi-stream-of-consciousness vignettes laced with black wit."
– MRB

"Exploring the schism between sunny social conventions and the narrator's penchant for darker sights and sounds, Kalynchuk's vignettes break with tradition, both in content and style."
– MRB

Valerie Joy Kalynchuk is a regular contributor to Matrix. Her work has also appeared in Geist, The Original Canadian City Dweller's Almanac, Fish Piss, Career Suicide, and You and Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing. Originally from Winnipeg, she currently lives in Montreal.

Sextant
Maya Merrick
September 2005
ISBN 1-894994-09-4
Novel
4.25x7 inches
260 pages
Illustrations by Lyle Brebner
METRO SERIES
$14.95 CDN / US

Sextant is narrated by the perpetually displaced Cassy Peerson, a young woman who lives in a car on a beach in an unnamed California town and works as a mermaid at a strip club. It is only underwater that she feels at peace. Although this is her first publication Merrick writes with the maturity of someone who has absorbed the classics of literature, as if Dorthy Parker had channeled William Faulkner. Merrick's fragmented narrative moves between an eclectic cast of characters and flashbacks to memories of her family which she would rather forget. Between interludes in which she reveals herself to a papier mâché head it becomes obvious that Cassy can't maintain her underground lifestyle of constant sex and drugs. She begins to unravel the emotions locked deep inside herself. Eventually she is forced to confront her past, which is literally laid bare before her eyes. Filled with spunky dialogue and strong character development Sextant is a searing portrait of dysfunction and redemption from a rising new talent.

This is the third novel in the METRO pocketbook series from conundrum. The first two were Another Book About Another Broken Heart and Cherry.

"Waif. Wastrel. Wraith. Cassy Peerson, the heroine of Maya Merrick's first novel, Sextant, is like some street-busted little match girl - but one with a stiletto blade stashed in her ripped fishnets. Buttonholing you like a bleached and bruised Ancient Mariner, Cassy almost convinces you that she couldn't care less if you paid attention to her curbside pitch - but it's one you'll find yourself following fascinated to the very end. Provoking acidic laughter in startling places, interlaced with blurts of spleen-filled surrealism, and set in a no-body's-land populated by a bestiary of transvestites, cast-offs, and skin-shedding mermaids, Merrick's Sextant is a mesmerizing debut."
- Taras Grescoe (author of The Devil's Picnic)

Originally from Vancouver, Maya Merrick presently works as a barmaid in Montreal. She is pictured here with Canada's largest bull. Sextant is her first publication.

Read an excerpt from Sextant.

For over a decade (1991-2004), Joe Ollmann has made his way through the indy comics scene with Wag!, his micro-books of fictions and comics. In experiences both extraordinary and mundane, Ollmann catches his motley crew of characters with their pants down. Influenced by a variety of artists, such as Ben Katchor, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Steadman and Edward Gorey, Ollmann draws the inhabitants of his world with remarkable craft and an eye for detail, making each character unforgettable. The Big Book of Wag! is a large format compilation filled with diverse stories culled from the best of his minis: Ollmann's alphaGorey, the biography of Isadora Duncan, punting with an opportunist, friars consumed with lust, a story about an aristocratic potato during the French Revolution, and more. The small size of these books (2 inches square) is what made them so appealing initially, but conundrum has re-formatted the books to produce something bigger, better and more practical in terms of distribution. The work is too strong to let it be lost simply due to its format. Also included are many of the best one-off strips Ollmann produced for a variety of publications during these creative years. These are hilarious, poignant, and eclectic tales done in Ollmann's trademark warts-and-all style.

"Joe Ollmann's the only cartoonist I know who makes me think I'm dealing with the book scene, whose work makes me think I'm holding part of the Great Literary Tradition. And did I mention that his comics are as funny as hell?"
- David Collier

"Ollmann's desire to explore important subjects and his ability to provide an emotional payoff with sympathetic characters put this work above the grade... Ollmann's cartooning style is at once conventional and grotesque."
- Time.com

Joe Ollmann is a cartoonist who divides his time between Montreal and Hamilton. For four years he had a monthly comic strip in Exclaim!, Canada's national entertainment newspaper, and now he is a regular graphic columnist for Matrix magazine. His animation has appeared on America Online, The Comedy Network and at the Canadian Comedy Awards. His first graphic novel Chewing on Tinfoil received rave reviews from The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and Time.com. He is the same Joe Ollmann who is the art director at Ascent, Canada's only yoga magazine. Other comics and animation may be viewed by visiting www.wagpress.net.

