Available now for pre-order.
This title releases October 01, 2026.

Beyond the Concert Hall needs a soundtrack. This one-of-a-kind playlist created by our contributors will make reading about sound even more immersive. Limited quantities available. 

Sound can heal and harm, comfort and confront, catalyzing the other senses and carrying us to distant places. Sound moves us.

The sonic modalities addressed by the authors in this collection cross borders and time, ranging from a Paco de Lucía Flamenco guitar performance, to the calming reassurance of a harp in an Alberta hospital ward; from Vienna in the 19th century, to the Chile of the 1970's. With acute sensibility, the editors have harnessed 19 stories and poems bringing the ultimate “soundtrack” to life. In the pages of Beyond the Concert Hall, multi-genre narratives vibrate together in high and low notes, a poly-sonic rollercoaster reminiscent of sound installations, music concerts, and the most intimate moments where silence holds.

EDITORS: Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Catalina Morales Vélez, Cait Yaga with AUTHORS: Yasser Abdel Latif, Marina Allemano, Gary Barwin, Kimmy Beach, Gavin Bradley, Amy Claffey, Kayleigh Cline, paulo da costa, Trisia Eddy Woods, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Renato Gandia, Emelda N. Gwitimah, Lori Hahnel, Kelly Kaur, Ryan Lacanilao, Wendy McGrath, George McWhirter, Marco Katz Montiel, Mila Philipzig, Bev Ross, Jaspreet Singh, Maitham Salman, Ramón Sepúlveda, Carlos Andrés Torres, Dr. Leslie Vermeer, and Cait Yaga

From the moment we leave the warm seas of our mothers’ bellies to join the world of Alone, tactility defines the contours of our being. With smell, touch is the oldest of our senses. It is also, as the explorations in Beyond Touch Sites reveal, one of the most complex and intimate conduits of human experience and communication. All-enveloping as our skin, our haptic sense can localize, lightning-quick, to specific memory sites. Touch can heal and harm, comfort and confront, catalyzing the other senses and carrying us to distant places. Touch moves us. We are touched.

The modalities of touch addressed by the authors in this collection range across a spectrum of forms of contact: reparative, violent, retributive, gustatory, familial, ritual and ceremonial. Touch is a temporal event that unfolds in unexpected and often gripping ways in the stories, poems, essays and hybrid experimental and performative scripts collected here.

With acute sensibility, Wendy McGrath has harnessed the many touch sites proposed by the contributors and made this volume THE ultimate tactile map, where multi-genre narratives expand and contract, sit in haptic dialogue next to each other, in the hopes of touching their audience with this collection’s beating heart.

Edited by Wendy McGrath

CONTRIBUTORS

Rona Altrows, Rita Bouvier, Giselle General, Kathryn 君妍 Lennon, Medgine Mathurin, Sana Mohsin, Catalina Morales Velez, Pierrette Requier, Sandro Silva, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, Jumoke Verissimo. 

With prologue by University of Alberta Emeritus Professor of English Studies Dr. Christine Wiesenthal. 

The contributors of this anthology are hyphened Canadians writers whose pieces are in English and French, depending on where they settled in Canada, complicating the cultural idea of the “Two Solitudes.” Most of these writers are immigrant settlers, with their own mother tongues. There are more immigrant voices added daily to our conversation on the environment, and yet, there are lots more voices to add to the climate change discourse in the country.

As always, we hope you engage with our stories through the senses as you consider the possibilities of books and stories to call out the best of our abilities to coexist in harmony. If our previous two anthologies engaged our readers with visual and culinary experiences, this one relies on olfactory memories to steer you Beyond the Park, Au-delà du parc.

Edited by Ángel Mota, with prologue by Jenna Butler and contributions from Diego Medina Creimer, Antonio D’Alfonso, Marie-Denise Douyon, Danielle Guthrie, Hugh Hazelton, Barbara Janusz, Kelly Kaur, Ángel Mota, Dafne Romero, Cora Sire, Elvira Truglia.

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Available now for pre-order. This title releases in March, 2023.

A collection of short stories by Peruvian American academic Margarita Saona.

Margarita Saona's sparse, clinically precise yet mysterious prose casts a spell upon her readers. Nothing says post-anthropocentric like Saona’s stories. Her characters, resisting gender and other labels inhabit cities that while existing in the real world, refuse to be pinned down on a map. In Saona’s stories, animals behave like humans, humans, like animals, or the elements, in a relentless phantasmagoria reminiscent of ancient mythology. This disembodiment is present in Saona’s narrative style, having herself hovered between life and death shortly before receiving a life-saving new heart. The English translation, The Ghost of You, originally titled in Spanish La ciudad donde no estás, gives these ghosts an English-speaking home, in the hopes they can remain in the memory of their readers the same way someone’s presence stills haunts a place.