Zoe Whittall

National Bestseller 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist National Post 99 Best Books of the Year Indigo Best Book of the Year Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of 2016 What if someone you trusted was accused of the unthinkable? George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual impropriety at a prestigious prep school. His wife, Joan, vaults between denial and rage as the community she loved turns on her. Their daughter, Sadie, a popular over-achieving high school senior, becomes a social pariah. Their son, Andrew, assists in his father's defense, while wrestling with his own unhappy memories of his teen years. A local author tries to exploit their story, while an unlikely men's rights activist attempts to get Sadie onside their cause. With George locked up, how do the members of his family pick up the pieces and keep living their lives? How do they defend someone they love while wrestling with the possibility of his guilt? With exquisite emotional precision, award-winning author Zoe Whittall explores issues of loyalty, truth, and the meaning of happiness through the lens of an all-American family on the brink of collapse.

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 Shelby 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 she even glanced his way, he feels truly known for the first time in his life. But Gibson’s friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he, too, has to admit that all the drama in Cammie’s life can feel a bit over the top.

When Gibson and Shelby meet, they realize Cammie’s stories don’t always add up. In fact, they’re far from the truth. But what kind of a person would lie about having cancer? And what does it say about Shelby and Gibson that they fell for it? From the author of The Best Kind of People and The Spectacular comes a sharp, emotional novel about lies, liars and the people who love them.

A Novel

The Fake

Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People. "Whittall addresses motherhood and autonomy in ways I've never seen done before. A fascinating stunner of a novel, The Spectacular is exactly that: spectacular!"--Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth It's 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twentytwo years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border. Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center 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 to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it's time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again. In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

The Spectacular

Winner of the 2008 Dayne Ogilvie Grant 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 parent's 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's apartment trying to navigate spaces of jealousy when a biker bomb goes off down the street. Their explosive beginning makes way for an even more volatile relationship that spans the following two years. Answering an ad for a roommate at the gay bookstore, Eve meets a new family of friends: Seven, homo-core sweetheart who defies all clichés, and Rachael, type-A activist and motivated poet. On the night of the 1995 referendum politics and romance come to a head and Eve's naiveté begins to fade. From naïve teenager to hot shot tough girl, Eve decides her own fate.

Bottle Rocket Hearts

What is it like to grow into adulthood with the war on terror as your defining political memory, with SARS and Hurricane Katrina as your backdrop? In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of a generation we've rarely seen in literature -- the twenty-five-year olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Zoe Whittall fulfills the promise of her acclaimed first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, with this extraordinary novel set in Toronto's seedy-but-gentrifying Parkdale. Revolving around three interlocking lives, it offers, among other things, a detailed inside look at the work of paramedics, and entertaining celebrity gossip.

Holding Still for as Long as Possible

Stories

Wild Failure

The Emily Valentine Poems

Holding still for as long as possible

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. “The genius of Zoe Whittall’s writing is her clear-eyed understanding of human nature, which she lays on the page in beautiful, startling, frank detail. I inhaled The Fake as fast as I could—and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.”—Marissa Stapley, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky AN AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 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 she even glanced his way, but he feels truly known for the first time in his life. But Gibson’s friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he, too, has to admit that all the drama in Cammie’s life can feel a bit over the top. When Gibson and Shelby meet, they realize Cammie’s stories don’t always add up. In fact, they’re far from the truth. But what kind of a person would lie about having cancer? And what does it say about Shelby and Gibson that they fell for it? From the author of The Best Kind of People and The Spectacular comes a sharp, emotional novel about lies, liars, and the people who love them.

A con artist walks into a grief support group. Chaos ensues. 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 Shelby 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 she even glanced his way, he feels truly known for the first time in his life. But Gibson's friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he, too, has to admit that all the drama in Cammie's life can feel a bit over the top. When Gibson and Shelby meet, they realize Cammie's stories don't always add up. In fact, they're far from the truth. But what kind of a person would lie about having cancer? And what does it say about Shelby and Gibson that they fell for it? From the author of The Best Kind of People and The Spectacular comes a sharp, emotional novel about lies, liars and the people who love them.