Bowlbrawl
Nathaniel G. Moore
October 2005
ISBN 1-894994-10-8
Humour / Sports Biography
6x9 inches
240 pages
Photographs and illustrations throughout
$16.95 CDN / US

Bowlbrawl is the epic tale of Robert Towell's rise from the exploitive ranks of provincial under 14 bowling stardom to the corporate late 1990s sabre-toothed world of full contact hypermasculine bowling. With his company (World Championship Bowling) and the edgy and life-risking storylines, pay-per-views, rabid fan-base, psychotic "athletes" and the continuous love of his wife Nikola, Robert Towell revolutionized society's contemporary vision of professional bowling and changed the game forever. He now lives in Morocco with his wife. This is his story.

Nathaniel G. Moore writes in the tradition of literary sports reportage (like Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, or Hunter S. Thompson) but also combines biography, fabulation, a behind the scenes perspective of the only bowling trial in Ontario's history, backyard wrestling, and screenplay techniques (similar to the book/film Hard Core Logo). Part infomercial, part championship tournament, part asylum memoir, this story includes first-hand accounts from those whose lives were affected the most.

Granted unprecedented access to Towell's story and those of WCB bowlers Dragan Momchilo and Greg Lebelle, this first time author has created a startlingly unique and hilarious portrait of the death of bowling and one man's histrionic personality disorder.

"Bowlbrawl is the blueprint for sports armageddon."
- Jerry Tomlin, WCB Executive Consultant 1996-2000

"Like most of you, I follow bowling religiously. The tension, the excitement, the skill and the wonder this majestic sport engenders are, to me, akin to a night of oily rough sex - but with better outfits and an audience. Now Nathaniel G. Moore and his irresponsible friends have gone and wrecked the romance! Damn them. Mark my words, Bowlbrawl will poison the Sport Of Kings faster than salmonella at a July wedding - and we'll only have ourselves to blame. Oh, sure, it's cute the first time. But where is the finesse, the elegance - dare I say it? - the love? Gone, gone in a single, scorching flash of gonadal boy play. They don't even wear the right shoes. I hate Nathaniel G. Moore for what he's done to 'our game', and the next time I see him I'm going to drop kick his ass then beat him silly with a nine pin. Or all nine pins."
- RM Vaughan

Nathaniel G. Moore is an iconoclast, fighter and lover. His work has been aired on ZeD TV and has appeared in print in magazines such as Matrix, Broken Pencil, Quill & Quire, The Antigonish Review and This Magazine. He is the feature's editor at The Danforth Review, and the editor of the Canadian anthology Desire, Doom & Vice. He is represented online courtesy of Notho Entertainment. Visit www.bowlbrawl.com for the Bowlbrawl trailer and further updates.

Read an excerpt from Bowlbrawl.

The Unexpurgated Tale of Lordie Jones
Marc Ngui
May 2005
ISBN 1-894994-08-6
Graphic Novel
7x7 inches
80 pages
$12 CDN / US

What happens when you try to double cross the tooth fairy? Marc Ngui's follow-up to his popular and critically acclaimed book Enter Avariz answers this question with an intricately crosshatched cartoon conflation of several popular childhood fears into a morally ambiguous suburban fable. Taunted in the schoolyard Lordie Jones slowly realizes something is wrong inside him, a secret that continues to grow. Told with wicked delight and dark humour in the tradition of Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey, or Tim Burton, Toronto native Marc Ngui has created a graphic novel with all the ghoulish verve of a classic unexpurgated fairytale.

"Neither confessional nor ironic, Ngui's work is wonderfully out of step with trends and can sometimes read like a comic collaboratively created by Terry Gilliam and Naomi Klein."
- eye

Marc Ngui is a graphic novelist and artist whose work is firmly rooted in DIY/zine culture. For the past two years, from Yellowknife, NWT to Brooklyn, NY, he's been giving workshops and presentations at libraries, schools, bookstores and art galleries, about the rapidly evolving North American Culture of Comix. He spent the 2004-2005 season as Toronto DIY arts correspondent for ZeD Television on the CBC. He is currently interacting processing in Toronto.

