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Gutted, Evie Christie’s powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” — a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) — it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things.
Depictions of alcoholism and sex contrast with scenes of contented domesticity; questions of faith stand in counterpoint to the harsher realities of pornography and violence. Lovers, friends, family, and strangers play an equal part in shaping these sharply barbed observations, fleshing out the typically unseen and unspoken dramas of both small town and urban existence.
From out of “an anarchy of conventional process” comes Evie Christie’s stunning, original observations — because despite the searing and sometimes controversial themes, this is essentially love poetry — the kind that will leave your “heart plundered, hands lifted, gutted.”
Meet Guy, a successful talent agent who dates models, pop stars and women he meets on the beach. He compulsively rates women’s looks on a scale from one to ten. He’s a little bit racist, in denial about his homophobia and enjoys making fun of people’s weight. His only real friend, besides his dog, recently joined a pickup artist group in order to be more like Guy.
Completely oblivious to his own lack of empathy, Guy’s greatest talent is hiding his flaws…until he meets someone who challenges him like never before. Darkly funny, Guy is a brilliant study of toxic masculinity, exposing the narcissistic thoughts of the misogynist next door.
“No one should ever work at a gas station long enough to get good at it,” observes Brendan, the narrator of the debut novel from Sean Trinder.
Brendan is 20. He’s been pumping gas for three years, working the evening shift at the CountryGas station in Winnipeg. He’s gotten good at it. Which is sad. And Brendan knows that unless something happens fast, he’ll be stuck in this rut forever, inhaling gas fumes and quietly seething at the idiot customers endlessly parading past him. Will the writing course he’s signed up for at the local university–and the older woman he meets there–be enough to get Brendan’s life back on track?
In The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You, Sean Trinder combines the profane humour of Kevin Smith with the big-hearted charm of Nick Hornby, while creating a uniquely winning character whose hard-won journey away from the gas station and into adulthood is impossible not to root for.
Nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation
All sorts of things can happen, no matter what road you take, and I never forget that. Death in particular can never be forgotten. Since Rudi’s death, I have tried to anticipate and dodge obstacles like an Olympic skier. My agile imagination glides between the little red flags with ease. Philippe’s imagination is both infnite and inflexible. It’s a dangerous combination. He stays planted on the ground while looking down over reality. Between us, we do a good job of imagining everything that could happen.
I figured I shouldn’t tell him the news: your hairdresser hanged herself in her salon.
Ana and her son, Philippe, are grieving the loss of Philippe’s father when Philippe’s hairstylist, Kimi, dies in an apparent suicide. Driven by a force she doesn’tunderstand, Ana starts digging into Kimi’s past in Guyana in 1978, which leads to nested tales of north and south, past and present, and to the Jonestown Massacre. A stunning translation of a masterpiece by one of Quebec’s most important novelists.
You know their name, you know their music, but do you know their story? Everyone’s favourite blood spewing alien band return to comics in an all new 96 page graphic novel.
The Master is at it again in a fierce battle against Cardinal Syn. To get into the Master’s good graces, the Destructo brothers have trapped GWAR in order to interrogate them to find the key to destroying Cardinal Syn once and for all. Will Sawborg and Bozo Destructo get the answers they need? Can GWAR escape their clutches? Will Cardinal Syn destroy them all? And what really happened when GWAR were banished to earth? All will be revealed in GWAR: The Enormogantic Fail, a new 96 page graphic novel from legendary rock band GWAR and Renegade Arts Entertainment.
Written by Matt Maguire and Matt Miner, with art by some of the greatest comic creators this side of Flab Quarv 7, hand-picked by GWAR themselves, including Matt Maguire, Liana Kangas, Lukasz Kowalczuk, Matt Lejeune, Katie Longua, Jeff Martin, Kelly Williams and Josh Jensen.
A life story sure to inspire a new movement of self-discovery and soul-searching for years to come. A story that captures a life richly lived, celebrating fantasy, passion and the ideals that lie within our soul. Who is to say that the outer stories of our lives are more important than the images that haunt our imagination? What if memoir could capture the vital pulse of our inner lives and track the mysterious affinities and longings we so often feel?
From earliest childhood Marlene Schiwy was enthralled by colourful gypsies that filled her imagination and fantasy. As a young woman she created skirts with laces, embroideries, and beadwork that expressed the darkly shimmering mystery of those gypsies and wondered why they kept appearing in her dreams.
Gypsy Fugue invites readers on a journey they will never forget. The author travels to Rajasthan, the original home of the Roma. In France, she joins thousands of Gypsies in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer during the annual Roma gathering to honour their patron Saint Sara. She embarks on her own Camino pilgrimage in Spain, birthplace of flamenco and deep song, then faces her mother’s shocking, wrongful death just days after her return. The music of Bach, the psychology of Jung, folktales, poetry, and alchemy keep her company as she meanders through a gypsy territory rich in colour, music, and dance. Running through the book is the scarlet thread of Marlene’s gypsy dreams.
This book celebrates fantasy, yearning, and the strange unbidden passions that lie inside our souls. As we explore this gypsy landscape, what opens before us is a whole new way of imagining our lives.