Best Kind of People

Spectacular

This is a gutsy, gritty, urban, urbane, and sleek selection by a poet evocatively skilled in her craft!A "precordial thump" is a single punch to the center of the sternum, an attempt to start the heart. In Zoe Whittall’s third book of poetry, lies erode a relationship, romance blooms in the back of an ambulance and the poet examines the implied sincerity in confessional poetry. At the intersection of emergency medicine and emergency poetry, Whittall aims to break down the larger lies of poetic form and the smaller dishonesties within ourselves.

Precordial Thump

The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life

Missy Turner is a very ordinary woman living in a small town and enjoying family life with her loving husband and child, until the day when her entire life is turned upside down and she begins to question certainties that she has lived with her whole life.

The Middle Ground

A dazzling debut collection of ten powerful, feminist, and queer short stories from bestselling author Zoe Whittall “Absorbing and wrenchingly intimate, with a rare balance of wit and tenderness.”—Jenny Fran Davis, author of Dykette In Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships. 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 nineties strip club after she learns of the death of a former client. Wild Failure is replete with Whittall’s perceptive humor and acute insights into human nature. It’s also a dynamic and vibrant collection of poetic fiction that contend with the meaning of desire in a world that devalues femininity and queerness.

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Tenth Anniversary Edition. THE EMILY VALENTINE POEMS, Zoe Whittall's second collection of poetry, challenges the impossible notions of femininity that permeate our culture. The texts within include self-portraits, prose poems, fake fan letters, and confessional lyric snapshots. These are pharmaceutically enhanced tributes to the hangovers of twenty-something love and to the pop icons from an unconventional 1980s childhood. With THE EMILY VALENTINE POEMS, Zoe Whittall offers up the perfect soundtrack for the culturally literate rebel in all of us. "This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person." --Eileen Myles "Zoe Whittall's poems are snake bite cures masquerading as candy." --RM Vaughan "Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler." --The Globe and Mail

A local schoolteacher is arrested, leaving his family to wrestle with the possibility of his guilt, in this exquisite novel about loyalty, truth, and happiness. The Woodburys cherish life in the affluent, bucolic suburb of Avalon Hills, Connecticut. George is a beloved science teacher at the local prep school, a hero who once thwarted a gunman, and his wife, Joan, is a hardworking ER nurse. They have brought up their children in this thriving town of wooded yards and sprawling lakes. Then one night a police car pulls up to the Woodbury home and George is charged with sexual misconduct with students from his daughter’s school. As he sits in prison awaiting trial and claiming innocence, Joan vaults between denial and rage as friends and neighbors turn cold. Their daughter, seventeen-year-old Sadie, is a popular high school senior who becomes a social outcast—and finds refuge in an unexpected place. Her brother, Andrew, a lawyer in New York, returns home to support the family, only to confront unhappy memories from his past. A writer tries to exploit their story, while an unlikely men’s rights activist group attempts to recruit Sadie for their cause. Provocative and unforgettable, The Best Kind of People reveals the cracks along the seams of even the most perfect lives and the unraveling of an American family. GILLER PRIZE FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK POST “A compelling exploration of the ways a crime implicates all of us.”—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman “I am obsessed with this book.”—Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life “In our post–Harvey Weinstein world [this book] feels more timely and urgent than ever. . . . It draws an elegant line between rape culture, patriarchy, and privilege.”—Claire Cameron, The Millions “Every character is fully rounded, flawed, and achingly human. It puts me in mind of a twenty-first-century Ordinary People.”—Kate Harding, author of Asking for It “Sure to provoke debate and send book discussion groups into overtime.”—Library Journal (starred review) “A powerful page-turner.”—Cosmopolitan

Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People. “Whittall addresses motherhood and autonomy in ways I've never seen done before. A fascinating stunner of a novel, The Spectacular is exactly that: spectacular!”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twentytwo years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border. Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center 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 to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again. In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

Zoe Whittall

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