Witness My Shame
Shary Boyle
October 2004
ISBN 1-894994-03-5
Graphic Novel / Visual Art
6 x 8 inches
176 pages
$20 US/CDN

Inspired by the self-publishing, or "printed matter" scene coming out of NSCAD in the 1990s Shary Boyle created sixteen mini books between 1997 and 2001. These genre-defying bookworks helped to fortify her independent artistic vision, which has since catapulted her onto the international stage. Staying up all night photocopying her drawings, collating and stapling them at home to be handed out anywhere and to anyone, meant freedom from art-world sanctioned venues of presentation: the drawings were imperfect, confrontational, urgent. The small book format was perfect for spilling all sorts of dirty and hilarious secrets. The works were mini stories of major subjects, unfolding in a beautifully paced sequence of revelations. Witness My Shame re-presents the majority of these bookworks as a graphic novel. Each one forms a chapter, a visual story which is part of a larger sequential narrative. The original flashbulb moments of hidden shame and pain are presented as they were created, resisting all urges to polish or elaborate, in the service of maintaining the spontaneous energy of the drawings. In this unique collection, Shary Boyle creates images of childhood and adolescence, exploring issues of power, gender, sexuality, and dysfunction. With Witness My Shame Boyle critically and humourously examines our relationships with ourselves, with our families, and with our culture. In so doing she underscores the poignant fragility of our very humanity.

"To describe her work is to gush. Looking at Boyle's images is like falling into murky puddles of memories... Boyle has captured both the bliss and discomfort of childhood. She illustrates the nebulous sexuality of adolescence in dream-like landscapes."
- Toronto Star

"Shary might draw cute girls, but their anxiety erodes the pleasing façade, creating the aesthetic equivalent of a doll's dress on a cactus.... Some of her drawings may enrage knee-jerk reactionaries, but there is a deeper purpose in the fragmented image, part of a larger, immersive, therapeutic, narrative structure.... Shary's work forces the viewer to slow down, to assess, to compare against their own experience, and revisit a place they might have thought lost."
- Ryan Bigge, Broken Pencil

"The book's a disquieting read. It piques the fear that someone will tear it from your hands at any moment and march you to your room. Boyle picks at the horrors of childhood, things that have congealed in some pungent corner of her imagination.... She draws with disturbing guilelessness, like the illustrator of some nihilistic Judy Blume novel. Her tableaux are an unrelenting stream of traumas and debasements, studies in depravity. They're also hilarious."
- eye

"Such simple lines on paper can manage to condense a universe."
- Hour

Shary Boyle is a multimedia artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture and performance. Constantly travelling, she has set up temporary studios across North America and Europe, working and exhibiting in Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Nova Scotia, Vancouver and the Yukon. Shary Boyle has been a Resident Artist at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City Yukon, as well as Struts Artist Run Centre in Sackville, New Brunswick. Boyle also collaborates with musicians, creating "live" drawings which are animated and projected onstage alongside their performance. She has worked with Peaches at the Sonic Youth curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Los Angeles and most recently performed with Feist at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, France. Shary Boyle's work has been published in magazines and books such as The Story of Jane Doe (Random House), The Walrus, The National Post, Starship, Maclean's, Toro Magazine, Saturday Night Magazine, and J&L Books. In 2004 her work will also appear in Girls Who Bite Back (Sumach Press) and Scheherazade (Soft Skull Press). Her work will be shown as part of The Republic of Love exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto, The Canadians at ZieherSmith Gallery in New York, and at Or Gallery in Vancouver. Shary Boyle was born in Scarborough, Ontario and is now based in Toronto.

Corner Pieces
Lance Blomgren

November 2004
ISBN 1-894994-04-3
Fiction / Urban Studies
6 X 8 inches
96 pages
includes photographs, wrap-around cover
$15.95

Corner Pieces is Lance Blomgren's eagerly anticipated follow-up to Walkups, his docu-drama about Montreal apartments, which was published to critical and popular success by conundrum press in 2000. Evolving out of Blomgren's ongoing fascination with architecture, Corner Pieces finds his distinctive voice expanding out of the domestic sphere and moving onto the streets.

