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Published in 1994, Crystallography was a gem of a book, an instant hit that was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.
‘Crystallography’ means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, ‘lucid writing.’ The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals — looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, ‘a word is a bit of crystal in formation,’ suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.
Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.
Cube Squared is the much anticipated follow-up novel from Christian McPherson, picking up where his darkly comic debut, The Cube People, left off. Returning to the seemingly mundane reality of government cubicle culture, McPherson finds more humour in the misadventures of a struggling computer programmer/wannabe writer.Colin MacDonald, a happily married man, owner of a minivan, and the proud father of three kids, is about to face his greatest challenge yet: middle age. By day he is a cubicle-bound civil servant, but by night he is a horror novelist writing the vampire-zombie apocalypse. With the death of his father, a promotion at work, a raging libido and the weight of the world on his shoulders, can our everyman hero rise out of the pits of despair to make sense of his life, which seems to be constantly falling apart? Find out as Colin pursues pedophiles through the park, steals teddy bears, comes dangerously close to an affair with a Jennifer Beals look-alike and deals with the epic failure which sits in his car garage.
Through the prism of a marginal child puzzled about her true identity, The Cuckoo’s Song/Le chant du coucou, a collection of 63 poems in English and French, adds vivid flourishes to the drab canvas of the Great Depression and celebrates the indomitable spirit of the men and women who joined the Gold Rush to Val d’Or in Northwestern Québec, in the 1930s and ’40s. The community they carved in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield, diverse and inclusive, their struggles, their joie de vivre–filaments of gold in the poet’s memory.
Now in its sixth year, the Cuffer Prize is sponsored by The Telegram and Creative Book Publishing in St. John’s. It showcases some of the best short fiction from Newfoundland and Labrador writers, both new and established. Entries in 2012 touch on numerous themes — relationships in their death throes, the loss of a parent of child, impending Armageddon, the strong pull of addiction and the perils of the sea. The stories were reviewed by Cuffer Prize judges Ramona Dearing, Joan Sullivan and Russell Wangersky, and selected by editor Pam Frampton. The Cuffer Anthology Volume V includes exquisitely crafted stories from the top three prize winners in 2012: Wanda Nolan for Nancy Drew, Joshua Goudie for Satsuma and Cigarettes and Janet Kelly for Bliss. They were chosen from the more than 150 entries for the Cuffer Prize. A portion of the proceeds from each anthology is donated to Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador.
Co-founder of Toronto’s groundbreaking theatre company da da kamera, Daniel MacIvor is Canada’s most influential post-modern playwright.
In his latest collaboration with director Daniel Brooks, MacIvor plays the role of Leonard, who narrates the events leading up to his murder while trying to understand them himself. Through the course of the play, we peer behind the curtains of his neighbourhood as MacIvor transforms into the multiple characters who bear witness to Leonard’s life and death. Yet each of their stories, while internally consistent, tells a subtly different version of what happened, progressively colouring and transforming our understanding of the characters as we think we had come to know them. In a headlong rush we understand that everyone’s story inevitably dead-ends at precisely the bottom of the preconceptions they brought to its telling.
Punctuated by brilliant lighting and a mood-setting soundscape, this dazzling one-man show is storytelling of the highest order.
Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe’s house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder’s show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and Algonquins, Davey delivers startling vignettes at their funniest and most thoughtful.
This book is delightfully—and deceptively—simple. It provides the reader at one and the same time the most exquisitely enjoyable bedtime reading, and a wake-up call with a better hit than the best designer espresso.
Translators connect languages and landscapes, sparking conversations that enlarge our imagination. In Canada, where translation has had an especially important role to play, the nature of the connections has changed. These wide-ranging essays, by Canada’s most prominent translators, chart a journey that begins with the sharp divides of English and French in the 1970s and then confronts the much more complex explosion of identities today. Engaging with the politics of meaning but also with the creative role of the translator, these beautifully-written reflections illuminate a practice that is today finally receiving due recognition.
Contributors include Wayne Grady, Rhonda Mullins, Michelle Hartman, Erin Moure, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Linda Gaboriau, Sheila Fischman, Kathy Mezei, Philip Stratford, Louise von Flotow, Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, William Findlay, David Homel, Jane Brierley, Katia Grubisic.
Culture in Transit was originally published in 1995. This edition, with a new introduction by Sherry Simon, has been revised, and expanded to include four new contributors to reflect changes in the translation scene over the last decades.
A stunning first novel full of empathy, marked by an astounding maturity of insight. Cumberland is both a place and a state of mind; it is a small-town story of longing and loss in the manner of David Adams Richards. It is an exploration of loneliness and the fear of loneliness in lives limited by circumstance.
