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The first of its kind, Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas is a groundbreaking anthology about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict penned by Diaspora playwrights of Jewish and Palestinian descent.
Featuring compelling interviews with each playwright and introductions by acclaimed dramatists Karen Hartman and Betty Shamieh, this volume of seven plays—three by Jewish playwrights, three by Palestinian playwrights, and a collaboration by both—tackles one of the remaining thematic taboos for many theatres in the Western world. Varying in genre between drama and comedy, in aesthetic between realism and surrealism, in setting between the Diasporas and Israel/Palestine, and in the political opinions of characters, Double Exposure offers distinct Diaspora perspectives that turn the political into the personal. This collection includes The Peace Maker by Natasha Greenblatt; Sabra Falling by Ismail Khalidi; Bitterenders by Hannah Khalil; Facts by Arthur Milner; Sperm Count by Stephen Orlov; Tales of a City by the Sea by Samah Sabawi; and Twenty-One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East by Abdelfattah AbuSrour, Lisa Schlesinger, and Naomi Wallace.
Curiosity about his father’s homeland sends American photographer Min Lin to Burma to immerse himself in its culture and build his portfolio. But it’s 1988 and pro-democracy activists are trying to overthrow the military regime. Min gets caught up in the movement after falling in love with one of its leaders. When she’s arrested, Min flees to the jungle and, joining the rebels, comes face-to-face on the battlefield with a Burmese army captain who looks exactly like him. After an explosion kills his double, Min awakes in a hospital misidentified as a hero of the regime, causing him to pose as the dead soldier for his own survival.
Escaping in 1990, he returns to Los Angeles, where he builds a new life based on his acceptance of his homosexuality while adjusting to the shock of discovering his father’s secret history in Burma. Decades later, a new wave of religious persecution and ethno-nationalism in the country now known as Myanmar compels him to return. Still haunted by the events of ’88, and knowing his ex-girlfriend is to be released from prison, Min must come to terms with his actions while seeking the truth about the double he met on a battlefield a lifetime ago.
Double Self-Portrait explores doubling and reproduction in art, memory, culture, nostalgia and fatherhood. Divided by four longer, more autobiographical poems, Double Self-Portait is a deeply layered collection, one that at times speaks directly to the reader and at other times is metatextual. Bees, cicadas, music and photography swirl through these poems, bounded as they are by the resistance to and embracing of responsibility. This is a collection where the poems work individually and together, subtly building toward a single theme that slowly coalesces during the reading to create a collection that resonates in your mind long after the book is closed.
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2016
Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat.
This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are—whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver—these characters brush against maddening contradiction and concealed brutality.
This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now. Murphy traces the lives of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.
There’s no room for Nat’s polar bear in her house. It seems there’s no space for him anywhere. On a class trip to The Rooms in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Nat wonders if they’ll let Bear in. But the museum has room for all sorts of fun and maybe even a bear–or two!
In the mass media today, as well as in high art and academia, there seems to be what one recent magazine has called an “irony epidemic.” This collection of essays considers irony in its Canadian literary and artistic context, with titles such as “Who Says That Canadian Culture Is Ironic?” and “Ironies of Color in the Great White North: The Discursive Strategies of Some Hyphenated Canadians.”
Doubting Yourself to the Bone is a story about the nature of grief, about what it means to be a parent in the face of great sorrow, the idea of re-invented love and hope. Set in Paris and a small town in the Canadian Rockies, the novel is propelled forward by a horrific car crash that reverberates for the victim’s husband and daughters. From a scotch-swilling Tibetan monk to a titillating, imagined waif named Katya, whose uninvited visits are always intriguing, this story serpentines through the labyrinth of grief and pain as the victim’s husband wrestles with the question, was the car crash an accident or intentional? It is a bumpy and strange journey, peopled with a capricious mother, an aging alcoholic uncle, five Buddhist monks in a broken van, and a nudist lesbian, that leads its main character and the reader on the road to salvation.
How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics?
DOWN takes junk language – with cameos by Frank O’Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations – and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal sentiments in this playful collection.
‘I’ve believed in Dowling’s poems for a long time with you. Or maybe you’re just now catching up to how the genius is working her machine on our minds? Gravity of letter in the word measured and dispensed with inimitable grace. The words are familiar, yes, but we get them again from this magnificent poet who is not going to let us just trample the smallest of them. I have tremendous respect for any poet who strives to be even half as great as Sarah Dowling.’
—CAConrad
‘After all of the previous avant-garde’s perpetual rediscoveries of Gertrude Stein’s formal innovations, Dowling reminds us that her best poetry was, above all, sexy. Where Dowling surpasses is in her recognition of the phatic, the emphatic, the obsessive understanding of the cultural syntax of infatuation. Everything in DOWN is palpably cloudy in its thick description: I am starstruck.’