Composed as a series of elegies to particular places, both real and imaginary, Corner Pieces traces a cartography of desire and frustration, loss and redemption, set amidst the backdrop of the contemporary urban spectacle. In Blomgren's city, the familiar becomes decidely strange. Street corners, indistinct industrial zones, central business districts and public squares become sites where the ideals and failures of urban planning collide with direct, personal experience. Here, lovers make out in discreet, unused corners; protesters march the streets in a bewildered state of empowerment and sadness; a two-storey stack of towels becomes a public sculpture of religious contemplation. Here, the street signs have all been changed, and the poignant moments that give rhythm to everyday life, but usually go unnoticed, come into focus. Cinematic in its scope, Blomgren's fictions move formally and conceptually between autobiographical vignette, sociological study, historical monument plan, architecture proposal, civic protest and love ballad, to create a psychological documentary of contemporary urban life. This book will draw together previous publications such as Manual for Beginners and Liner, which won the bp Nichol chapbook award in 1997. Corner Pieces will also contain writing created for recent art installations, and poster projects in Montreal, Calgary, Chicago, and Berlin.

Lance Blomgren was born in Courtenay, B.C. and presently lives in Montreal where he works as a writer, artist and teacher. He is the author of Practice (1996) and Walkups (2000), which will appear in French from Les Editions Triptyque. Blomgren has recently been published in Geist, Matrix, Ascent, and You and Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing (Véhicule Press, 2002). Last year his radio drama, A Room Full of Birds, was produced for CBC Radio. He has created writing installation projects for Dare-Dare and the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal, and at Sox36 Gallery in Berlin. Presently, Lance is co-curating an exhibition of Montreal video artists for Trinity Square Video in Toronto. In his spare time Lance enjoys self-medicating with large doses of Brazilian Tropicalia.

Mac Tin Tac
Marc Tessier &
Stéphane Olivier

December 2004
ISBN 1-894994-05-1
Graphic Novel
Mature Content
6 X 9 inches
160 pages
$17.95 CDN / $15.95 US

The Artists: Al+Flag, Jean-Claude Amyot, Hélène Brosseau, Simon Bossé, Rupert Bottenberg, Caro Caron, Jean-Pierre Chansigaud, G.B. Edwin, Alexandre Lafleur, Billy Mavreas, Stéphane Olivier, Helge Reumann, Carlos Santos, Siris, Richard Suicide.

Mac Tin Tac, a dystopic allegory of modern life told through a unique combination of myth and hard-edged realism, was originally serialized in five comics between 1990 and 1995. To illustrate their vision, Montreal authors Tessier and Oliver commissioned the emerging talent of Quebec's avant garde. Many of these artists went on to varying degrees of success publishing in French in Europe and Quebec, and in English in Cyclops: Contemporary Canadian Narrative Art, which conundrum press published to rave reviews in 2003. However, this story was left uncollected until now. Mac is a mirror maker in a world in which everyone works for the Cake Factory. When the factory is put on wheels and moved to a third world country, the citizens revolt. Concerned with anti-globilization politics long before the term became commonplace, the story is a mix of Orwell's 1984 and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realism. Mac's desperate attempt to create beauty in a bleak world is the overarching theme in the book. But the dazzling variety of drawing styles keeps the reader immersed in the lives of various peripheral characters as well, their desire for employment, for the taste of intoxicating bananas, for new shoes, or simply to be noticed by a populace constricted by blinders.

Mac Tin Tac, which includes new material done especially for this edition, is not only an impressive cultural document from Quebec's fin-de-siècle underground but is also a chronicle of the struggle for hope in the face of corporate uncertainty. Stéphane Olivier teaches graphic design. He recently finished the graphic novel Le Clairon and is editing the next book in the Cyclopes series. Marc Tessier has collaborated with Alexandre Lafleur on Theatre of Cruelty (Fantagraphics) and the upcoming Abinagouesh series (Delcourt). He is a frequent contributor to The Comics Journal.

