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Rebecca Tucker

How farmer's markets and organic produce became synonymous with "good food" and why they shouldn't be.

How did farmer's markets, nose-to-tail, locavorism, organic eating, CSAs, whole foods, and Whole Foods become synonymous with “good food”? And are these practices really producing food that is morally, environmentally, or economically sustainable? Rebecca Tucker's compelling, reported argument shows that we must work to undo the moral coding that we use to interpret how we come by what we put on our plates. She investigates not only the danger of the accepted rhetoric, but the innovative work happening on farms and university campuses to create a future where nutritious food is climate-change resilient, hardy enough to grow season after season, and, most importantly, available to all—not just those willing or able to fork over the small fortune required for a perfect heirloom tomato. 

Tucker argues that arriving at that future will require a broad cognitive shift away from the idea that farmer's markets, community gardens, and organic food production is the only sustainable way forward; more than that, it will require the commitment of research firms, governments, corporations, and post-secondary institutions to develop and implement agri­science innovations that do more than improve the bottom line. A Matter of Taste asks us to rethink what good food really is.

Coach House Books

Exploded Views

A Matter of Taste: A farmers' market devotee's semi-reluctant argument for inviting scientific innovation to the dinner table

Kelli María Korducki

In 2012 Korducki was named one of five young journalists most likely to succeed by the Ryerson Review of Journalism and was nominated for a 2015 National Magazine Award for Tiny Triumphs a 10,000-word meditation on the humble hot dogKorducki is well connected having written for Vice, The Hairpin, NPR, and The New Inquiry among othersReleasing just in time for Valentine's day, Hard To Do is sure to capitalize on broken hearts and spurned loversHard To Do views romantic rupture through a gendered lens in in the tradition of Moira Weigel and Laura KipnisKorducki has a sizeable Twitter following of over 10,000 with which she can discuss Hard To Do

Hard To Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up

Julia Cooper

The Last Word investigates the debased art of eulogy. Through insightful, surprisingly playful readings of famous eulogies (from a scene in Love Actually to Jacques Derrida’s heart-rending essays on the deaths of his peers), Cooper argues against the socially sanctioned desire to avoid thinking about death that results in clichéd memorials, honoring neither the living nor the dead.

The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy

Sarah Barmak

A provocative look at why our current understanding of female sexuality isn't getting us off.

QUILL & QUIRE BEST OF 2016

QUILL & QUIRE BEST COVER OF 2016

We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated – if anything, we’re told we’re oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. Over half of women report having a sexual complaint, whether that’s lack of desire or difficulty reaching orgasm. But this issue doesn’t get much press; the urge is to ignore or medicalize it (witness the quest for ‘pink Viagra’). If so many ordinary women suffer from sexual frustration, then perhaps the problem isn’t one that can be addressed by a pharmaceutical fix – or isn’t a problem. Maybe we need to get hot and bothered about a broader cultural cure: a reorienting of our current male-focused approach to sex and pleasure, and a rethinking of what’s ‘normal.’

Using a blend of reportage, interview and first-person reflection, journalist Sarah Barmak explores the cutting-edge science and grassroots cultural trends that are getting us closer to truth of women’s sexuality. Closer reveals how women are reshaping their sexuality today in wild, irrepressible ways: nude meetings, how-to apps, trans-friendly porn, therapeutic vulva massage, hour-long orgasms and public clit-rubbing demonstrations – and redefining female sexuality on its own terms.

Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality

Mike Hoolboom

Chase Joynt

The book is constructed as a series of conversations between filmmaker Mike Hoolboom and moving-image artist Chase Joynt. Hoolboom was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the 80s and would have died if not for the introduction of the 'cocktail' therapy in 1995. Chase Joynt is a transgender individual (female-to-male). The book's title refers to the notion that they are both currently living 'second lives.' Mike and Chase have a fascinating dynamic and will perform the book well in public. They'll also produce a high-quality book trailer and investigate other moving-image strategies to promote the book.

YOLT is true fiction, part of the auto-genre wave that includes the diary crypts of Knausgaard, the friendship recordings of Sheila Heti and the theory-fiction of Maggie Nelson and Chris Krauss.

High-profile trans people (Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, Chaz Bono) have put the trans experience and transgender cultural production in the spotlight recently. YOLT offers an intersectional perspective and an embodied experience of our post-biopolitical world.

Seeking blurbs from Maggie Nelson, Lana Wachowski and Michelle Tea.

The conversation is framed through the life and work of filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, the inspiration for the film 12 Monkeys).

You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death, and Transition

Howard Akler

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS

The problem of consciousness may just be a semantic one. The brain absorbs a sea of sensory input, the tiniest fraction of which reaches the shore of our awareness. We pay attention to what is most novel, most necessary at the time. At its most reductive, the word 'consciousness' refers to the synchronized firing of neurons across multiple areas of the brain, the mental experience of attending.

But should consciousness be summed up simply by its subsconscious mechanism? I would prefer a more imaginative answer.

After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate. 

Howard Akler is the author of The City Man, which was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Men of Action

RM Vaughan

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch.

More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can't stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twenty-four-hour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation?

Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we've created, predicting a cultural collision—will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done?—and wondering about the cause-and-effect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it's an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists—does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the long-term cultural consequences of this increasing sacrifice for the ever-elusive goal of "total productivity"?

RM Vaughan is the author of nine books and many short video works. He contributes essays on culture and society to numerous publications and his video works play in galleries and festivals around the world.

Bright Eyed: Insomnia and Its Cultures

Tim Maly

Emily Horne

In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.

Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices—providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.

Tim Maly is a regular contributor to Wired, the Atlantic, and Urban Omnivore and is a 2014 fellow at Harvard University's Metalab.

Emily Horne is the designer and photographer of the webcomic A Softer World.

The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance

Shawn Micallef

What do your Eggs Benedict say about your notions of class?

Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class.

Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity.

The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it's also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn't so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it's that brunch could be so much more.

The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure

Geoff Pevere

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no Canadian band rocked harder, louder or to more hardcore fans than Teenage Head. This high-energy quartet – consisting of four guys who'd known each other since high school – were a balls-to-the-walls sonic assault. And they almost became world-famous. Almost. This is their story, told for the first time.

Gods of the Hammer: The Teenage Head Story

Exploded Views is a series of probing, provocative essays that offer surprising perspectives on the most intriguing cultural issues and figures of our day. Longer than a typical magazine article but shorter than a full-length book, these are punchy salvos written by some of North America's most lyrical journalists and critics. Spanning a variety of forms and genres — history, biography, polemic, commentary — and published simultaneously in all digital formats and handsome, collectable print editions, this is literary reportage that at once investigates, illuminates and intervenes.