In Wild Failure bestselling novelist Zoe Whittall's debut collection of poetic fiction contends with the meaning of desire for both intimacy and danger in a world that devalues queer femininity. In "Oh, El" a dominant woman can't stop herself from toying with the tender heart of her co-worker. The title story, "Wild Failure" is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. In "Half Pipe" a teen girl's heterosexual ambivalence results in chaos at a skate park. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in "Murder at the Elm Street Collective House." In "The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet" a woman reflects on her brief stint at a 90s strip club after she learns of the death of a former client. Whittall's characters navigate shame, attachment, and disconnection in this collection of outsider stories, which were inspired by the new narrative movement.

Welcome to Montreal in the months before the 1995 referendum. Riot Grrl gets bought out and mass marketed as the Spice Girls, and gays are gaining some legitimacy, but the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. It's been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; revolution seems possible, when you're 18, like Eve. Eve is pining to get out of her parents' house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della — mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, an avid separatist and ten years older. Initially taken in by a mutual other-worldly sense of rapture, they hole up in Della apartment, trying to navigate spaces of jealousy. On the night of the 1995 referendum, politics and romance come to a head and Even's naiveté begins to fade. From naive teenager to hot shot rough girl, Even decides her own fate.

A scammer as alluring as she is elusive irrevocably upends the lives of two strangers in this gripping novel from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People.After the death of her wife, Shelby is suffering from prolonged grief. She’s increasingly isolated, irritated by her family’s stoicism and her friends’ reliance on the toxic positivity of self-help culture. Then, in a grief support group, she meets Cammie, who gives her permission to express her most hopeless, hideous feelings. Cammie is charismatic and unlike anyone Shelby has ever met. She’s also recovering from cancer and going through several other calamities. Shelby puts all her energy into helping Cammie thrive—until her intuition tells her that something isn’t right.Gibson is fresh from divorce, almost forty, and deeply depressed. Then he falls in love with Cammie. Not only is he having the best sex of his life with a woman so attractive he’s stunned...

It's taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People. It's 1997 and Missy's band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At twenty-two years old, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. Missy is the only girl in the band and she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town. But then a forgotten party favour strands her at the border. Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living, when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return...

What is it like to grow into adulthood with the war on terror, SARS, and Hurricane Katrina as your back-drop? In her robust, elegant novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling and mature portrait of a generation we've rarely seen in literature—the twenty-somethings who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotions, blurring their public and private lives. With this lively work, Whittall proves herself once again to be one of our most talented writers.

From award-winning author Zoe Whittall comes The Best Kind of People, a stunning tour de force about the unravelling of an all-American family.

Missy Turner thinks of herself as the most ordinary woman in the world. She has a lot to be thankful for: a great kid, a loving husband, a job she enjoys and the security of living in the small town where she was born. Then one day everything gets turned upside down. She loses her job, catches her husband making out with the neighbor and is briefly taken hostage by a young man who robs the local café. With her world rapidly falling apart, Missy finds herself questioning the certainties she's lived with her whole life. Originally published in 2010, The Middle Ground was a 2011 Golden Oak Award Nominee and an early work from an award-winning author. This edition includes discussion questions at the back for reading and literacy groups.