"It is a delirious, chaotic, often impenetrable allegory of tribalism in an industrial dystopia. Here, sentient liquor bottles get soused on raw bananas while dead fish coast through the clouds. The chapters by Carlos Santos, which bookend the novel, cushion the violent undercurrents. In deafening contrast is Richard Suicide's chapter... in a style so breathless, so dense, it smothers the reader in its sticky stench."
- eye

"Tessier and Olivier's artistic direction of the project is deviously inspired.... This is a surprisingly coherent work where each artist has been paired with a chapter that complements his graphic style.
- Montreal Review of Books

The Worthwhile Flux
Corey Frost
December 2004
ISBN 1-894994-06-X
Short Stories / Performance
5 x 7 inches
144 pages
$12

Corey Frost's first book of stories, My Own Devices, was published by conundrum press to both popular and critical acclaim. His latest offering, The Worthwhile Flux, collects Frost's dynamic performance pieces, including the texts from some of his beautifully designed chapbooks self-published over the last decade. Tonight you'll have a filthy dream was a collection of stories first performed in Montreal from 1994 to 1999, accompanied by the images used in performance. It included the surreal pedagogy of "5 minutes with the Communist Manifesto" (the digitally remastered version) and "5 minutes with/without the ground," a story about airplanes and war that proved to be creepily prescient in September 2001. I feel perfectly fine was the third volume in the Backwards Versions trilogy of chapbooks. It contained stories first performed in 1999 and 2000, including the crowd-pleasing "Everything I know about aphids" and "A few advanced yo-yo tricks." Added to these will be some uncollected pieces, such as "The Worthwhile Flux", featuring the religious beliefs of random strangers met while travelling, and "Summer plum (winter version)", about the moral issues surrounding the consumption of a plum.

The Worthwhile Flux collects the best of the author's chapbooks along with newer performance pieces and some never-before-seen writing. And, although the stories and photographs will now be forever fixed on the page, the experience is still definitely worthwhile.

"These are stories for the altered attention spans of the modern world: experimental meditations on everything from the way North Americans vacillate between happiness and unhappiness in 'A Few Advanced Yo-Yo Tricks' to underused letters of the alphabet in 'A Farewell to Q.' The book is also highly visually oriented, with graphics on almost every page. Dreamy and erudite, silly and profound, The Worthwhile Flux is an exercise in contradictions that lingers in the memory."
- Quill & Quire

"A heady blend of intellectualism and snide absurdity."
- Hour

Corey Frost has received wide acclaim for his self-published chapbooks and his multi-media performances that reverberate with surrealist wit and proletarian pop. He has travelled extensively, including two tours of duty on the unique Perpetual Motion Roadshow in Canada and the US, and performance tours of Europe and Australia. His CD Bits World: Exciting Version is forthcoming from Wired on Words. Currently he is pursuing a PhD and lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Cherry
Chandra Mayor
Winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award 2005!
March 2004
112 pages, 4.25 x 7 inches
Novel
Includes photographs
ISBN 1-894994-02-7
$14.95 CDN / $9.95 US

Set in the Winnipeg skinhead scene of the early 1990s, Cherry is an unsettling account of a woman's negotiation of violence, memory, and identity. Mayor deftly employs the technique of pastiche to craft her story: newspaper articles, notes, photographs, letters, and even appointment slips are used to signify the multi-layered nature of her narrative. At its heart, Cherry is a story about a romantic relationship on the precipice of chaos. The unnamed protagonist falls in love with an enigmatic young skinhead and spirals into a frightening state of unreality. Her world is reduced to a cycle of drugs, abuse and an endless series of rooming houses which she is forced to call home. These addresses become the chapter titles; Mayor literally uses the decrepit buildings as the structures on which to hang her narrative. The narrator tries to write her way out of her desperate situation, infusing moments with a vibrant and transcendent beauty to ensure her survival, and in doing so invokes the streets of downtown Winnipeg with the precision of a poet and the cunning of a satirist. Cherry is a punk rock bricolage, a poetic novel, a loss of innocence story, and an ode to the city of Winnipeg.

"A startling read from the perspective of a young woman who saw it all from the inside. Cherry is a novel that exposes the shocking reality that is the racist right."
- Warren Kinsella (author of Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Networks)

Winner of the 2004 Manitoba book Award for Most Promising Writer!

"With poetic economy, Mayor spins a tale of misplaced love and harrowing abuse."
- The Globe and Mail

"Mayor's prose is razor-sharp, perfectly suited to her subject matter. There are no flowery CanLit metaphors, no devices, just direct, bold writing."
- Ottawa Xpress

Check out the review of Cherry in the Toronto Star.

Chandra Mayor is a Winnipeg writer and editor. She has worked with dark leisure press and Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2). Her first book, August Witch: poems, was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, the Mary Scorer Award for best book by a Manitoba publisher, and the John Hirsch Award for most promising writer, and won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in 2003. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including The Cyclops Review 02 (Cyclops Press) and Exposed, an anthology of new writing by women (The Muses' Company). A member of the Prairie Fire board of directors, she is also the Manitoba representative for the League of Canadian Poets.

