Everybody wants to get to Heaven, but nobody wants to die. And in Hell, everyone is naked. Dog Eat Rat, the third novel by Tom Walmsley, one of Canada's most uncompromising writers of plays, fiction and poetry, is the story of private investigators Trip and Ginger, who continually devise new ways to break the tedium of their primary task: sitting in cars for days on end, waiting for their subject to step out a door or step into one. But suddenly everything changes: in what begins as a dime-a-dozen case of an adulterous wife, Trip and Ginger fall off the edge of the world trying to solve a mystery no one knew existed. Hard-boiled yet determinedly literary, Dog Eat Rat draws the reader into another of Walmsley's unique explorations of sex, faith and violence.

Tom Walmsley won the first Three Day Novel contest in 1979 with his novel Doctor Tin; its sequel, Shades, which also contained the original novel, was published in 1992. His novel Kid Stuff was published in 2003. He's also the author of the poetry collections Lexington Hero and Rabies, the plays The Jones Boy, Blood, and Something Red, and the screenplay of the film Paris, France. He lives in Toronto.

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What I love most in poetry when it's good (and Alice Burdick's poetry is uncommonly good) is not just the obvious skill at work but also that clear sense that the poet firmly believes there's still something important about writing it. That poetry, like anything humanly useful, starts now Ñ from this moment, not the next or last or some repackaged version of somewhere else. For all their glorious idiosyncrasy and unrepentant abstraction, Burdick's poems are as clean, as raw, and as unpretentious as breathing in and breathing out.Ó (Kevin Connolly)