Cumberland is an industrial town located halfway between Ottawa and Montreal on the shore of the St. Lawrence River. It’s facing the close of its factories and mills in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Ernest, a mill worker whose job is lost when the mill closes, is fifty-two; his employment prospects are poor. His life to this point hasn’t equipped him to face any more loss. Longing for companionship, he meets Bea, a waitress at Malouf’s, the local pub. Bea lives in an apartment with Amanda, who left home at seventeen because she couldn¹t live with her mother and stepfather. Yearning for a better life, Amanda develops a crush on Nick, Ernest’s drinking buddy, who represents many aspects of a better life — he has a Range Rover, owns a house — he is emotionally unavailable to Amanda, being a recently widowed single father.
The lives of Ernest, Bea, Amanda, Nick, and his son Aaron come together, fall apart, and come together again in this memorable and emotionally satisfying novel.
A full-colour compendium of Toronto’s “Brief Leafs”
Over the past 100 years, close to 1,000 players have suited up for at least one game with the legendary Toronto Maple Leafs, and more than 250 did in the most turbulent era in club history, 1978–1999. In that time span, the Leafs made more than 300 trades, signed 20 free agents, and claimed eight players on waivers while almost 100 draft selections changed hands in addition to dozens of Toronto’s own picks.
Unlike NHLers elsewhere, the names of Toronto players aren’t quickly forgotten by fans. A stint with the Leafs, no matter how short, carries a certain cachet; the names and sweater numbers, and the compelling stories behind them, live on as trivia talk for years. Featuring 256 players, Cup of Coffee tells those stories with full-colour action pictures shot by veteran Leafs photographer Graig Abel. Learn about these “Brief Leafs” — their backgrounds, statistics, and memorable tales — as detailed by veteran Leafs journalist Lance Hornby.
From everyday foods to exotic dishes, from the herbs and spices of medieval England to the cooking implements of the modern kitchen, Cupboard Love is a sumptuous feast that explores the fascinating stories behind familiar and not-so-familiar gastronomic terms.
Who knew that the word “pomegranate” is related to the word “grenade”? That “baguette” is a cousin of “bacteria”? That “soufflé” comes from the same root as “flatulence”? Who knew that “vermicelli” is Italian for “little worms,” that “avocado” comes from an Aztec word meaning “testicle,” or that “catillation” denotes the unseemly licking of plates?
Originally published in 1996 and revised and expanded in 2004, and now available again for the first time in two decades in this new edition, Cupboard Love was one of three books nominated for a 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the Food Reference/Technical Category (Calphalon Award), and was included in The Globe and Mail‘s list of “required reading” notable books for 1997.
Addictively readable, it takes us on a journey across cultures and history to arrive at the explanations behind some of our favorite culinary words and phrases, answering along the way those questions we’ve always had about food but were afraid to ask the cook.
Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?
‘Curate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate the contributions of individual artists. Curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and the business world is adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Everyone, it seems, is a curator.
But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture’s relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this vibrant, revelatory and original study, David Balzer travels through art history and around the globe to explore the cult of curation, from superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s war with sleep to Subway’s ‘sandwich artists.’ Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Curationism will change the way you look at art – and maybe even the way you see yourself.
‘This is an unusual art book. It is a book you should read and one that you can. Balzer traces the history and current hegemony of curationism, a practice of jumped-up interior decorators who double as priests explaining the gospel to the unlettered masses. A good read, if you don’t mind reading things that you don’t want to know.’
– Dave Hickey
In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
Almost unbelievable. You’ll swear it’s fiction.
“You haven’t read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story.” — Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard worships his father, believing that he can do no wrong. Although his charismatic father is prone to racing trains and brawling, Deni has no idea how unusual his family is.
But when Deni discovers his father’s true identity (and his other life as a bank robber), his imagination is set on fire. Before long, he begins to see himself as a character in one of his father’s stories. He can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding his own passions, aversions, and motivations.
Eventually Deni finds himself ensnared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father and increasingly obsessed by his father’s own muted recollections: the impoverished childhood in the Gaspé he’d fled long ago, the hunger for excitement and a better life, and a trail of crimes leading from Québec to the American west.
At once an extraordinary family story and an unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man, Cures for Hunger is a singular, deeply affecting memoir by an acclaimed writer.
Still tired of the same old Can Lit? Had your fill of The Beautiful Poetry? You’re not alone. For those of you who missed it the first time, BookThug is pleased to RE/present West Coast poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s first full-length collection of poems, CURIO: Grotesques and Satires From The Electronic Age.
CURIO: Grotesques & Satires From the Electronic Age is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ellusive first book of poetry. Published just prior to Home of Sudden Service, a collection that went so far in another direction as to be nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2006, CURIO offers a very different view of what Bachinsky is capable of as a poet, and invites her readers to consider a much wider vision of her work as a whole. No one can truly hope to understand her work without reading this volume.
Witness Antonin Artaud climbing a beanstalk and eating his lover’s foot, as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors, and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th century’s (and even the 21st’s!) most eclectic authors, CURIO is quirky and sly—an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and a retro avant garde that heralded the arrival of a brave new poet.