Neither Either Nor Or
Joey Dubuc
October 2003
104 pages, 4.125 x 6.875 inches
Graphic Novel / Visual art / Fiction
Illustrations throughout
ISBN 0-9689496-9-X
$14.95 CDN
$11.95 US

Inspired by Edward Packard, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, artist Joey Dubuc has created the genre-defying literary debut Neither Either Nor Or. Spelunk into the cave of his unconscious as it melds with you, the reader. Follow along and try to avoid the pitfalls of his winding narrative as it leads (or loses) you through caverns, forests, rivers, or along the cliff's edge. But stay alert or you may perish! At surface what seems to be a simple rumination on death becomes a metaphysical quest, filled with existential choices, glimpsed through the lens of nostalgia.

Joey Dubuc was born in Greenfield Park, a suburb of Montreal. Highlights in his life include: a possible false memory of a record player falling on his head; a brief visit to the Luray Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia; and countless hours spent watching re-runs of various television programs. He has worked as a smoked meat cutter at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, a demolition worker, and a teacher's assistant at York University.

Joey was featured as a Noisemaker in the Montreal Mirror in January 2004.

"This is a flawless evocation of the golden age of 1980s young adult literature.... The design of this book, with its Todd Haynes intensity and aesthetic referencing, consumed me like a virus... [it] expands the limits of what a book can be.... More a disorientation generator than a story, it fulfills the promise of adventure, albiet with a ruckus filled with existential crisis after crisis."
- Broken Pencil

"Much like real life, there are choices that aren't really choices, including at least one point where you can get 'stuck', bouncing between two pages with no resolution.... Dubuc's quirky humour makes this one cool little artifact."
- McGill Daily

Another Book About Another Broken Heart
Julia Tausch
October 2003
160 pages, 4.25 x 7 inches
Novel
ISBN 1-894994-00-0
$14.95 CDN / $9.95 US

Twenty-one year old Katy self-consciously, obsessively processes the dissolution of love, resulting in Another Book About Another Broken Heart, a fast-paced monologue filtered through the consciousness of this clever, albeit self-obsessed and miserable young woman. After moving from Toronto to Montreal, Katy is forced to forge new friendships, some providing new strength, others resulting in disaster. Whether arguing with her violently disturbed neighbour over a St. Hubert's chicken or confronting her estranged boyfriend atop the CN tower, Katy is desperate to narrate some control into her life. Originally intended as a one-woman show, the voice-driven nature of this novel allows it to "perform" for the reader; Katy's cognizance of our presence disrupts the narrative and invites us to participate fully in her often hilarious take on the subject that's been done to death and then done again.

"Funny, self-debunking, sassy, irreverent, impassioned, dismayed, distraught, delirious, adventuresome, vulnerable (yep, that too), Julia Tausch's heroine provides a voice for her times. Simultaneously politically savvy and emotionally naïve, both joyful and depressed, she wends her way through the world with smart-eyed contempt and a gentle, wounded heart. Another Book About Another Broken Heart is a smart book, and ultimately a very human book. For anyone interested in the travails of being young and female in contemporary times, it's a must, and a delightful, read." - Trevor Ferguson

Julia Tausch sometimes lives in Montreal, sometimes in Toronto. She recently completed her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Previously she has been published in The Cyclops Review (Cyclops Press), Matrix, and Career Suicide: Contemporary Literary Humour (DC Books). She won the J.C.W. Saxon Award for playwriting in 2001. This is her first novel.

Sapphic Traffic
Suki Lee
November 2003
120 pages, 5.5 x 5 inches
Short Stories / Lesbian Fiction
ISBN 1-894994-01-9
$14.95 CDN / $9.95 US

Inspired by the Lesbian pulp books of the 1950s Suki Lee's debut reclaims the territory for the modern woman. Sapphic Traffic is a provocative collection of twenty short stories told through the tradition of the confessional. A Jamaican drug deal is a catalyst for the unthinkable, lucid dreams spill over into the enclosed world of a psych ward, a desperate obsession leads to a doomed attempt at love. Filled with desire and longing but not trapped by them, Suki Lee's characters skirt the mundane realities of life and revel in walking the fault line between the private and the public woman. The stories trace the repercussions that follow the revelation: "There is something you should know about me."

