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A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant
$22.95Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant’s portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. Edited by noted Native poet and scholar Janice Gould, A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant’s characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.
A Gentleman of Considerable Talent
$26.00In 1811, twenty-one-year-old William Brown arrived in Rupert’s Land from the small Scottish village of Kilmaurs. Employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company during perhaps the most conflict ridden years of British North America’s history, Brown set out on the path of the ordinary fur trader. Brown’s time with the HBC is marked by hardship and strife: he struggled to survive during long, hard, hungry winters, and the fierce conflict with men of the rival North West Company during the Pemmican War. He found himself embroiled in the churning politics of the time, playing a role in the mutiny on the waters of the Hudson Bay—throughout, Brown showed he had both the brawn and brains to make a difference.
Described by Governor George Simpson as “a zealous gentleman of considerable talent,” Brown would go on to establish Fort Kilmaurs in New Caledonia, now Northern BC, and emerge as a pioneering explorer of the Babine and Bulkley Rivers, fueled by the dream of being the first HBC trader to reach the Pacific Ocean via the Skeena River. While not a powerful figure in his own right, Brown nonetheless left a mark on the development of the nation. Through letters and entries in the HBC journals, he gives us a rich picture of the era. In A Gentleman of Considerable Talent: William Brown and the Fur Trade, 1811–1827, award-winning historian Geoff Mynett delivers the fascinating story of a Hudson’s Bay everyman and the tumultuous conditions of Canada’s fur trade.
A Ghost in the Throat
$22.95An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own.
Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
A Ghost in Waterloo Station
$18.95The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut. Swallows enter their nests high on the white stacked walls at Indian Lodge as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from. There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history—all delivered in a voice distinctive in its combination of narrative, whimsy, and psychological observation.
A Glittering Chaos
$22.95The adage about “what happens in Vegas” is funny precisely because we know it’s wishful thinking. A Glittering Chaos is about what happens when “what happens in Vegas” comes home to haunt you. Melusine is a German librarian whose ho-hum world wobbles after she tags along when her husband Hans attends a Las Vegas optometry conference. A newly empty nester who speaks no English, Melusine’s voyage of self-discovery is punctuated by the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, nude photos in the desert, a black dildo named Kurt, autoerotic asphyxia, and the unravelling of her husband’s sanity because of a secret from his youth. A smart, funny and incredibly wise novel about marriage, secrets and lies, and unusual sexual proclivities.
A God in Need of Help
$17.95Nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama
It’s 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, Venice’s four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting – Albrecht Dürer’s The Brotherhood of the Rosary – across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pusterwald, they are set upon by Protestant zealots; their escape is attributed to a miracle.
The strongmen and their captain are summoned to an inquiry, led by the magistrate of Venice and the cardinal archbishop of Milan, to determine whether something divine did indeed occur. Each man’s recounting adds a layer of colour to the canvas.
Through this vividly painted mystery, inspired by true events, Sean Dixon challenges the role of faith at thedawn of the Age of Reason.
A Good Baby
$19.95During the night of a storm, an Appalachian girl delivers a baby and disappears. The next morning, Raymond Toker finds the baby under a bush and takes to the mountain roads to find her a home. While Turner carries out his quest, the child’s father, Truman, with “teeth as rotten as his soul, ” drives his battered car along the same paths. Though critically acclaimed when first published by Knopf in 1990, and widely considered among Rooke’s best novels, A Good Baby has been unjustly forgotten. This beautiful new ReSet reissue brings attention to this fast, funny, frightening masterpiece.
A Good Enough Life
$24.95Philosophers, psychologists, and mystics perceive crisis as an opportunity for growth, with the most dramatic crisis being the experience of death. In A Good Enough Life, documentary film writer and director Susan Gabori has turned to this ultimate human experience, revealing the profound paradox of confronting life when faced with the inevitability of death. In monologues shaped from interviews with twelve terminally ill people, Gabori explores how people try to cope with death. Reflecting on the lives they have led and what still lies before them, each person interviewed for the book deals eloquently, in their own words, with a topic many people cannot bring themselves to discuss freely.
The twelve speakers in A Good Enough Life are dying of AIDS, cancer, or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and range in age from thirty-three to seventy-eight. To protect their identities and those of their families, Gabori has given them names other than their own. Yet, in their own voices, they speak uninterrupted about life in the face of impending death. Gabori approached each of them, looking for answers she was sure they had, even though they might be unaware of it. They each answered questions they had never before been asked and many revealed things they had never before told anyone for fear of not being understood. All but one of the twelve people featured in the book have died. Although they led radically different lives, certain realizations and understandings echo from one portrait to another. Each story is filled with honesty and the joy of discovery in the midst of extraordinary struggles and hardships. Together, they offer a priceless gift: the opportunity to find out more about life at the end of the human journey.
A Good Name
$25.00Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn’t one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.
