Coach House's December News Includes a Pop-up Store, a Holiday Sale and More

Good tidings and a'wassailing to you, friends. While you're enjoying the rising of the sun and the running of the deer, why not check out what your oldCratchit-like friends at Coach House are up to? We've put a coal in the fire and deposited our fifteen bob in the Savings & Loan, so it's just about party time.

It's December, readers, so what does Santa Coach House have in store for you? Since you've been such good boys and girls, we're bringing you (a) a completely Ludi-crèche Holiday Sale, (b) a pop-up store in Toronto with our friends at Spacing and (c) award news, events, reviews and much more! Check out Coach House this December; we're more off the chain than Jacob Marley!

'Tis the Season for Sales

No matter what you celebrate - Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwaanza, Raven-Symoné's birthday - or whether you celebrate nothing at all, everybody loves a good deal. And this December, Coach House has a great holiday deal for you. All our books (print, electronic, old and new) are 25% off the usual retail price, and we'll waive any shipping fees. That's right! It's like we're like Amazon but we pay taxes! So if you know of someone who'd love the gift of a Coach House book, now's your chance to win brownie points while saving money, with our Ludi-crèche Holiday Sale!

If you want to give the gift of Coach House, but can't decide on the book, we have solutions for that particular pickle, as well: our C.H.I.P. (Coach House Important Person) program is always a great choice. For a low fee of just $10 a month (or $110 up front) C.H.I.P.s receive six books of their choice (in both print and electronic editions), which Coach House sends out in semi-annual shipments (along with giveaways, postcards, catalogues, a sweet membership card and more). It's like a book-of-the-two-month club, for Coach House titles alone. The program also has an electronic-only version called the MicroC.H.I.P.s, which does the same with ebooks for just $5 a month! For information on how to become a C.H.I.P. or how to buy a gift C.H.I.P. membership, contact us at chips@chbooks.com.

And we'd be remiss if we didn't also mention the Literary Press Group's virtual holiday pop-up store, All Lit Up. For twelve business days in December, the LPG has specially curated book bundles, a package of three or four books, which they've grouped under various themes: graphic novels, award winners, sports fans. Each day of their 12-day pop-up bookshop, at noon EST, they'll reveal a different themed book bundle for sale. Each book has been signed by the author and will be for sale at a special All Lit Up discount. It all starts today (December 2), so find out more at alllitup.ca.

Our Ludi-crèche Holiday Sale runs until December 31!

Pop into ToronTOpia

From the virtual pop-up store to the bricks-and-mortar variety! Want to purchase some Coach House gifts for the holidays, but need to browse? This December, in addition to the many fine booksellers that stock our titles, Torontonians can visit the ToronTOpia Pop-up Store for their Coach House needs. A joint venture of Coach House Books and Spacing magazine, and supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the TorontoTOpia Pop-Up Store will stock all the finest wares from Coach House and Spacing - not only our recent and (especially) Toronto-themed publications, but tote bags, tchotchkes, buttons, posters and prints and even some clothing!

Located at the corner of Portland and Richmond (568 Richmond St. W, on the other side of that big Loblaws building), the ToronTOpia shop will be open throughout the month, providing you with an ideal location to pick up the perfect gift for that hard-to-shop-for urbanite. Pick up a Coach House tote bag! A copy of Shawn Micallef's Toronto walking guide, Stroll! Edward Keenan's Ford analysis, Some Great Idea! Or maybe a vintage subway poster from Spacing!

The ToronTOpia shop (568 Richmond St. W) is open December 4 through 22, during the following hours:

• Wednesdays & Thursdays - 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
• Fridays - 2 p.m. to 9 p.m.
• Saturdays & Sundays - 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

So stop by and visit. The store will be staffed by Coach House and Spacingemployees, and we're happy to suggest any number of gifts for the Toronto-and-book-lover on your list.

Governor Generally Awesome

Fault Lines: Greenland - Iceland - Faroe Islands, a book of three plays by Nicolas Billon, was named the winner of the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama at a ceremony heldNovember 13 at Canada's National Ballet School in Toronto. The winners of the Governor General's Literary Awards are chosen by peer assessment committees appointed by the Canada Council. This year's peer assessment committee for the drama category, consisting of Marcia Johnson, Bryden MacDonald and Charles Tidler, said of their selection:

Nicolas Billon's Fault Lines takes a unique and dramatic look at climate change. Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands inspire the playwright's provocative, theatrical triptych. Urbane and sophisticated strategies of monologue are honed to a laser probe into the interiors of contemporary consciousness.

And in other nice award news, Edward Keenan's City Hall analysis, Some Great Idea, has been shortlisted for the Ontario Speaker's Book Award, and Tamara Faith Berger's scandalous Maidenhead is a lucky finalist for the 2013 ReLit Award. We know both Canadian and American Thanksgivings have already passed, but we're really thankful for all the critical praise our books have received this past year. Thanks, jurors and critics, far and wide.

Ugly Duckling Heads North

Friends, have you heard of Ugly Duckling Presse? Ugly Duckling is a nonprofit publisher based out of Brooklyn, focusing on new poetry, experimental prose, translation, lost works and books by artists. UDP typically publishes 25 titles a year, many of which fall into such series as their Eastern European Poets series, their Lost Literatureseries and their Dossier publications, which share an investigative impulse, whether they be poetry, essay, interview or polemical text. To top it all off, every Ugly Duckling book is, ironically, a work of art. The gang at UDP does really beautiful stuff, whether it's Heimrad Bäcker's letterpressedSeascape or Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto.

Starting in early 2013, Coach House will be the Canadian distributor of Ugly Duckling Presse's books. So if you're a bookseller, librarian or wholesaler who's been itching to get copies of Rob Fitterman's No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself., Jen Bervin's Nets or Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl for your store, talk to us at Coach House, or to our sales reps at Publishers Group Canada. They'll make sure your customers and readers can get their hands on some of the U.S.'s strangest, most beautiful books. Find out more about Ugly Duckling Presse at uglyducklingpresse.org or follow them on Twitter at @udpbooks.

Poetry by Underpaid Contract Workers

And speaking of distributing books that aren't ours, we're also doing that with the dazzling Of the Subcontract, by Nick Thurston. Published by information as material (York University), Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right, is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service. The collection is ordered according to cost-of-production and repurposes metadata about the efficiency of each writer to generate informatic typographic embellishments. Those one hundred poems are braced between two newly commissioned essays; the whole book is threaded with references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Kempelen and the emerging iconography of cloud living.

Of the Subcontract reverses out of the database-driven digital world of new labour pools into poetry's black box: the book. It reduces the poetic imagination to exploited labour and, equally, elevates artificial intelligence to the status of the poetic. In doing so, it explores the all-too-real changes that are reforming every kind of work, each day more quickly, under the surface of life. And it'snow available from Coach House Books.

Other Events

TORONTO

Dec 14 - Coach House Books at the Toronto Indie Arts Market

Toronto Indie Arts Market: Small Press & Literary Festival
featuring tables by Coach House Books, ChiZine Publications, Grow & Grow, Little Brother, Meat Locker Editions, Worn Journaland more
The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m., $5 admission
partial proceeds to Parkdale Project Read
RSVP on Facebook

CALGARY

Dec 6 - Decomp Book Launch at Pages on Kensington

Double Book Launch at Pages
featuring authors Jordan Scott (Decomp) and Aaron Giovannone (The Loneliness Machine)
Pages on Kensington, 1135 Kensington Road NW
7:30 p.m., free
RSVP on Facebook

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