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Aesop meets Anaïs Nin in these absurdist stories of very unexpected redemption
Getting to the Shamrock Motel isn’t easy. It’s just off Concession #18, but you can’t get there through a sequence of lefts and rights. To find the Shamrock you have to be lost – not just on the map, but in your heart and soul.
The Shamrock Motel does not accept reservations. The only way to get a room is by walking into the office and asking Rosemary, the owner/operator for one. Try not to stare at her hair.
Fair warning: no one spends the night, or even an hour at the Shamrock without experiencing some form of transformation. Whether it’s accidently sleeping with a bear, turning yourself into a river, or getting entirely too intimate with the sun, time spent at the Shamrock will make you wiser, stronger, sexier, and more yourself. Even if that’s the last thing you want.
These linked stories explore the intersection of personality and desire, love and lust, the joy and sadness of being alive and in love. Heated pool, cable TV, and a shot at redemption: the Shamrock Motel offers it all. Credit cards are accepted, but cash is preferred.
A reflective expression of a life pursuing enlightenment. A collection of haibun and their haiku poems that take a glimpse into topics such as teenage awakening and long standing grief; all with a deflecting wittiness and space for reflection.
Inspired by the 108 Buddhist defilements, each piece represents a lesson learned, some based on personal recollections and experiences; others are gathered bits and pieces of confidences or snippets overheard while shamelessly eavesdropping.
As soon as you read the first haibun, with its clear prose followed by the haiku: grade three/ creating a family/ tree tangled roots, you will be hooked. Vera Constantineau uses her talent with haibun and haiku to capture emotions in moments that might otherwise appear everyday. She shares her own emotional growth that has pushed her along towards enlightenment.
You can’t win a race you’re kept from running.
Set amid the cubicles and courtyards of Toronto City Hall, Kimia Eslah’s third novel centres on three women of colour navigating labyrinths at work, in love and in life. Faiza Hosseini is a cutthroat executive with a proven record — she knows she’s enough, but can she circumvent the old boys’ club? Sameera Jahani is passionate about equity but her girlfriend isn’t — can she bridge this gap, or has she had enough? Goldie Sheer has triumphantly landed her first job, but unexpected work drama makes her question — is she really enough? With grace and insight, Eslah bares three women’s experiences of structural discrimination, from microagressions to corruption.
Enough is an empathetic missive to anyone working on equity, diversity and inclusion — in cubicles, courtyards and countless other spaces.
An Attorney’s Struggle for Democracy in Quebec. Guy Bertrand made front-page news across Canada when he challenged Quebec’s referendum laws in court. In the face of the October referendum he obtained a court judgement declaring the referendum law illegal. After the referendum, he made front-page news again when he asked the courts to issue a permanent injunction banning any future unilateral declaration of independence by the Province of Quebec. For Bertrand, enough is enough. In this startling and candid book, Mr. Bertrand describes the long march that led him from being a founding member of the Parti Québécois and a diehard supporter of independence, to his creation of the Citizens for a Democratic Nation, a movement he founded in January 1996. The book explains this movement and what motivated him to challenge the legitimacy of the 1995 referendum in Quebec Superior Court. For Bertrand, the referendum was an illegal political coup d’état that defied both the Canadian constitution and the Charter of Rights. He reviews the disastrous social and economic effects that separation would have on Quebec and vigorously criticizes political élites, both nationalist and federalist, for losing touch with the real problems confronting ordinary people. He proposes new solutions for Quebec, and calls upon citizens to seek a better future as full members of the Canadian federation. Bertrand offers a moving and reasoned plea, in the name of all citizens, for democracy and the rule of law in a free society. The English translation includes the full text of the Lesage judgement that declared Quebec’s Bill 1 illegal.
Enough Light for the Journey tells the story of Annie Wenger-Nabigon and her husband Herb Nabigon, an Oji-Cree Anishinabe elder. In this powerful and moving tribute to her late husband and the beliefs and teachings he shared with her, Annie Wenger-Nabigon shares the Oji-Cree teachings Herb wanted to pass on.
In his most recent volume of poetry, Rienzi Crusz’s preoccupations have not substantially changed, but his perspectives have shifted. Still deeply conscious of time and place, here he concerns himself with broader existential concerns, with love and hope, and tragedy, death, and despair. Nature continues to inspire in its concreteness and its tranquility. As he meditates on the edge of silence, he walks feistily as always through the scowl of age and lovingly through the many idioms of the sun, revelling in the poetic spaces he has defined with his “singing metaphors” and the dance of words.
