Announcing Conundrum Press’ Spring 2025 Lineup!
We may be nudging toward winter, but Conundrum Press is gearing up for spring 2025! (We promise we’re not wishing away time– this is the book biz!) With a stellar lineup, we can’t help looking forward to these spring titles.
APRIL
First up is Citymouse by Eleanor Hannon, an artist and writer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since 2014 Hannon has been drawing and taking photos daily, creating an archive of her personal life in relation to the ever-changing city around her. Within that archive is a history of buildings in her life that have disappeared. As people and neighbourhoods change, the memories of how things were is increasingly challenging to conjure (but no less loved). Citymouse, the latest titles in the Conundrum25 line, examines the ways we begin to mourn places and experiences before we’ve lost them.
MAY
In May we have Denniveniquity by D. Boyd, a candid and personal exploration of junior high in the 1970s, with enough vulnerability to make readers squirm, laugh, and maybe even fall in love (but only for now). From awkward first kisses to changing bodies with an agenda all their own, puberty is not for the faint of heart. But hitting puberty in a small Canadian city where your father knows everyone and your on-again-off-again boyfriend quite literally lives on “the wrong side of the tracks”? That comes with an extra set of super-charged emotions and embarrassing moments—and Dawn is no stranger to any of it.
Our second May title is Salt Green Death by Katarina Thorsen, which explores the documented experiences of Joseph O’Dwyer, a young man who was institutionalized at one of Canada’s most notorious historic psychiatric institutions.
On November 21, 1948, Joseph O’Dwyer’s suicide attempt was interrupted when a bystander pulled him out of the Kitsilano Pool in Vancouver. This set a series of events in motion that ends with O’Dwyer’s institutionalization at British Columbia’s first forensic psychiatric facility, Colquitz Hospital. In Salt Green Death Thorsen delves into 15 years of Joseph O’Dwyer’s life via patient files and other historical documents. This is her attempt at piecing together meaning and context in the experiences of the O’Dwyer family—a small slice of historical graphic medicine brought to life in coloured pencil and graphite.
At the end of May we have Gesticulating Gentrification by Rick Trembles, a graphic memoir giving a close and honest look at the challenges faced by people living in precarious housing, the constant threat of being forced out by gentrification, and the social and health problems that result from all of it. But this graphic memoir isn’t only about social issues—it also provides a rare glimpse at a bygone version of Montreal and the DIY culture that thrived there.
Gesticulating Gentrification has received high praise from R. Crumb, who referred to Trembles’ third title with Conundrum Press as “Entertaining & compelling! A great story! Totally brilliant! A great book! Genius! Really!”
JUNE
Right before summer we can look forward to Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon, a first collection of graphic stories about climate change and eco-anxiety.
Coined by Elizabeth Rush, “endsickness” is a term that describes our modern malaise and severe anxiety over the end of the world. For Alarcon, It’s also a shorthand way of describing our culture’s current obsession with all things dystopian and apocalyptic. Climate change is often referred to as a hyperobject: so large in scope and scale that it’s difficult to see or understand the entirety of it.
In Endsickness, each story attempts to counter that challenge by taking a close look at the individual quandaries of living in a society that seems at odds with itself, unable to face the existential threat looming on the horizon.
“Sofia Alarcon packs a generous amount of wicked comic wit into this wry and earnest exploration of an existential anxiety we should all find very familiar today. Endsickness manages to make us laugh out loud even as it stares unflinchingly into the cosmic horizon, the void that capital and consumerism have left waiting for us just down the road.” — Sami Alwani, award-winning comic artist and author of The Pleasure of the Text