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For almost six decades Montreal’s fabled underground city has been an inspiration to civic planners from around the world. What began as a subterranean pedestrian network beneath Place Ville Marie is now an integral part of the city and a major tourist attraction. It has developed into a parallel metropolis, an amazing labyrinth of passageways, alleys, atriums, and hallways that snake their way along 40 km, connecting 85 downtown skyscrapers, ten hotels, 2000 stores apartment blocks and 68 Métro stations. Alan Hustak looks at its history, takes you on a personal tour of the multi-level environment, and reveals its many hidden surprises along the way.
Like the city above ground the underground city has its own mix of sun and shade, public squares, fountains, green spaces, and even an indoor skating rink. It is not so much an underground city–that’s a misnomer–as it is an enclosed, weather proof city: a climate-controlled environment, above and below ground that is air-conditioned in summer and warm against the blast of winter.
For Montrealers and visitors alike, Exploring Montreal’s Underground City is an indispensable guide with tours, maps, and indexes, and full colour photographs.
Quebec is one of the most visited cities in North America, for good reason-it has a unique charm. A romantic city, it attracts lovers as well as families and tourists interested in history. In 1985 UNESCO named Quebec a World Heritage Site. It is the only city in either Canada or the United States to have preserved its original walls and fortifications. Although the city has been the scene of armed conflict, many historical buildings remain.
For the curious travellers, the seven walking tours in Exploring Old Quebec are a voyage of discovery through the rich history of an extraordinary city founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608. This completely revised guide also includes four thematic itineraries, maps, and practical information.
Mathieu Poulin brings us an action comedy of a novel, starring big-budget, explosion-happy movie director Michael Bay. What if Bay were, against all odds, a misunderstood genius right up there with the likes of Plato, Sartre, and Nietzsche? What if his films were more than just Baydiocre, high-grossing box-office successes held in low esteem by most movie critics? What if Bad Boys was a film about decolonization? What if The Rock was about failing to be recognized by one’s peers? If Armageddon was about a post-human future? And Pearl Harbor was a reflection on the freedom afforded an artist when striving to transform fact into fiction? Poulin takes his hypothesis and runs with it. Bayhem ensues as our leading man sets out in hot pursuit of the truth, finding more questions than answers between epic car chases and sexy love interests. Who are his real parents and why did they abandon him? Who keeps following him? Did someone intentionally try to poison him, aware of his deathly allergy to sesame? And most importantly: What is meaning?
Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry
This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.
Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.
Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras’s stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. ‘Cleanse the doors of perception,’ Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we’ve allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome – each decision can make or unmake us.
‘The works in Expressway are all so tightly wound, hyper-distilled and stressed … This is poetry for the apocalypse.’
—Broken Pencil
‘As a poet, Queyras is secretly romantic, writing with lyricism and a voice that’s unafraid of sentiment or emotion … Queyras’ words spark like pickaxes on old asphalt.’
— Eye Weekly
‘Queyras show[s] what poetry can do when it simultaneously maps roadways of transportation and lines of human thought.’
—Spacing
‘Eclectic engagements characterize Queyras’s work, but any suggestion of characterization of her work immediately brings a morphing to something new, intelligent, and provocative … Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with.’
—Lambda Literary Review
Expulsion & Other Stories consists of two parts: a novella followed by a group of short stories. But the main protagonists have one thing in common: they are all women coming of age in difficult times. In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship’s mundane face — a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play — or pays the price, that of facing “expulsion”. The novella “Face” shares a similar motif of expulsion but takes the reader to a different place — the urban sprawl and property greed of modern Vancouver.
The ordinary becomes the extraordinary in K. I. Press’s latest collection of poems, Exquisite Monsters. Filled with gods, monsters, saints and small children, Press draws together myth, magic and the forces of science Press to examine the power of creation and the creatures that lie beneath the skin. She peers into our blood and bones and teases out the beasts that bury themselves inside our minds. With precision, K. I. Press conjures fantastic images and constructs an elegant poetic machine for her readers.
When she makes the chance discovery of a framed sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister, RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes decides to investigate how a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, B.C. wound up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later. As Arabella sifts through caches of long-forgotten letters and unearths long-buried memories, she pieces together the heartbreaking truth of her family history and resolves a nearly century-old murder. In her debut novel, Myrna Dey skillfully moves back and forth between two time periods and two memorably resourceful heroines.
Extraordinaire raconte l’histoire d’une solution communautaire extraordinaire à un problème chronique : la pénurie de médecins dans le Nord du Canada.
La communauté a décidé que la solution était de former ses propres médecins.
L’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a produit plus de 700 médecins dont un pourcentage étonnant exerce dans le Nord du Canada pour répondre aux besoins uniques de leurs communautés d’origine, quelles soient rurales, autochtones ou francophones. La plupart des diplômées et diplômés sont non seulement restés travailler dans le Nord mais apportent aussi une contribution à l’École en tant que mentors, précepteurs et membres du corps professoral.
