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Every spring, hundreds of tree planters migrate north to remote bush camps. Some are drawn to the fast cash, some by the scenery, and some are on the run. Rusticated from university for protesting the felling of the campus arboretum for a parking lot, sick of the noise of urban life, greenhorn Noah Abramson flees Toronto in search of a quiet place where he can become a man on his own terms. But the camp has attracted other fugitives. At first, their mutual struggle to survive the season binds them but as spring stretches into summer, and fever and fire close on the camp, their pasts catch up with them, and some scores must be settled.
Greetings from the off-kilter world of Chris Gudgeon. In his first-ever book of fiction, the bestselling author of The Naked Truth: The Untold History of Sex in Canada offers postcard glimpses into the quirky private lives of unusually twisted characters. A prim English bride honeymooning near the so-called Vodka Sea learns the hard way why it’s better not to drink the water in foreign parts.
A chess-playing doctor loses his wife to a charismatic psychologist during a sensuous group sex session masquerading as therapy. A social climbing adulterer contemplates the seduction of a middle-aged woman he once loved but who may now expose him. Personal histories rub up against present relationships. Paths cross, whether by accident or design. Polished veneers hide deeper truths.
Bitterly funny and filled with lusty, rueful, comical, calculating, and even affectionate sex, Gudgeon’s eleven cosmopolitan stories explore the chasm between loving and being loved in return. Life’s randomness is offset by dark comedy and by an eerily familiar synchronicity.
Finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Awards
Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney is a compelling study of an intriguing character – a white man who assumed a First Nations “voice” to promote his ideas and ideals to an international audience. In turn, the book raises difficult questions about identity and voice, Indigenous culture, human rights and the environment.
Ruffo draws on extensive archival research and family memories – Grey Owl lived for three years with Ruffo’s grandmother’s family in the small northern Ontario community of Biscotasing – to offer new insights about the man and his mission. With clear, direct and evocative language, Ruffo writes from Grey Owl’s own perspective as well as from the viewpoints of women he loved and men with whom he worked. The poems detail both his professional achievements and his personal failures.
Ruffo brings a deep understanding of Indigenous thought, excellent research skills and a mature craft to this collection. Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney marks a significant contribution to Indigenous writing and to Canadian literature.
Twenty-five years ago, award-winning Indigenous poet Armand Garnet Ruffo released this compelling collection to reassess the contradictory life and personality of the infamous Grey Owl. Both humorous and tragic, Grey Owl weaves archival research and reminiscence, documentary and personal family connection to offer insights into the man and his mission. In accessible, dramatic language, Ruffo raises difficult questions about voice and appropriation, Indigenous culture, human rights and the environment.
Elegies on the death of the author’s parents.
The Grey Tote, Deena Kara Shaffer’s debut, is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother. Scorning easy consolations, Shaffer’s poems are witty, epigrammatic, rhythmic, spiked with grief but ultimately dry-eyed “lessons in goodbye,” she calls them, “Sentences / cut.” In coming to grips with what to do “now that now/ has no them in it,” she has arrived at a book of poetry fiercer and truer than most written today.
For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.
This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, produces, as if by accident, invariably astonishing social, moral and ethical critical insights. Each of these writers’ particular uses of language—the most radically different in contemporary literature—consistently foregrounds and interrogates the cultural origins of “common” perceptions that too often remain hidden and undiscovered in the dictionaries we search for “common” meaning: proof positive that each person’s perception of life’s most fundamental questions and answers is almost never shared, and is always and only ever subject to translation, even among those who “share” the same language.
