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Life is unpredictable.
In this strangely endearing, wonderfully whimsical, and exquisitely hilarious collection of stories, life offers a free trip for two to Ethiopia and an imported cat, a pool of vegan gravy and an Internet Elvis wedding officiant, a confetti machine and a potentially life-changing hot tub. Everything Life Has to Offer is like nothing you’ve encountered and it’s just what you’ve been looking for. Prepare to be amazed.
“Everything Life Has to Offer is a heart-melting read and a hell of a good time.”—Jessica Westhead
“Kasman’s collection offers a sharp, sometimes eccentric, often hilarious vision of modern life.”—Anna Leventhal
Before there was Drake, there was The 6. The genesis and rise of Toronto’s Hip Hop culture.
Amongst the algorithmic pulsations that remap informational networks at the whim of any giant tech company, hip hop culture produces ways of knowing (and being in) the world that continually disrupt the status quo.
Guided by a sense of rawness — an unsanitized speaking of truth to power — hip hop culture thrives outside of the formal and institutional settings which are often used to confer importance. Hip hop has no use for such pedestals. Its inherent and purposefully self-critical nature ensures that hip hop is both a widely appealing form for youth protest and a self-calibrating system of quality control.
A photographic excavation of Toronto’s hip hop archive, …Everything Remains Raw draws on photographs of Kardinal Offishall, Michie Mee, Dream Warriors, Maestro, Drake, Director X, and others by Michael Chambers, Sheinina Raj, Demuth Flake, Craig Boyko, Nabil Shash, Patrick Nichols, and Stella Fakiyesi to offer a deep dive in hip hop’s visual culture. An intentional intersection of the taste-making skills of the DJ and the nuanced particularism of the curator, the book and the accompanying exhibition juxtapose never-before-seen images with photojournalism, street posters, and zines to reframe and enhance popular understandings of this thing called hip hop.
…Everything Remains Raw accompanies an exhibition organized at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
Thin is the line between dreaming and wakefulness, wellness and disorder, here and there, this and that. Elana Wolff’s poems illuminate the porousness of states and relations, the connective compulsion of poetic perception, in language that blends the oracular and the everyday, the elliptical and the lucent, the playful and the heart-raking. The de- and re-constructive workings of the poems in Everything Reminds You of Something Else argue for empathy and attentiveness. At the core of this work is the belief that art is the sanest rage.
In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her: marriage, menopause, fear, desire, loss, and that guy on the bus, the woman on the street, wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms.
This isnt a how to guide to middle age and its not a collection of memories either for one thing, the author cant remember that much foranother, shes more interested in the places where the raw bones of the personal intersect with the wider world. Where a moment or gesture suddenly feels emblematic or prophetic or final, and why is that? Why do some moments shimmer, while others fade into a quickly growing morass of “I cant remember?”
On September 11th, 2001, the world changed. For Sophie and Paul, it started with a disastrous dinner party. For the babysitter, it started with waking in a dark kitchen and recognizing the smell of blood. For so many others, it started with a plane flying into the World Trade Center. In this tautly written domestic thriller Michelle Berry weaves together the story of two couples whose lives are about to be unravelled by the murder of a neighbour, a babysitter who has gone missing and the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center. Everything Turns Away is a haunting exploration of marriages and what tears them apart, of what happens to people during shocking events and of how everything can change in an instant. Filled with richly drawn characters, a web of thwarted desires and multiple motives, Everything Turns Away is riveting until the very end.
Eleven years after a world war destroyed the consumer-driven, plastic-based existence of 2055, a new order of players jostles for power. Streaky electricity, ravaging drought, a scarcity of food and deadly Monarch butterflies makes for an increasingly desperate situation. In this imaginative sequel to The Rage Room (2020), Sharps Barkley returns after a bizarre series of encounters inside the Mainframe and is reunited with his former cohorts. At the same time, his mother reinvents herself and eventually emerges as the new leader of a dreamy nightmarish world. The genetically engineered OctoOne and her army face off against The Fountain of Youth compound ruled by an unstable plastic surgeon known as Alpha Plus and his deadly squad of mechanical cutting machines. Will world order ever be restored? A hilarious and likewise poignant novel, Everything You Dream is Real is filled with dark and delightful ironies, and the sobering realization that obsession with appearances, the soul-draining sex-trade, and the thirst for power hold sway in our own world every bit as much as in an imagined apocalyptic future.