Suki Lee's fiction has appeared in Exile, The Literary Quarterly, Matrix and was anthologized in Hot & Bothered 3: Short Short Fiction on Lesbian Desire. She writes the column, "Sapphic Traffic" for Capital Xtra, Ottawa's gay and lesbian newspaper. She has travelled to 20 countries and lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Peterborough, Swansea (Wales), Seoul (Korea), and now Ottawa. She currently works at the Ottawa Art Gallery where she writes about visual art and artists. Visit her site at: www.sukilee.com

"Suki Lee is Ottawa's Anais Nin."
- The Glebe Report

"Suki Lee's prose throbs with sensuality while she probes dark and disturbing desires.... Reading it feels like eavesdropping, like standing against a paper-thin wall in a rundown motel, ear pressed to a drinking glass, listening in as a cast of characters confess their deepest, darkest transgressions.... What connects the diverse stories is the writing, which is precise, poetic and vibrant."
- NOW Magazine

7.75 x 10.75 inches
Full colour cover with flaps
224 black and white pages
$16.95 US
$19.95 CDN
16 Euros
ISBN 0-9689496-8-1

THE ARTISTS

Michel Rabagliati, Siris, Line Gamache, Marc Bell, Peter Thompson, Alain Reno, Stéphane Olivier and Gilles Boulerice, Marc Richard, Marc Tessier, Bernie Mireault, Caro Caron, Jimmy Beaulieu, Phil Angers, Richard Suicide, Leif Tand, Rupert Bottenberg, Carlos Santos, Obom, Jean-Pierre Chansigaud, Jean-Claude Amyot, Philippe Girard, Hélène Brosseau, Billy Mavreas, and Alexandre Lafleur.

In Montreal, a large community of artists, both French and English, has emerged at the forefront of a graphic narrative movement, after twenty years of struggle. Perhaps it is the unique position of the city, influenced by both European and North American styles, which has made some of these artists internationally recognized. Some European publications have had completely "Montreal" issues featuring many of these artists: StripBurger from Slovenia and Ferraille from France to name but two.

Cyclops is the work of twenty-five highly prolific, award-winning, mature Canadian artists. Consisting of longer graphic narratives the book allows these artists room to express themselves within a medium which fuses the form of the graphic narrative with the conventions of the short story. The stories relate to the human condition and are told through a variety of approaches including humour, autobiography, poetry, philosophy, legend and myth. Some of these artists are well known in North America as well: Tessier and Lafleur released the Fantagraphics title Theatre of Cruelty; Harvey award winner Michel Rabagliati has had work appear in the Drawn and Quarterly anthologies; Bernie Mireault is featured in the Blair Witch Chronicles; Marc Bell's strips are syndicated across the country and Highwater is releasing his Shrimpy & Paul book; Bottenberg is also the Montreal Mirror's music editor; but for most of the French artists this book will be the first showcasing of their work in English. Cyclops is the English version of the popular and critically-acclaimed series of Cyclopes books which have represented Quebec culture abroad. Publishing their innovative work in translation will finally provide an opportunity for these artists to be appreciated in the rest of North America.

- Read a Book of the Week review in the danforth review.

Enter Avariz
by Marc Ngui
December, 2002
112 pages (6 X 9 inches) + 8 foldouts (22 X 9)
Graphic Novel
ISBN 0-9689496-6-5
$20 CDN/$18 US

Enter Avariz is a meditation on the state of the modern world told in a single tumbling video game style narrative.

Witness as the delightfully bouncy Boy Ugly and the rest of the resilient Zak Meadow gang are sold-out, co-opted, harvested, test-marketed, junk-mailed, genetically modified, pre-packaged, networked, made over, discounted, off-gassed and branded in the pursuit of economic progress by the otherwise well meaning agents of capitalism.

In a vivid mixture of Saturday morning cartoons, 'anti-globalisation' politics and stream of consciousness hallucinations, Enter Avariz is both a light-hearted romp through the travails of our technologically obsessed civilization and a sinister peek into the greedy bowels of a parasitic culture.