Enter the Chrysanthemum is a luminous collection of poems about family, love and loss. Employing precise imagery and concise language, Lam plumbs and mines ordinary events and experiences to find a central core of poetic insight and sometimes harrowing truth. Whether written from the vantage point of a young child observing her parents, a single parent struggling to raise a child, or a daughter watching a parent’s decline and death, these poems reconnect us to what it means to be human. Enter the Chrysanthemum is Lam’s second book of poetry.
Enter the Raccoon documents a love affair between a woman and a raccoon. They are a couple that loves without preconceptions, whose being together eschews all limits until their beliefs in the self are put to the test. Their story unfolds each time one surrenders to the other in a sometimes melancholic and cruel, other times joyful, even ecstatic embrace.
An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement.
Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.
Entitlement is the tragic, wrenching story of Andy Kronk. After a lifetime intertwined with the Aspinalls, one of Canada’s wealthiest families, Andy has finally forged a clean break. Mere months pass, however, before his past returns, and he finds himself, obediently, digging …
At its heart, Entitlement is a story about identity — about who we think we are and where we really stand. Set in rural Ontario and with excursions to Toronto and New York City, the novel takes a provocative and honest look at class, power, male relationships, death, and the familial bonds that tie, protect and harm us most.
Andy’s story is revealed to Trudy Clarke. Writing an Aspinall “tell-all” biography, she wants Kronk’s take for her book. Reluctantly, Andy agrees to talk. He begins by explaining that when he quit practising law, all he wanted was a clean start and the privacy to live life on his own terms. But, as he explains over the course of a weekend interview, his boyhood boarding school entanglement with one of Canada’s elite families became complicated — and remains strong. As the weekend progresses, Andy grows comfortable. When he realizes that he’s gone too far, said too much, it’s too late…
Written in forceful prose, with a poet’s ear, Jonathan Bennett’s Entitlement does for the world of power and privilege what David Adams Richards has done for the hardscrabble blue collar men and women of his award-winning novels — tearing down myths to reveal something essentially, and always, heartbreakingly human.
“Bennett demonstrates a real talent for evoking the affectless, indulgent ‘eccentricities’ of the surpassingly (and perpetually) wealthy … Bennett manages it all deftly. He can weave a tale and has the chops to keep it all in a literary vein … this is a good book with a crackerjack ending.” — The Globe and Mail
“Bennett’s storytelling is effortless in its pace and time shifts, and his dialogue glints like a sharpened knife.” — The Walrus
BackLit bonus material includes an author interview, discussion questions, and recommended reading.
“I used to think this was a book about a disguise,
but now I know that it’s a book about translation.”
According to Cormier family lore, Pierrot Cormier escaped a British prison the night before the Acadian Deportation by disguising himself in a dress. In the invigorating, transliterative Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier uses his ancestor’s escape to ponder what it means to live between two languages. Writing in a blend of English and French that evokes Chiac, “a living thing, growing gills, a voice from the future, prophetic and clear,” Bernier-Cormier probes the mutability of language and of translation.
A heady mix of English renderings of a single French poem, a Franco-fusion mélange of reflections on Acadian history and identity, and meditations on the evolution of language and the rapper Young Thug, Entre Rive and Shore exhibits “an eloquence we aren’t attuned to.” The result is protean, an exhilarating collection that reassesses what it means to live between two identities, two worlds, two languages.
Epic Canadiana returns in the second volume of the award winning anthology series! Dedicated to exploring numerous flavours of superheroism within Canada, Epic Canadiana Volume 2 puts a new twist on the superher genre, and features a truly diverse collection of heroes – some of them pastiches of classic 40s characters and others totally new.
An immersive experience, Eraser delves into the memories and fantasies of a classroom of students as they figure out who they want to be. Six students guide readers through their different journeys, taking them along to the cafeteria, change rooms, and playground, to the places where they feel safest and the most brave, vulnerable, and afraid.
Afroze just moved to Canada from Pakistan and is struggling to fit in as a white-skinned gender-questioning convert to Islam. All Jihad wants is to be cool, but he struggles with the appearance of this new student who doesn’t look like any of the Muslims he knows. Noah’s brother just died, and he’s been avoiding processing his grief, which makes him lash out at his best friend, Eli. Eli doesn’t know how to support Noah, who he also harbours questioning feelings for. Whitney wants to live by her own rules in her own imaginary world, but she’s forced to deal with annoying kids like Tara. Tara loves school and getting straight As, but all the pressure she feels eventually adds up and she crumbles.
Finding a balance between tough realities and honest fantasies, Eraser is an energetic and sentimental look at what it’s like to navigate differences and connections as a kid.