AUTHORS: Marianne Apostolides, Deni Y. Béchard, Steven Heighton

Marianne Apostolides is the author of four books, including the novels Swim and The Lucky Child, which was longlisted for a ReLit Award. Apostolides is a recipient of the 2011 Chalmers Arts Fellowship. She presents Voluptuous Pleasure, a collection of non-fiction stories that push the limits of the genre.

Deni Y. Béchard’s first novel, Vandal Love, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. His articles, stories, and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, including the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, and Harvard Review. He has done freelance reporting from northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and he has lived in over 30 countries. Béchard presents Cures for Hunger, a gripping memoir of a young man looking for the soul of a man and the darkness that he finds within.

James Grainger is the author of The Long Slide, which won the ReLit Award for short fiction. His reviews and articles have appeared in the Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, Globe and Mail, Elle Canada, Men's Fashion, Sharp and Rue Morgue.

Steven Heighton is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels: Afterlands, The Shadow Boxer, and Every Lost Country. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in publications including the London Review of Books, Tin House, and Walrus. Heighton has won several awards and has been nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. He reads from his latest work of short stories, The Dead Are More Visible, which encompasses wildly divergent themes of love and loss, containment and exclusion.

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong. When the boy discovers his father’s true identity, and the crime sprees and prison sentences attached to it, his imagination runs wild. Before long, he is imagining himself as a character in one of his father’s stories. Deni can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding himself and to making sense of his own passions, aversions, and motivations.

Eleven profoundly moving and finely crafted stories encapsulate wildly divergent themes of love and loss, containment and exclusion. Stories include those about a parks and recreation worker who faces an assailant who does not leave the altercation intact, a medical researcher and his claustrophobic fiancée who are locked in the trunk of their car after a failed carjacking and a young woman who enters a pharmaceutical trial in the outer reaches of suburbia and slips between sleeping and waking with increasingly alarming ease.

A collection of non-fiction stories which are sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths – these stories take you into brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; they seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you’ve ever read or even experienced.