A Good War
$24.95“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” — Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
- One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments
- Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis
- Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work.
- Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow
Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature — assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it.
It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this?
Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to.
Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral—or even climate zero—future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives.
COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world—one which demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.
A Grandmother Named Love
$22.95Lorato lives a comfortable but lonely life in her retirement years, alone in the home her husband had built in their rural village on the Kalahari in southern Africa. She becomes a grandmother when she adopts Lesedi after the death of a neighbour from HIV-related causes. Then six more children come into Lorato’s care, four of whom are biological grandchildren, two more are adopted. Now primary caregiver for seven grandchildren, she struggles to feed them all, to teach them right from wrong, and traditional ways of life in a world shifting and modernizing. We see how AIDS as well as cultural changes disrupt traditional life when Lorato’s son dies of the disease.
A Grave in the Air
$18.95Sweeping from Nazi Germany in 1939 to the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Stephen Henighan’s A Grave in the Air is a masterful sequence of stories. In these tales, dominated by Central and Eastern European themes, readers are transported across borders and into the lives of characters who have something serious at stake, people enmeshed in acts of destruction, and people redeemed through honour and grace. These narratives bear Henighan’s cosmopolitan stamp, but they do not take place in a sanitized global village. There are no stereotypes on which to hang a plot, no filtered sense of the human condition. There are stories of betrayal, such as “Beyond Bliss”, where a young British woman uses sex, duplicity and her connections to an Eastern European exile to become a partner in a Canadian literary press; luminous studies of introspection and character, such as “Freedom Square”, in which a Romanian photographer’s desire to escape her mother country yields to surrender to it; and ironic stories of historical displacement, such as “A Sense of Time”, in which an erotic memory takes life for a Canadian expatriate in England, and “Duty Calls”, where a Hungarian Montrealer experiencing divorce becomes the unsuspecting catalyst for another couple’s commitment.
The two long stories, which bracket the collection, summarize its themes. In the opening story, a British businessman relies on the sporting spirit to try to avert the onset of the Second World War; in the title story, a weary foreign correspondent, shaken by his encounter with a band’s disturbing groupie, must face his own truth about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
Whether moving readers to reflection or providing engaging entertainment, Henighan’s prose is sharp and clean. Once again, he is as instructive in his understanding of peoples and cultures as he is instinctive in taking us inside the worlds that shape them.
A Green Reef
$12.95In spite of its disturbing implications, the impact of climate change on our physical environment can be difficult for us to understand or imagine. Moving from a memoir of a journey through an abundant yet fragile natural world to the daunting scientific evidence that climate change will lead to the degradation of nature and upheaval within society, this essay offers a lucid personal approach to the pivotal dilemma of our time. In a wide-ranging discussion that embraces science, history, art, language and identity, A Green Reef offers the reader an understanding of what climate change means for life on earth.
A Guide to Animal Behaviour
$14.95Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction
A Guide to Animal Behaviour is a stunning collection of stories by an author who is fast becoming one of the great, innovative story writers of his generation. Following on the heels of his widely acclaimed comic novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover’s new collection smashes all the fictional moulds.
Urbane, stylish, and off-beat, the stories in this collection touch the lives of an astonishing array of characters whose common experience is of a world that is wayward yet full of marvels: a born-again Christian from Kentucky who loses his memory and ends up finding true love in glitzy Bel Air; two women who fall in love only to be parted when one dies of cancer; a man who goes to live in a cardboard box when his wife leaves him for the manager of a Toys R Us store; an eighteenth-century Canadian pioneer who believes he is being persecuted by witches.
This is sophisticated fiction at its best. A maximalist writer of ideas, he packs his sentences with energy, exuberant imagery and amazing turns of thoughts.
A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend
$19.95Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this book a comprehensive survey of myth collecting in B.C. The aim is to reveal the true extent of this neglected body of world literature, and to begin to sort out the more valuable texts from those damaged in transmission. A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend is a valuable reference tool for beginning or advanced students of anthropology, and an absorbing look at the research process itself.
A Guide to the Bookstores of Toronto
$17.95As a guide to the more than 250 bookstores in the Toronto area, A Guide to the Bookstores of Toronto provides individual listings detailing location, contact information, store size, special services, and a brief description of each bookstore based on an actual visit by the authors. This guide covers it all, including listings for general, specialty, used, rare, and mail order stores, which range in size from tiny neighbourhood comic book stores to megastores. Organized in an easy-to-read format, A Guide to the Bookstores of Toronto also includes a geographical index, a list of bookstores no longer in existence, an index to bookstores by subject specialty, and a name index. Acquainting book lovers with the remarkable array of bookstores in the city of Toronto (with a sampling of interesting bookstores in the surrounding region), it’s all here: from stores specializing in bridge to airplanes, from children’s books to design. If you have a special interest, says Arthur Wenk, “there is very likely a bookstore in the city devoted to that interest” (Judy Stoffman, Toronto Star).