“Brilliant lunatic assemblage.” — Today’s Book of Poetry on Cut-up Apologetic
From 2007 to 2016, Jamie Sharpe led an itinerant life, throughout British Columbia and the Yukon, in Sechelt, Prince George, Dawson, Salmon Arm, Whitehorse, Galiano, and Texada Island. When family life solidified around a sedentary existence, old scattershot suggested new targets …
By way of time’s amnesia, we’ve almost lost Sharpe entirely; only a few of his worm-eaten books remain in the musty libraries of literary perverts. The great record of Canadian literature is a list of prestigious “-ists” and “-isms” (the Realists gave way to Naturalists, replaced by Symbolists, affronted by Dadaism, bled into Surrealism, birthing the Post-Absurdist-Nouveau Roman … ). Some authors are so diverse we struggle to contain them with a name. Here’s hoping we can drag the ever-distinct Sharpe, against his will, without proper receptacle, into the future for a few years more. (The Associative Press)
Part roman à clef, lies, composite, and compendium, Everything You Hold Dear is an ode to poetry and a posthumous work from a living writer.
In this companion volume to The Tree of Meaning (GP, 2006), Robert Bringhurst collects talks and meditations under the principle that “everything is related to everything else.” His studies of poetry, polyphonics, oral literature, storytelling, translation, mythology, homogeny, cultural ecology, literary criticism and typography all build upon this sense of basic connection.
Across the collection emerges a sustained interest in poetrythe existence of a poetry to which poems are answers, an examination of philosophy in poetry, the relationship between poetry and music, and the concept of polyphonics. Bringhurst’s thinking involves the work of poets, musicians and philosophers as varied as Ezra Pound, John Thompson, Don McKay, Empedokles, Parmenides, Aristotle, Skaay, Plato, George Clutesi, Elizabeth Nyman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dennis Lee and Glenn Gould.
The value Bringhurst places on translationthe process of, the dialogue between one language and another, and the sheer experience of witnessing translation by reading and hearing poems, stories and songs in their original languagesis another strong presence in this collection. Accompanying the English narrative are passages in Tlingit, Haida, Chinese, Greek, German, Cree and Russian, for readers who want to find the patterns and taste some of the vocabulary for themselves, for those interested in meeting the languages part way.
Winner of the 2008 Hubert Evans Noon-Fiction Prize.
Lena Fulvi has been arrested for the murder of her mother. She insists it was an accident, but she has been accused by a nurse in the hospital who saw her do the deed. Her sisters willingly testify against her. But the Inspector questioning Lena is not convinced that it is an open and shut case. He probes the pain and darkness that Lena conceals beneath a sophisticated veneer, embarking on a journey with her that changes them both.
Since its Montreal premiere in 1988, La Déposition (Evidence to the Contrary) has had over 150 performances in Québec alone and has had considerable international success. Readings at the Soho Repertory and Double Image theatres in New York in 1989 were followed by a Dutch translation and performance in Amsterdam in 1990. The play toured France in 1991 and was published there by Editions Actes Sud. It was staged at the Avignon Festival in both 1991 and 1993 and was translated into German and broadcast on German radio in 1993. In 1994 it went into production in London, and was translated into Spanish and Italian.
Evie Troy, an impulsive and funny young Jewish woman, has a tendency to overcomplicate things. And that can get her into trouble. When her dying friend Jean-Gabriel, a successful and controversial francophone writer, cons her into carrying out his last wish, delivering a monetary mea-culpa to his ex-wife Amélie, Evie decides she knows better. In a fit of misguided generosity, she appropriates his cash to help set herself up as a surrogate mother on behalf of the barren Amélie, a plan she keeps so secret not even Amélie has an inkling a baby is headed her way. Evie’s pregnancy scheme pops so many holes at the seams that she’s forced to enlist the aid of her estranged mother Marilyn. Back when she was Evie’s age Marilyn lit out on the Abortion Caravan, a cross-Canada road trip whose final blow-out demonstration in Ottawa brought the work of Parliament crashing to a feminist halt. Marilyn can’t fathom her daughter’s daft determination to saddle up her womb on spec, but she agrees to come on board and the two of them head-butt their way through every step of Evie’s program, from arm-twisting Mr. Right into coughing up his sperm to staging the flimflam that will relay the newborn to the oblivious Amélie. But will Amélie accept the baby they’re offering up gift-wrapped? Played out against the backdrop of the fight for women’s rights in Canada, The Village Idiot’s Buffet is the boisterous tale of a mother and daughter at odds, struggling to reconnect across a reproductive divide.
