In this video, Elisabeth de Mariaffi gives us her Lit Wish List: Three Bite-Sized Books to Fill You Up. Two titles are short story collections, and one title is a book aphorisms. All the titles are considerably well-crafted and exhibit a range of talent and theme that's, well, a literary smörgåsbord that will keep you going back for more. So, eat up!

Elisabeth de Mariaffi's Lit Wish List: Three Bite-Sized Books to Fill You Up.

Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms
George Murray
ECW Press

"An engaging little package of 409 aphorisms. . . . Murray may have come up with the ideal poetic form for the age of Twitter. It’s easy to breeze through its bite-sized witticisms in a sitting. And yet, what’s perhaps a bit surprising is that the book continues to yield enjoyment, and a sense of discovery, on rereading."

——Toronto Star

The Cloaca
Andrew Hood
Invisible Publishing

"Really, these stories are nothing less than shit-hotmiracles from the mind of one of the most inventive,funny, and fearless young writers in Canada."

—Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game

Sleeping Funny

Miranda Hill
Doubleday Canada

"Hill is able to slip unerringly into many voices: a group of suburban mothers, a man pining after a country singer who was his former love, a commuter on a train, a boy picked on at school and ignored by his parents in favour of his beautiful younger sister. She moves us effortlessly from one recognizable voice to another . . ."

—Toronto Star

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Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the author of one book of short stories, How To Get Along With Women (Invisible Publishing, 2012). Her work has been widely published in Canadian magazines, including The New Quarterly, The FIddlehead, This Magazine, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, and The Puritan, and is taught as part of the short story curriculum at the University of Waterloo. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is one of the wild minds behind Toronto Poetry Vendors, a new press that sells poetry broadsides from refurbished vending machines in the downtown Toronto area. Currently at work on a novel, Elisabeth now makes her home in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she works for Breakwater Books and lives with four children, a poet, and a very lovely dog.

About How to Get Along with Women: A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where—for better or for worse—we see ourselves for what we truly are.

"Elisabeth de Mariaffi is urgently trapping the ten percent of emotions that hardly get mentioned by anyone else. She’s alive to what disturbs, and she’s dead to cliché."—Michael Winter, The Death of Donna Whalen

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No matter who you're buying for this holiday season—Secret Santa, work colleague, book club, family, children, host, neighbour, "friend of a friend"—books truly are the gifts that keep on giving. 49th Shelf's Lit Wish List helps you find those books and encourages you to #givecdn!

Follow #givecdn and tell us what books you'd like to give (or receive) this holiday season!