— Craig Dworkin
Everyone’s welcomeAt the Seaweed Cafe,Where seaweed teaIs served all day…If you’ve ever played restaurant, made mud pies or hosted an imaginary tea party, you’ll welcome an invitation to the The Seaweed Cafe for an evening of song, storytelling and dance. A perfect bedtime book, Down at the Seaweed Cafe’s sunken treasure, sea monsters and tsunamis will charm readers of all ages.
After a dangerous incident, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway left the RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit and is now working as the Team Commander of the Fiskar Bay detachment. Roxanne is adjusting to her new job when the body of retired Sergeant Bill Gilchrist, her predecessor, is discovered in a ditch at the side of the road.
Spring in Fiskar Bay often means flooding, as the normally peaceful stream–home to ducks and teals and the occasional blue heron during the warmer months–fills to the top of its banks with fast-moving, murky brown water, sweeping chunks of ice and broken tree branches along with it. The locals from the close-knit community show up in droves to help sandbag and Roxanne organizes the local RCMP to help with the effort.
Then another RCMP officer is found dead, and tensions begin to rise as quickly as the water levels. Roxanne moved to Fiskar Bay to keep herself out of harm’s way, but with a cop killer on the loose, she isn’t sure who she can trust. Can Roxanne find the killer before it’s too late?
Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be married later in the day and it is this occasion that has brought the three of them together. Ambrose is losing his lover to AIDS. Victor, the eldest, has just left his second failed marriage.
They have never really spoken with each other because they all have their own individual secrets to hide and because they share an ambivalence about the death of their father. Could they have prevented it? Would they have wanted to save the town drunk, dreamer, poet, fisherman, the man who embarrassed them in front of their friends and locked them in the sentimental prison of his poems? Are they ready, finally, to reveal themselves to each other and move on with their lives? Can they survive this unsparing encounter with their own manhood?
In voices that interweave, alternate and play off one another with the exquisite lyricism of chamber music, the brothers reveal themselves as trapped by their father’s inability to let his boys grow up and their own inability to accept him as an adult.
Cast of three men.
A virus has plagued the city and residents are quarantined. Curfews have been imposed and rumours of government corruption abound. Bureaucratic red tape is creating a food crisis. Laurel and her parents are imprisoned in the basement of their stately home, relying on the generosity of their former gardener, Cheater, for information and supplies. While Laurel and her family struggle just to survive, Cheater becomes intoxicated with his new-found power as a member of the Security and Surveillance police. Laurel must act as go-between if she is to liberate her family from their basement cell, and enters the dark and convoluted world of Cheater, discovering in the process startling revelations about herself, politics, art, violence, and the man they have become dependent upon.
A compelling personal memoir and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic indifference and agenda-driven government policies.
In his thirty years in the Canadian prison system, Robert Clark rose from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada’s most dangerous and notorious prisoners, including Paul Bernardo and Tyrone Conn. He dealt with escapes, lockdowns, prisoner murders, prisoner suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes. He has managed cellblocks, been a parole officer, and investigated staff corruption.
Clark takes readers down inside a range of prisons, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for mentally ill prisoners and the notorious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. In Down Inside, he challenges head-on the popular belief that a “tough-on-crime” approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation. Wading into the controversy about long-term solitary confinement, Clark draws from his own experience managing solitary-confinement units to continue the discussion begun by the headline-making Ashley Smith case and to join the chorus of voices calling for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.
Nominated for an Alberta Book Award.
Time you had a haircut. Look like a mop.
Not that skinny.
Skin and bloody bone, boy.
Jacob breaks the point of his pencil but makes it look like an accident. And away Dad goes out the door and thump thump down the stairs.
Jacob eyes the hole at the end of his pencil. Listens till he can’t hear the Torino anymore. Crawls under the covers. Hopes the rest of December comes and goes like a heartbeat.
Eleven-year-old Jacob McKnight doesn’t like running. He doesn’t like the hills, the cold wind, the slushy electrolyte drinks, the interval training. He doesn’t like the way his dad is always pushing him: harder, faster, what’s wrong with you, boy? But mostly he doesn’t like the way it gives him time to think about the accident that shattered his brother’s body and his parents’ marriage.
Jacob would rather be drawing than running. He likes the Anatomy Colouring Book his dad gave him, and he likes how it helps him to better draw superheroes, with their unbreakable bodies. He likes, too, how drawing makes him forget about how much he misses his mum, about how hard his dad works to pay for their tiny apartment and secondhand clothes, about the pitying whispers that follow them around Glanisberg.
Down Sterling Road parses the anatomy of childhood with wisdom, wit and wonder; it’s one of the most charismatic books you’ll read all year.
‘Down Sterling Road lopes into the periscope of Canadian literature, strides through the barking back alleys of small-town childhood, drifts like a leaf over the skin of memory. Adrian Michael Kelly has captured the bittersweet ache of growing pains and growing up, of adolescent loss and daydream and rage. This dazzling bildungsroman fractures paternity and anatomy and necromancy to become an exquisite marathon of filial love and acceptance.’
— Aritha van Herk