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All Books in this Collection
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A Possible Landscape
$14.00Maureen Harris’s first volume of poetry evokes “a possible landscape,” where the stories that subtly shape us blend with the moments that we are. Here is an Eden where Eve longs for the serpent’s “green quiver,” his “sibilant caress,” where a snake tires of his lover “wearing/the same skin day-out, day-in.” The poems in the first section of this book are sharp new takes on old stories, at once angry, witty and thoughtful. With grace, compassion and sparkle, the rest of the book explores the self in the world of the late twentieth century, the seeming contradictions of the third world, and the ordinary magic of an evening spent with friends.
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A Possible Life
$19.95Daniel Clevenger has a successful career as a professor and writer in Winnipeg. But his two university-aged sons are growing up and Daniel is still haunted by memories of his late wife. Then he meets Magda, an attractive, recently-divorced art historian, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance.
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A Pretty Sight
$17.95Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time’s frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara’s new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay.
‘O’Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at which he excels, here is a writer prepared to put feelings on the line and to argue his case with the reader. This is proud, felt, and affecting work — I can’t think of many other poets so prepared to engage and so equipped to succeed.’ —Simon Armitage
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A Priest in Hell
$17.95“Living in jail is like living in a foreign country. The customs and culture are different, almost alien, and so is the language.”
A Priest in Hell is the compelling true story of life in the U.S. prison system. The book takes fodder for popular reality shows (like Cops) to a new level, giving the reader a frighteningly real sense of the tastes, sounds, smells, culture and lifestyle of jail.
On November 5, 2005, Randall Radic was arrested and charged with ten felonies. Desperation for a monied lifestyle led Radic, a pastor in the northern California community of Ripon, to first mortgage the home provided to him by his church, before selling off the church itself. His crime is exposed when a large bank deposit catches the attention of the authorities. Radic is subsequently convicted of embezzlement, forgery, and fraud, and he spends six months in a California jail before a plea bargain facilitates his release.
At 54, Radic is well above the average age of the prison population, and his background as a priest makes him both a target and a confidante within the prison walls. Through the book, Radic introduces the stories of several of his fellow inmates, detailing their crimes, cases, and struggles. He eventually earns his plea bargain by sharing confessions of a fellow inmate with the district attorney.
Radic considers his time in jail Dante’s version of Hell. This is the gritty, painful reality of crime and consequence.
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A Profession of Hope
$20.00Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award
Gold Medal for the Green Living category in the Living Now Book Awards
Finalist for the High Plains Book Award for creative nonfiction
“This is not the story of a ready-made farm, complete with generations of history, carefully tended tools and sturdy clapboard farmhouse.” In 2006 Jenna Butler and her partner, Thomas, purchased “160 acres more or less” of rough northern bush. They knew they weren’t purchasing anything more than hard work and hope but still they headed up every weekend to clear a spot in those woods where they could plant their first crops.
With the warm wit of Barbara Kingsolver and the stark beauty of Sharon Butala’s writings on the prairie, Jenna Butler shares her journey with us. From beating a hasty retreat from the first overwhelming swarm of mosquitoes, to discussing worm poop with local farmers and becoming forever more the crazy hippie teachers, the stories of Larch Farm spill out of these pages. A Profession of Hope: Farming on the edge of the Grizzly Trail is a beguiling read, as rich and promising as freshly turned earth.
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A Progressive Traditionalist
$45.00Winner of the Heritage Toronto Award
John M. Lyle (1872–1945) was an anomaly among architects: a Beaux-Arts classicist who nevertheless found much inspiration in modernism, allowing his own traditionalist practice to be affected in form and detail by a brave new emphasis on minimalism and indigenous influence. His early works, including countless legendary banks and residences, as well as the iconic Union Station and Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, are exemplary of Beaux-Arts classicism; his later bank designs in Halifax, Calgary and Toronto display a modernist shift and see him championing an idiosyncratic and authentic regional consciousness.
A Progressive Traditionalist traces this aesthetic trajectory through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, documenting Lyle’s training at Yale and in Paris, his early career in New York and his later successin Toronto, including his tireless efforts to raise the profile of the profession through teaching, writing, curating and lecturing, and his attempts to pave the way for a uniquely Canadian architecture.
‘A book on Lyle is long overdue. Glenn McArthur has given us an elegant and thoughtful publication which sets a new standard for documenting our architectural legacy.’
– Bruce Kuwabara, KPMB Architects
‘Most Canadian architects are simply architects who practice in Canada; but for John Lyle, being a Canadian architect meant practicing Canadian architecture in Canada. Glenn McArthur brings Lyle, brilliant designer and passionate cultural nationalist, vividly to life.’ – Christopher Hume
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A Pug Called Poppy
$14.95One day Poppy the Pug meets Smudge the Maine Coon cat at the park, and so begins an extraordinary friendship and a series of adventures ranging from a disastrous coffee-and-play group to a terrible house fire. These eight linked stories also introduce Poppy’s human companion Danielle, cheeky Jackson, Baby Gillian, the dog-hating Wenda, and the dreaded Psycho-Cat, proving that no matter what the situation, life is never dull when there’s a glossy black pug in the neighbourhood!
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A Quiet Night and a Perfect End
$17.95The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They’re peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people’s extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone.