The photographs in this volume are evocations made visible through reflection, observation, exploration, and expression … the embodiment of memory, renderings of personal emotional truth … recollections of the photographer’s life during the 1970s, spanning the decade he underwent basic art training and developed as a professional image-maker. Few frames from this collection were printed at the time, and the negatives resided untouched for decades in an old cardboard box that inhabited the basements and attics of his transitory world. In 2017, 40 years later, he opened that box, and discovered history anew, awakening long dormant feelings and perceptions. Through the prism of time, reminiscence sometimes brings clarity, but just as often, the residue of the past can be complex and blurry. The metaphors in these contemporaneous visual musings are both non-verbal and evocative, as well as testament to the veracity and longevity of ocular fragments, the reverberations of a long process.
A long poem at the fringes of the Canadian tradition, Ex Machina is a latticework of poetic and philosophical statements concerning the symbiosis of humans, books, and machines. In a series of three intertwining sequences, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth from statement to statement, seeking development but meeting frustration. The reader thus becomes a larval stage in the poem’s development, forging connections between its disparate parts during the course of this mental processing, as the text evolves over multiple readings.
In 1993 when Robert Lepage suggested to his colleagues that a specific identity and image be found for his next working group, he imposed one condition. The word “theatre” was not to be part of the name of the new company. This gorgeous full-colour book documents the results of that landmark decision: the dynamic creative arts company Ex Machina, constantly on the move in search of new forms of storytelling—from Lepage’s own Dragon’s Trilogy, through Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Metropolitan Opera of New York, to Peter Gabriel’s world tours, or Cirque du Soleil’s Kà in Las Vegas. Its frenetic dynamism means the company must constantly move simultaneously between story draft and stagecraft as it invites audiences the world over to their theatrical experiments where technology is part of the human adventure. Onstage, hierarchies, methodologies and narrative codes are turned inside out to create a rich stage vocabulary, free of the conventional constraints of theatre.
“The artists of Ex Machina believe that theatre craves new sources of inspiration,” notes Michel Bernatchez, the company’s producer. “What is needed is a commingling of the performing arts such as dance, opera and music with the recording arts such as cinema, video and multimedia. It calls for encounters between scientists and playwrights, between scenic artists and architects.”
Robert Lepage has said, “Theatre, like the world itself, evolves very rapidly, as do its practitioners and its audience. The influence of film and television and the new dramaturgical possibilities offered by multimedia have opened the way to new forms of expression and new languages of staging that have only barely been explored. It is thus not simply the content and form of theatre that we are questioning, but also the role theatre will play in the new exchange of ideas in the 21st century.”
A bilingual collection of renga poetry by two of Canada’s most celebrated poets in English and in French, each writing in his respective language in response to the other. A project of discourse itself, shared in dialogue between two poets, as they explore Novalis’ definition of poetry as “the truly absolute real.” The poetic act is world-changing, the agglomeration of atoms as they fall through space – a sort of “elective affinity”, or state of grace – to constitute Being. If Lao Tzu reminds us that the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, this renga, suffused with elements of the natural world, also recognizes that, in the words of Angelus Silesius, ‘‘the unnameable, which we usually call God, is expressed and revealed through the Word.’’ Léveillé and Bloggett share an unprecedented dialogue that possesses both paradox and complete clarity of word in Canada’s two official languages.
Haley McGee was on the phone with Visa, promising to pay off her bill by having a yard sale, when she realized that the only things she could sell were gifts from her exes. Inspired by this call, The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale: a play about love is a hilarious and daring play about the cost of love…or what love costs us. So: can we translate sentimental value into cold hard cash? Why does Haley want to — and why now? The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale smashes together personal divulgences, mathematics, interviews with Haley’s ex-boyfriends, economics, and the politics of commerce in a quest to determine what our romantic relationships are actually worth. This autobiographical work offers eight items “for sale” — all gifts from Haley’s real ex-boyfriends — and introduces a brand new formula, developed with math expert Melanie Frances, to calculate the cost of love.