En presque vingt ans depuis sa création, l’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a transformé les soins de santé dans le Nord et laissé une marque loin d’être ordinaire.
Extraordinaire
Finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award
Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros’ collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph transformed into a heifer, a young soldier who returns home to discover that his brother is a changeling, an ancient temple uncovered during the construction of a church, a betrayed woman lost in a labyrinth, a wise woman confronting changes to her position when modern technology comes to her village. Some stories show that people still seek refuge in myth and folk beliefs; the ways of the past are not gone. The paving of a village does not destroy the power of the evil eye or the ability to repel it. A temple in honour of the old gods comes again to the surface. An unfinished musical composition for piano magically completes itself whenever it is played.
Eli has lived in Crooked River his whole life, and he knows better than anyone about that sinking number. His father, uncle and grandmother are dead; he didn’t know his mother, and his grandfather Clarence, an eccentric builder of hotels and a now-underwater castle, walked to the river one day and never returned. Eli’s childhood friend, George, also went missing, back when they were kids, and was never seen again. Eli has spent years wondering about both Clarence and George. Now the river, its course diverted years earlier to make way for a mine, is reclaiming its original path, and the lake is receding day by day. As the waters retreat, secrets come to light, and it seems as though Eli might finally learn what happened to his grandfather and best friend. Then a young boy disappears, pulling Eli’s past into the present. Told in taut, spare prose, Eye Lake is the haunting story of three families, three generations and three disappearances.
Randy and Steve have finally tied the knot. With the snow blowing and temperatures dipping well below zero they are looking for an escape from the frigid Edmonton winter. Like so many others, they head south to Puerto Vallarta, along with a crush of University of Alberta students, looking for a goodtime during spring break. When a student is found dead in an elaborately staged scene, Randy’s romantic beach walks and candlelit dinners will have to wait. Instead Randy and Steve will have find meaning in the murder to catch the culprit. If they don’t, the honeymoon just might be over.
Forty-six years later those words still ring true: there has since been no book that has brought to life early Calgary the way that Eye Opener Bob does. Perhaps more importantly, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to Robert Chambers Edwards—Eye Opener Bob —the irrepressible editor of Calgary’s most singular newspaper, and the city’s most singular denizen.
Bob Edwards was a true Canadian original, the prototypical hard-drinking, pull-no-punches editor of the Calgary Eye Opener—at the time the largest paper between Vancouver and Toronto, with a circulation of over 30,000 copies. A paper with the power to elect or dethrone governments, to bring the mighty CPR to reform its ways, and to skewer the pretensions of society like few before or since. Eye Opener Bob brings this fascinating character to life in all his glorious self-contradictions.
MacEwan arrived in the city at just the right time to write Eye Opener Bob—the old Sandstone City hadn’t yet been whitewashed over by the new money from the Leduc gusher, and there were still living people who had known Edwards. MacEwan ferreted out their stories as only he could do, combined the interviews with hard research, and the result is Grant MacEwan’s best book by a country mile.
Eye Opener Bob can be enjoyed on its own or as a companion piece to the new compilation of Edwards’s writing, Irresponsible Freaks, Highball Guzzlers, and Unabashed Grafters: A Bob Edwards Chrestomathy.
A remarkable debut collection, Kelly Cooper’s Eyehill provides a multi-hued portrait of a small prairie town. Too small to support a high school or a drugstore, Eyehill is populated by men and women who have worked for generations to wrest a living from the dry, rolling hills. Like people anywhere else, they hunger for love, understanding, a decent living, and safety and comfort in their homes. Their passion for something more, something better, is tangled by their almost visceral attachment to the land and by the dangerous allure of an oil industry that grows more rapacious every year.
In this startling debut collection of loosely linked stories, characters disappear only to resurface once again a few stories later. Among the central characters are Rhea, a girl whose mother abandoned her and her father when she was three and who grows to adulthood full of questions and contradictions; Jarvis, a boy whom Rhea loves but wants as a boyfriend only when he has to marry his pregnant girlfriend; and the Lalonde brothers, so different and yet so clearly formed by their shared circumstances.
A strange eroticism pervades “They Secretly Pray for Rain.” A subtle, mostly denied violence underlies “Very Little Blood,” but it percolates to the surface in the terrible climax of “River Judith.” The ancient aquifer flowing below the prairie pulses through the very marrow of the men’s bones. Farming is not what they do, but what they are, and interference is fatal. In this small, tightly knit community, secrets are essential. The need to keep silent and to control terrifying emotions is at the same time necessary and ruinous, and the stories people tell hide as much as they reveal.
A spellbinding Scottish novel set in Edinburgh and Upper Canada during the tumultuous years of the French revolution and the Napoleonic war, Eyemouth is a wonderful novel with a definite Scottish flair!