Roig takes her characters, and her readers, on Munro-like passages through miscarriages, infidelities, and disappointments through the motions of everyday life. It may be coping with the feeling of academic failure or coming to terms with the loss of a child who has died too young, an unexpected pregnancy or the intrusion of house guests who are no longer friends. What is uplifting, finally, is the achievement of forgiveness, the small, daily victories over despair. These are stories that remind us why our days and nights are so worth living.
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A Quiet Roar
$22.95Compelling and honest life of a stubborn BC rancher living tenaciously in the face of her Multiple Sclerosis condition. The devastating diagnosis of an incurable, debilitating disease does not ordinarily form the starting point of a triumphant story. This, however, is a triumphant story. Heidi Redl was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2004 and immediately chose to fight the disease with the only tools available to her: sheer stubbornness and courage.
Growing up on a pioneer ranch in the rough and dusty days of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Redl learned at a young age to be self-reliant and tenacious. Life as a rancher had given her the courage she would need to bravely and persistently fight back against this chronic disease that now affects 2.5 million people worldwide. But nothing in her previous experiences could fully prepare her to live with an equally tenacious enemy.
In A Quiet Roar, Redl shares the struggles and triumphs in her uphill battle with multiple sclerosis. To survive, Redl must first learn to trust and rely on other people for the help she would need in the new reality of her daily life. This compelling and honest memoir is a record of her struggle against the physical challenges of living with a progressive disease but also of the support and incredible friendships she found along the way. -
A Ragged Pen
$22.95A Ragged Pen brings to the page five essays on memory. First delivered in Vancouver in the spring of 2005, these talksby Robert Finley, Patrick Friesen, Aislinn Hunter, Anne Simpson and Jan Zwickyexamine the narrative challenges, lyric energy and questions of verity that surround the subject of memory in a creative context.
Finley’s essay searches out appropriate, genuine voices for memories. Comparing photo narrative projects, his own and a friend’s, he proposes a form of storytelling that incorporates both memory and creation, a dialogue that speaks to, rather than for, the past. Within the discussion of narrative Zwicky posits a distinction between lyric and narrative treatments of memories, what each accepts about and tries to do with what memory delivers, and whether a difference in the degree of verity is part of this distinction. Hunter picks up the thread of verity and examines the discrepancy between seeing and imagining, the notion of “real” and the power of memory, drawing on the work of Borges, Seamus Heaney and recent science that calls into question commonly held perceptions of truth. Friesen begins with a childhood memory he suspects may be an invention, and opens onto the role of longing in memory and in poetry, challenging the assumption of past experience in longing, arguing for a note of loss in every new experience, a longing for what has never been. Simpson uses a myth of longing, that of Orpheus and Eurydice, to dig beneath metaphor, bringing new ideas and influences to the role of metaphor in social interactions and artistic endeavours.
Together these essays make fascinating crossovers and offer fresh insight on memory and art. A Ragged Pen is a valuable new contribution to the study of poetics and narrative philosophy.
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A Ramshackle Home
$22.95Felicia Mihali writes: “I would like this novel to be read as a universal story about little girls born in small and poor villages around the world who are not as lucky as those born in big cities and in good families. These are girls who have to struggle to succeed, to fight their own complexes and their shame over not being more fortunate. For many of them their only escape is through the imagination.”
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A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing
$19.95Jamey Popilowski dreams of becoming a rock star and Lilah Cellini dreams of Jamey. Together the young couple leave their childhood home of Terrabain Street and hit the open asphalt, kicking up a musical storm along the way. Entering their raw mix of carelessness and longing is Zeke, destiny in black leather. Zeke is the soundman, producer, preacher, but is he angel or devil? Lilah can’t make up her mind; however, one thing is certain, he changes all their lives forever. While Jamey embraces the musician’s lifestyle, along with its excesses, Lilah is confronted by choices that will ultimately lead her to her own goals.
A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing follows the intertwined lives of friends and idols and articulates the fine balance between the love of making and performing music and the temptations that hide in the shadows.
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A Really Good Brown Girl
$20.00Deluxe redesign of the Gerald Lampert Award-winning classic.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Métis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.
I am looking at a school picture, grade five, I am smiling easily … I look poised, settled, like I belong. I won an award that year for most improved student. I learned to follow really well. –from “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl”
“No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it.” –Lee Maracle, from the Introduction
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A Record of Writing
$39.95Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces the development of Bowering’s consciousness as a writer through four decades of work—from his early days with the Oliver Chronicle and The Ubyssey, to his involvement in the avant-garde writing community of the 1960s and 1970s, to his life as a mature writer, confident in a wide range of literary genres and activities.
Dr. Roy Miki’s unique bibliographic method proposes that the writing cannot be separated from the writer: throughout the book there are illustrations, photographs, annotations, choice excerpts from Bowering’s works, and passages from his lively correspondence, all of which illuminate and enrich the tremendously detailed bibliography.
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A Refuge of Tales
$15.00What does it mean to make a home inside a story? Stories are safe, comfortable, familiar. Fairytales and myths, these stories we all know and grew up with are even more so.
A Refuge of Tales takes everyday tropes and asks: safe for who? This is a collection of poems for anyone who has ever felt outside of the myth.
With language both sharp and lyrical, Lynne Sargent weaves a treatise on the power of stories, and how those who have been left behind can take up that power and use it to build a new, better world.
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A Report on the Afterlife of Culture
$24.95Report on the Afterlife of Culture, A