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As Morris Panych’s latest comedy opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: “These are the last few days of my childhood.” The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day’s school drill. For Iris, there remain a few more days of life in a universe that is inherently ordered, where the spirit of her departed and ritually interred goldfish can, of course, be re-incarnated in a lost and amnesiac drifter given to rhetorical questions of seemingly deep philosophical import.
Iris’s terminally depressed parents, trapped within the nostalgic desires of their own lost youth, are oblivious to how the child’s eye view of their daughter works and what it sees. They remember too well their own loss of innocence as they abandoned themselves to the existential chaos of adulthood. The middle-aged family boarder has spent years in a frustrated search for any kind of gratification, immediate or otherwise, at the Legion after a full day’s work in the fish cannery.
It is into the goldfish bowl of this dysfunctional family of lethargic piranhas, existential bottom-feeders and aggressive guppies that the audience peers with incredulity, acute recognition, hysterical laughter, and an overwhelming sense of the creative healing power of the imagination.
Cast of three women and two men.
Winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Drama.
Former Inspector Frank Foote has left the Winnipeg Police force and gone into home renovations, but after tearing down a wall on a job one day and finding the skeleton of a small female who has been imprisoned there, he finds himself following the leads to a photographer who specialized in taking photos of the recently deceased for their families.
As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her five-year-old sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse – fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain of the virus emerges, Dany careens headlong into crisis, determined to save her sister. Together with her best friend and reluctant history teacher, they must flee the city. Along the way, Dany faces a series of devastating choices: Can she make the dangerous attempt to break her aunt out of the prison-hospice? And just how much is Dany willing to sacrifice to ensure her sister and her friends survive?
Girl Minus X is a meditation on the gift that is memory and its hidden costs, pitting a fear of forgetting against a desire to erase the past.
Girls! Girls! Girls! The carnivals, the girls, and the scams — a journey back through time to the glory years of traveling adult entertainment. Many of these photos have never been seen before, and no one has published a book exclusively devoted to the women (and men) who performed in Girl Shows. Picture yourself at a carnival in the 1950s. It’s summer, and after you wander through the midway, you head towards the sideshow area. There, on stage in front of huge banners, is Tirza — The Wine Bath Girl. A crowd has already gathered, and the talker is describing the pleasures to be found inside, but only after you’ve bought your ticket. “See the beautiful Tirza, in the altogether, taking a full bath — in wine!”
Interested? Unfortunately, you can’t attend these Girl Shows anymore. The last performances occurred in the mid-1970s. But you can see 200 photos from 1900 onwards in A.W. Stencell’s book about this cultural phenomenon. And you can read about their European origins, their American developments, their heyday after World War II, and their ultimate demise in the face of men’s magazines, strip clubs, and x-rated videos.
The 2012 One Book Toronto title
Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.
Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex’s sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.
Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love.
‘The depth of her understanding … fills this book with moving scenes and striking perceptions.’
—The Globe and Mail (about Between Mountains)
‘With pitch-perfect prose, Helwig shows huge compassion and an ability to make Toronto come alive.’
—NOW
‘stellar … meticulous and poignant realism’
—Montreal Gazette
Poison? Paranoia?: this 2008 novel of love and fear is more relevant than ever
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.
Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex’s sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.
Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Encampment, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love.
A quintessential Calabrian love story.The Girls of Piazza d’Amore traces the lives of three village girls and the forces that lead them to leave home for a new life across the ocean. Set in southern Italy in the 1950s, Connie Guzzo-McParland’s short novel walks us through the piazza and the narrow alleys of her own childhood, imaginatively recreating an entire world as seen through the eyes of a young girl who accompanies her friends on their evening passeggiate to the spring water fountain and carries their love notes to the boys they love. The joys of Calabrian village life are palpable, and so are its frustrations and heartbreaks, but this is a world on the cusp of irrevocable change, as family after family is leaving. And that’s what is most heartbreaking of all.
A linguistically inventive exaltation, a wild ride down into the privacies, the here-and-goneness of girlhood.
In Girlwood, Jennifer Still’s second collection, her poems come of age: they take the dare; they cross out of sapling and into maturity’s thicket. But the poems don’t leave the girl behind, they bring her along: as sylph, as raconteur, as witness, as pure, unstoppable bravado. These songs of liberation and confinement arise from the rich and mysterious connection between mother and daughter. Here, the mother figure is as vulnerable as the daughter, caged by domestic duty, by the fear that snakes through sexuality, the longing and the repulsion that accompany mortal desire. The daughter is at once compassionate and defiant. This is the paradox at the heart of this collection. “Mother, divine me,” Jennifer Still writes, and later, “Mother, spare me.” Between these two phrases, which are both plea and command, we experience all the tangled pathways between mother and daughter, the cries of devotion and the congested laments.
Gitwaa?tk by Crystal AJ Smith is the story of a young Indigenous woman who loses her Sister-Cousin to the highway of tears and who embarks on a journey with her na?xnox to find and bring to justice to the person responsible for her Sister?s disappearance.
It?s an exploration of how grief and loss can find strength in family, community, and tradition.
“My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within.” — Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within is the first fully illustrated monograph in English on the work of the Italian Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone. Using simple materials from everyday life to unsettle the boundaries between art and nature, Penone explores the mysteries of time and our existence, our relationship with nature, and the interdependence among all organic life forms.
Featuring full-page reproductions of Penone’s work and four major essays by leading artists and critics, the volume includes an essay by the founder of the Arte Povera movement Germano Celant, which contextualizes Penone’s work within the art scene at the time, and an interview with the artist by Matthew Teitelbaum, the former director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario, providing a uniquely personal view of the work Penone has created. Rounding out the volume are essays by art critic Didier Semin and the late John Bentley Mays.
Elaine writes for anyone tired of fundraising appeals or looking to have more impact with their charitable giving dollar, using engaging dialogue to demonstrate charitable giving strategies available to Canadians today. As a financial planner, she is able to guide the reader through the maze of strategies and the tax and estate implications of each, to show how Canadians can achieve dramatic value for their charitable dollar.
The story centres on Allison, 54, who has just nursed her mom through the final stages of cancer and is now considering the meaning of life and what legacy she might leave. Attending a class reunion, she joins long-time friends — all of whom share a desire to make an impact. They address Allison’s concerns about life’s struggles and successes, and give her ideas and alternatives to make a difference through charitable giving and volunteering.
If you work hard, at home, at the office, or both, it’s hard to step out of the rush and think about what’s meaningful to you. It’s even harder to go the next step and research the financial strategies that may suit the goals that are meaningful to you. Written especially for readers who are not in the business of financial planning or fundraising, industry professionals such as insurance agents, brokers, lawyers, accountants, financial planners and professional fundraising executives will also appreciate the book as a resource for the strategies outside of their normal area of expertise or for their clients or potential donors.
Given
April brings spring surging with it, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is somehow still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change.
In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.
A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast, strange dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.