"If the Queen of Hearts wore a business suit and played a sort of Globalization Candyland instead of chess, and Alice were a naive and surreal prankster, you'd have Enter Avariz. It's a funny 21st century Alice in Wonderland - a celebratory romp and novelty song to the human spirit with great cartooning, loopy jokes and something to say."
- Tom Hart

"The long-awaited full-length Zak Meadow tale from comic genius Marc Ngui does not disappoint. His hilarious, rambunctious and horrifying take on post-modern capitalism is remarkable."
- Broken Pencil magazine

- Read a review in the Montreal Mirror.

Sea Peach
(Halocynthia auranthium)
by Catherine Kidd
Jack Beetz
September, 2002
68 pages, 5.5 X 5 inches, CD included
Spoken word / Poetry
ISBN 0-9689496-4-9
$16.95

Sea Peach, the highly-anticipated new collaboration between Catherine Kidd and Jack Beetz, features a collection of interlinked pieces which constitute a bonsai performance version of Kidd's novel Bestial Rooms. The stories and poems focus on themes of memory and zoo animals, chickens and global warming, a giant leech that sucks up the whole world, and a gentler creature, the Sea Peach, who might inspire humans to restore the world to itself. Through voice, image, sound and text this CD/book recreates these performances. A lovely package, Sea Peach can sit on either your CD rack or your bookshelf.

Catherine Kidd is the author of the novel Bestial Rooms (Thomas Allen), as well as two previous conundrum releases.

Jack Beetz is a DJ and music mastering engineer. On the vinyl lathe in his studio, Chopstick, he cuts records and dub plates for reggae artists in New York, Montreal, and abroad.

The CD is produced by Wired on Words.

Winner of the MECCA 2003 for Best New Text!

Voted Best Spoken Word Artist in Montreal Mirror!

Praise for Kidd's other conundrum releases:

"She takes little shreds of language, and lifts them up and turns them in the light, holding them, playing with them - searching them for meaning as if they were toys that had just come out of a black box, without instructions."
- Ian Ferrier, Montreal Gazette

"Kidd's voice is the best cause for spoken word I've heard yet... Huge talent!"
- Terminal City

"Kidd's spontaneous prose brings physical attributes into a poetic consciousness. She explores tangents based on a series of coincidental thoughts, then pulls back into a firm unwavering center. Kidd writes with a deep concern for the physical, the tangible, and the tactile nature of our own existence within a confusing, sometimes predatory environment."
- The Peak

The Overlords of Glee
by Billy Mavreas
co-published with Crunchy Comics
$15 ($10 U.S.)

This beautiful perfect bound book collects together strips by the renowned underground comic artist Billy Mavreas for the first time, as well as many never before seen strips. These stories of monoliths, bunnies, and alchemical slugs have appeared in various international anthologies including: 106U (Montreal), Danny Hellman's Legal Defence Fund book (USA), Cyclope (Montreal), Maow Maow (Toronto), Ferraille (France), as well as many mail art and zine exhibitions. In 1997, Conundrum published his book of poster art, Mutations, which is now sold out.

"The stuff looks insane: ornate, carefully and intricately wrought, cute hilarious, disturbing, it's all there on the page. Mavreas's comics eschew traditional narrative in favour of time-jumping, space-warping, organic flows of controlled ink."
- HOUR magazine, Montreal

- The Overlords of Glee was featured as the cover story in Hour Magazine
- Rick Trembles reviews The Overlords of Glee
- Read an article from Exclaim!
- Read a CBC interview with Billy on Brave New Waves

Distributed in the U.S. by Cold Cut Distribution

All Day Breakfast
by Valerie Joy Kalynchuk
ISBN 0-965161-9-X
$10

This book of short stories, which the Globe and Mail called "a disarming stream-of-consciousness novel," was made in a limited edition for distribution in a cigarette machine. Conundrum Press was so inspired by the positive response to All Day Breakfast that they are reissuing it as a perfect bound book, collecting together all Valerie's published work (from various zines) into one volume.

"Valerie's done it again. All Day Breakfast elicits equally strong feelings of fascination and revulsion. The handful of eerie little stories about family life from a teenage girl's perspective hit too close for comfort, make you squirm like you're witnessing an awful event you want to ignore, but feel compelled to resolve. Cracked, awkward characters vomit out the minutiae of their lives as though nothing existed beyond the mundane details of their five-hour breakfasts, high school graduations and plane trips. Valerie's stories do not so much follow plot lines as naturally conform to the grim poetry of greasy fingers, violence and broken homes." - Broken Pencil's May zine of the month