Raine, unable to respond emotionally when her mother dies, finds herself at this group home, in a community that has little tolerance for its newest residents. The ensuing battle—over whether the group home stays or not—allows Raine to re-awaken her emotions through rage, and a political will she didn’t know existed in her.
The history of the Montreal Canadiens is not just a story about hockey. It’s also the story of how hockey’s most legendary team has always skated hand-in-hand with its home province of Quebec. Brendan Kelly takes a fresh look at the ups and downs of the Habs since the heyday of the “Flying Frenchmen” in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s and shows how the history of the team mirrors the tumultuous changes in Quebec over the past decades.
Kelly talks to former Canadiens greats like Serge Savard and Bob Gainey, journalists, politicians, filmmakers and even to Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen, maybe the Canadiens’ most famous fan?and they tell the tale of a team and its unique bond with its local fans.
The glory years of the Habs in the ’70s reflected the exciting times in Quebec back then. In the ’80s, the team and all of Quebec struggled to regain that former glory. However, in the past 25 years, both the team and Quebec have grappled to find their identity. One conclusion is that when the team’s roster was at its most Québécois it had its greatest success on the ice. Since Montreal’s last Quebec superstar, Patrick Roy, was unceremoniously booted out of town, the franchise has failed to win a Stanley Cup and has rarely been amongst the NHL’s elite squads.
Everything changed for the Habs in 1995 when Serge Savard was fired as general manager and Roy was traded to the Colorado Avalanche?just as everything changed for Quebec that year with the razor-thin loss for the Yes side in the second referendum. Thirty years later, Stanley Cups and referendums are a distant memory for Quebecers.
The Canadiens may no longer be the “Flying Frenchmen” winning Cups nearly every year but the ties that bind the team to the people remain as strong as ever.
Jen Currin’s acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in her new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new territory. These poems push life’s barely hidden strangeness into the light, and present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event. In Hagiography, mind and sense and the world they move through are interwoven to create a mysterious, familiar, vexing and continuously fascinating human drama.
There are no saints in Hagiography, but there are many curious characters looking for spiritual truth. Hagiography is populated by seekers: ghosts, spiders, sisters, pilgrims, children, tigers, therapists, witches, grandfathers and birds. Hagiography starts with death and ends with birth. In between, life after life.
‘Hagiography is a delight for the reader’s heart and mind – hagios, meaning sacred, plus graphein, to write. One lovely poem after another guides us through what holds us like a light.’ – Robin Blaser
‘Currin’s language is not so much surreal as it is devoted to the strangeness of what really happens to bodies and selves in the world … this book is a conversionnarrative … it is a story of how we believe language can change and how we believe change can speak.’
– Aaron McCollough, author of Little Ease and Double Venus
Well into his forties, Derrick Rowe finds himself chasing stray women and stealing cash from the bookstore he manages. Having decided it’s time to stop spinning his wheels, he’s recently turned to robbing banks. Meanwhile, he bails his friend Jack Lofton out of jail, a burly fellow in an alcoholic free-fall of his own. Rowe soon enlists both Lofton and a tough young clerk at the bookstore in another heist, setting the stage for an armed bank robbery, a drive-by shooting, and further complications for all. Told from different perspectives in Clark’s signature clear, concise prose, Hair-Trigger follows the various trails and exploits that lead to a violent climax involving Rowe, Lofton, the police, and several gangsters.
Two nursing home residents, both in their eighties, meet and fall in love, rekindling what might have been a wartime romance.
Had they previously met somewhere else under different circumstances? Why is their love so troubling for their children? Indeed, the light at dusk is sometimes warmer and more enveloping than that of the midday sun. Characters navigate between being and appearance, between cowardice and dissoluteness. The award-winning author of Possible Worlds brings us this poetic and moving meditation on identity, aging, and the nature of memory. What shines through when memory fades away?
“Sick for the language nan speaks,” Robin Durnford’s poems pursue the “dervish verbs” of a torquey local idiom, their punchy rhythms and visceral imagery invoking a sort of barbaric yawp for Newfoundland’s south coast. Whether she’s writing of childbirth, family lore or teenage shenanigans, her work is rooted, her “tongue still twists / in the deserted weeds of barren banks / for recitations, caribou, heroic deeds, and blessèd / fishing coast I cannot leave.”
The world of Dave Paddon’s recitations is quirky, riotously funny, and utterly unique; a place of tall tales and plain foolishness, where fog is so thick you can use it for cannonballs, and a polar bear hijacks a bingo tournament. Berry pickers turn combatants and the result is a bay full of jam; a local handyman turns doctor and uses the spare parts in his shed to patch up his neighbours.
Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True brings together thirteen recitations long-loved by Paddon’s many local fans. Great for older kids and grown-ups alike, this is a wonderful cross-over book. Paddon has been called Newfoundland and Labrador’s Robert Service, and for good reason. His recitations are non-stop fun, fully engaging the verve and tang of the province’s rich language. (The book has a glossary at the back for those from up-along.) These were written to be recited, and readers will surely find themselves reading aloud to family and friends.Duncan Major’s illustrations capture the energy and wit of the recitations. While this is Major’s first trade publication, he and Paddon have collaborated on several letterpress chapbooks featuring Paddon’s recitations and Major’s artwork; they are a perfect pairing.