Here is what they talked about:
Trouble and the Self
What is Forever
Does Belonging Exist
Luck and Life
We Need Not Hold Our Experiences Against Life
Is There a Script
The Role of Mysteries in People’s Lives
Time
Free Will and Wider Wiring
Families
God &/or the Loved One and Individual Freedom
Mortality and the Jigsaw Puzzle of Replicating a Parent in a Lover
Why “Shoulds” are No Good
Delusional Relationships
The Chemistry Metaphor
Censorship and Propaganda
True Love
Fact or Fiction—Where’s the Line
Do We Invent Everything We Go Through
Is Rationality a Costume
Can We Influence Larger Book Sales
Maybe We All Want to Move to Sweden
Just for Today I’m Confused About Religion
Tax Reform
Predictability
Stage Fright
Carol, What Is It
Them
Know Thyself and the Writer’s Delusions
Wondering What about the Stars and Our Friends
Childhood Versus Later On
Real Life—Does it Really Exist
All Those Prayers—Where are They Going, Exactly
Meaninglessness
Time and Relativity
Each Day We Wake Up and Realize They’ve Given Us Another Day
Everything is Answered
The Questions in Our Lives—the Balance, and What’s Peripheral
Dogs Give Unconditional Love, Why Can’t People
Life is Difficult and We are Up to the Challenge
Personal Happiness and Destiny
Federalism—Is It Too Late to Save It
The Payoff is Always Inside Ourselves
Cultural Translation
Can We Know Beforehand
Spirituality
Loss and Grief
Is This Real Life We’re Experiencing
Jealousy
Why Aren’t People in Love with Us When We’re in Love with Them
Do We Have Freedom Outside Our Imprintings—Can We Find Reciprocal Love if Our Imprintings Prevent That from Happening
From the acclaimed author of Where Things Touch comes a rigorous interrogation of grief as an intimate register of loss, and political transformation.
In Bahar Orang’s formally innovative collection, grief emerges as neither innocent nor private but as structured by war, empire, and diaspora. As intimate relations are continually traversed through geopolitical realities, the poet-speaker sifts through the debris of language alongside the likes of Fanon, Gramsci, and Césaire.
Moving between lyric fragments and essayistic meditations, the book deftly brings personal loss into relation with longer histories of colonial and imperial violence. In doing so, it poses difficult but necessary questions about the cruelty that can exist within empathy, the pleasure of righteous outrage, the fantasy of proximity to suffering, and the ways in which love and care themselves may reproduce domination.
This unique hybrid work resists linear narrative and reveals grief as an ongoing, unresolved condition. Ultimately, Grief Theory asks what it means to witness, desire, and remain implicated in the violent world we seek to endure and to understand.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD
Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being.
A superstar boxer who rarely won a fight, Grim distinguished himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment.
In this wild and expansive novel, Michael Winkler moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908–09 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative.
Pain is often said to defy the limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain – physical and mental – is also the most familiar and universal human condition; and, perhaps, the secret source of our impulse to tell stories.
“The strangest book you are likely to read this year.” – JM Coetzee
“Grimmish meets a need I didn’t even know I had. I lurched between bursts of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler’s verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable flow of his images, the bizarre wit of the language of pugilism – and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness.” – Helen Garner
“A powerful blast of literary ingenuity and originality.” – Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip
“All the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching.” – Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
A mob enforcer is pulled back into his old life in this “terrific read” (Ken Bruen, Shamus Award–winning author of The Dramatist)
“Razor-edged prose and a sympathetic antihero lift Knowles’s no-holds-barred crime thriller . . . Readers who like their mean streets really mean will be thoroughly satisfied.” — Publishers Weekly starred review
Two years ago, Wilson made a deal: he let his old boss live in exchange for a clean slate. He’s kept up his end of the bargain since then and stayed off the grid — working on a fishing boat off the coast of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Now, many miles from the city he once escaped, a man comes calling on Wilson with a gun in his hand and a woman in his trunk. And Wilson is pulled back into his old life as a “grinder” — working under the radar to quietly find out who is responsible for a dangerous mobster’s missing nephews . . .
All bets are off and before he’s done — everyone will pay.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction
“This is the story of how you were loved,” Penelope MacLaughlin whispers to her granddaughter.
