Seventeen-year-old Andy has moral integrity that unravels under peer pressure, recurring sexual fantasies about an older woman—and super-strength that can only be triggered by smoking cigarettes. The antihero of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel The Death-Ray (Drawn & Quarterly) makes awkward attempts to fight injustice that result, more often than not, in additional chaos and destruction. Andy hits the streets at the urgings of his sidekick Louis, but, finding no criminals, the pair quickly resorts to baiting potential thugs and doling out harsh punishments—until the eponymous death-ray gun turns against them, too. Bleakly reminiscent of Clowes’ 1997 comic Ghost World, The Death-Ray offers insight into the psyche of a would-be superman. 
—Jaela E. Bernstien

The Massey Lectures were pretty much made for Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker staff writer with a gift for spinning long-form essays from unlikely subjects. He’s the featured speaker at this year’s instalment of the venerable Canadian series, and in Winter (House of Anansi), a book based on early versions of his talks, Gopnik ruminates on the cultural history and meanings of the season. Regular New Yorker readers will be pleased to find Gopnik at his woolliest and most conversational, free from the magazine’s famously rigid house style. He ricochets from point to point like a freewheeling professor, touching on everything from the colonial madness of arctic exploration to the politics of A Christmas Carol. One summer night, while reading Gopnik’s reminiscences of his childhood in Montreal, this frigophobic reviewer actually longed for the blasting winds and freezing stillness of our city’s unforgiving winters—an unambiguous sign of a story well told.
—Drew Nelles

Millions of dollars worth of artworks are stolen every year, and relatively few are recovered. It’s easy to picture Picassos disappearing into the sacks of black-clad cat burglars, but, as Toronto journalist Joshua Knelman finds out in Hot Art (Douglas & McIntyre), cops and robbers are only half the story—the whole, unruly art market is rife with laundering, loopholes and under-the-table transactions. Knelman, an award-winning magazine writer, seems uncomfortable in this longer format; his segues can be mawkish, his points repetitive. But he is also laudably thorough, with a litany of well-informed and charismatic sources, and he emerges from his jet-setting investigations with a simple message: stealing art is almost too easy. “Believes me, thieves are laughing all the way to the bank,” one ex-con man tells him, “and most of them aren’t even that smart.”
—Madeline Coleman

Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist (House of Anansi) dwells in the space between the identities we choose and the ones chosen for us. Antag’s protag, Gordon “Rank” Rankin, Jr., is an oversized Canadian tough with an “innate criminality” who berates a former college buddy via email for having written him—unflatteringly—into a novel. A sharp commentary on the sometimes-blurry line between fiction and non-, Coady’s book can read like a twenty-first-century update on Poe’s spiteful classic “The Cask of Amontillado.” The ways in which it differs from that infamous short story simply suggest that Facebook and email have changed how we seek revenge.
—Alex Manley

Kristyn Dunnion’s The Dirt Chronicles (Arsenal Pulp Press) launches the reader into the gritty world of the friends and lovers, hustlers and whores who populate Toronto’s underbelly. In this collection of short stories, Dunnion opens with seemingly optimistic tales of queer love and street life, focusing on a group of lovable freegans squatting in an abandoned factory. Then, before you can look away, she forces you to watch as the same characters are hunted down, beaten, raped and tortured by a dirty cop known only as the King. Dunnion’s prose style is simple, but her stories are powerful enough to make your stomach lurch.
—Jaela E. Bernstien