Penelope MacLaughlin marries a miller and gradually discovers he is not as she imagined. Nonetheless she remains determined to make the best of life at the lonely mill up the Gunn Brook as she struggles to build a home around her husband’s eccentricities. His increasing absence leaves Penelope to run the mill herself, providing her with a living but also destroying the people she loves most. Penelope struggles with loss and isolation, and suffers the gradual erosion of her sense of self. A series of betrayals leaves her with nothing but the mill and her determination to save her grandchildren from their disturbed father. While she can prepare her grandsons for independence, her granddaughter is too young and so receives the greater gift: the story that made them all.
Ground Rules features writing from the second decade of one of the most active micro publishers in Canada, selected from a series of hundreds of publications lovingly edited, produced and distributed by editor/publisher rob mclennan. A follow-up to Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Ground rules includes a wide range of work by Artie Gold, Mark Cochrane, Suzanne Zelazo, derek beaulieu, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Nathana‘l, Lisa Samuels, Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris, D. G. Jones, Julia Williams, Eric Folsom, Gregory Betts, Natalie Simpson, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Emily Carr, Cameron Anstee, Helen Hajnoczky, Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell, Robert Kroetsch and rob mclennan.
Colin Browne’s exciting new work Ground Water received a glowing review in The Georgia Straight (June 6-13, 2002 issue). In all map making, one begins with the representation of ‘ground’ and ‘water,’ and what grows or is constructed on these representations is rendered by a series of conventional symbols-the ‘elements of topography.’ This book of poems is an investigation of the elements of the spiritual topography of the 20th century, and a close examination of the conventional symbology passed on to the poet/map-maker by his ancestors-his father and mother, his grandparents, his aunts and uncles. It is a paralysing inheritance which is rendered here-an entire century, not begun with ‘the war to end all wars,’ but a century through which that great calamity of mechanized and mass-produced misunderstandings was perpetually reproduced.
These ancestors have abetted suffering they could never have imagined. Accessories to crimes against whole populations that made possible their pleasures and their grace, they’re humiliated and ashamed, mortified by themselves, by their indignity and complicity. Incapable of reversing the inhumanity of what they have created, they have left the traces of their deeds on the landscape, fragments of correspondence for their sons and daughters to decipher.
Within this wilderness of the 20th century, the green flame of life continually presents itself in these poems as an emergency-an emergence, a coming-out, a flower, a bloom of identity, shape and form, requiring immediate attention and action, asserting itself as mimesis, and constituting a disruption of the conventional representations of the symbolic.
Candid, poetic and forensic, Derrick Stacey Denholm’s Ground-Truthing walks the reader slowly and nimbly through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Having lived and worked for twenty-five years as both a forestry field worker and a multidisciplinary artist, Denholm brings a rare perspective to how we can work productively and participate ethically in a life that maintains respect for the wild. Ground-Truthing explores a diverse terrain of communities that are as deeply wild as they are highly civilized. Carefully negotiating the conflicting value systems of industrial forestry, the culture of resource towns, the diversity of First Nations history and tradition, the stagnancy of government policy and the “Real Work” of the rainforest, Denholm gathers the perspectives of more than 150 academics, poets, scientists, journalists, loggers, activists, local citizens and mushroom hunters. He brings together the breadth of the local opinion, personal emotion and technical work that serves to influence the ongoing industrialization of the wild and human world – which are one and the same. Local in focus, international in scope and interdisciplinary by necessity, Ground-Truthing provides a dynamic alternate voice to the mainstream cycle of North Coast writing – which generally serves to memorialize the Euro-Canadian, colonial-settler narrative. Denholm argues that First Nations’ experience and wisdom, taken with the long-standing lessons provided by the wild itself, can provide us all with the models, principles and philosophies needed to live our lives – and not just in the rainforests of the North Coast of British Columbia, but anywhere.