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Winner of the Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize
Always willing to take aesthetic and artistic risks, Stuart Ross is the author of some of Canada’s most daring, and also most rewarding, poetry. Long celebrated for his surreal narratives and humorous wordplay, here Ross focuses more intensely on intimate subject matter?investigating the often complex, often absurd, but always powerful connections between loved ones. The care and delicacy with which he renders these portraits of family members, friends, mentors?and even himself?is nothing short of arresting. And readers?both those familiar with his work and those new to it?will admire the dexterity with which he juxtaposes such pieces with more audacious inventions.
This fast-paced spy novel featured Winston Spencer, a one-legged, ex-school teacher tricked by circumstances and the SIS into acting as “keeper” for a chess-crazed KGB defector. A Spy in My House is a cold-war spy novel set in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick.
Former bookseller Richard King has created two memorable characters in his mystery novel, A Stab at Life.. Annie Linton, RN, is a nurse in the Emergency Department of the Gursky Memorial Hospital in Montreal and Gilles Bellechasse, a detective in the Major Crimes Division of the Montreal Police Force. Gilles is in charge of investigating a series of murders that have occurred in a park and the area surrounding the Gursky Memorial located in the Cote-des-Neiges area of the city. Suspects include members of a vigilante group devoted to getting drug dealers out of the park, a jealous husband, a mysterious woman of whom nude drawings turn up in one of the murder victim?s bedroom, and competing drug dealers. Annie?s excellent diagnostic skill play a critical role in solving the crime.
King?s mysteries are reminiscent of the originators of the mystery genre, writers such as Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and modern writers such as Robert Goldsborough and Louise Penny. Margaret Cannon said of King in the Globe & Mail: ??he has talent, wit and Montreal.? A Stab at Life. will delight fans of murder mysteries and have them waiting impatiently for the next novel in the series.
In A Step in the Right Direction, Sondergaard continues a line of thought he first developed in Bees Die Sleeping and continued in Vinci, Later (which was published in English in 2005). This new collection is “about” walking. It contains four major cohesive songs or cantos, each of which explores the act of walking from a different point of view: as a social activity, as an act of love, as a condition for thought, and as inspiration for art.
His poems make you forget what poetry is. Bernlef’s secret is in the way he looks at things. His attention to the ordinary, to the marginal, the so-called extra literary has not only enlarged the realm of the poetic but challenges the hierarchies and preconceived notions about what is or is not considered literary. — Dutch critic Hans Kloos
A Stone In My Pocket
When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing – through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall – that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours – Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for. As Shiloh becomes involved with an undercurrent of teenagers who frequent the grounds of the ruined asylum, her rebellion and grief push her towards choices she can never take back.
With evocative, lyrical prose reminiscent of Emily Ruskovich and Marilynne Robinson, A Story Can Be Told About Pain is a profound meditation on loss and survival, a novel that reminds us why we tell each other stories-to revel in the beauty of language, to find solace, and to boldly confront the truth in order to heal .
Two women tell the story of the shocking act of violence that transforms both their lives.
Carol and Amy haven’t seen each other for decades — not since they met one fateful summer in 1962 — but the death of a very old woman named Hattie reignites long smouldering emotions. What exactly happened to turn a summer idyll into a nightmare?
The first voice we hear in A Study in Red is Amy, talking as if she were the main character in a film noir. Then Carol picks up the narrative like a detective determined to use reason to examine the past. But the past beguiles her and she sinks into her memories of being thirteen, when she was Hattie’s guest at her summer place and the enigmatic romance writer held her in thrall.
Amy and Carol think they can understand the violence that took place beside Hattie’s swimming pool, but they both get crucial details wrong, and because of that, the mystery and their attempts to solve it have repercussions neither could have foreseen.
A literary mystery and an exploration of the nature of memory, this novel is also a study of the red emotions: lust, anger, jealousy, and not least, love.
A Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things – always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught in the sky.
I REFUSE to accept
the spine’s dictated script
which at the precise moment
lets itself dissolve, lets itself be inserted
as a footnote of terror in the great law
that has condemned us to carry
the quake’s loosening when the alibi doesn’t hold
and the body surrenders itself
when dawn cleans up
among the stars
Gernes has called poetry “a resistance movement”, explaining “A poem gives us the possibility of hearing our own voices. While the media offer us the world in small pieces, which are experienced as chaos, poetry seeks connections”.
2022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 30TH ANNUAL HAMILTON LITERARY FICTION AWARD
A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture
Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.
Soon Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently.
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.
“The guy knows what he’s doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you.” – Zadie Smith, author of NW
“A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects.” – Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist
“Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill’s A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death.” –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction
“Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion‘s sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read.” –Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square
“A writer of striking talent and originality.” – Daily Mail on The Mysteries
“McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live.” – Observer on The Mysteries
Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian’s, student’s, and teacher’s wishes. Each book contains clear information on a major Canadian novel. Attractively produced, they contain a chronology of the author’s life, information on the importance of the book and its critical reception, an in-depth reading of the text, and a selected list of works cited. This volume examines Wacousta by John Richardson.
A Tale of Two Divas tells the story of two Canadian singers who began as soloists in church choirs, but eventually moved on to spectacular careers. Soprano Jean Forsyth and contralto Edith Miller knew each other well. They met when nineteen-year-old Edith studied vocal music with Jean, almost twenty-five years her senior, in Winnipeg in 1894. After that their paths crisscrossed. This tale of two voices contrasts the ways in which Jean and Edith achieved success. Edith Miller’s path was clear and committed. An only child from Portage la Prairie when there were only about 700 citizens, she forged through to the very top in England, singing in the Proms, at the Festival of Empire to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911, and at Covent Garden before marrying a baronet. Jean Forsyth never married and was drawn to many other interests. What might have been a vocal success story like Edith’s was diluted by the compassion for animals that led her to the founding of the Winnipeg Humane Society, her support of various charities, her dabblings as a actress, her journalism, her utter dedication to the many vocal students she launched on careers of their own, and her fulsome enjoyment of many social events.
Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems.
“Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Recently Microsoft released the hit video game Maximo Cortés: Kitchen Gangsta. You’ve seen him on television. You’ve bought his bestselling cookbooks. Now for a limited engagement … it’s the Demon Chef, the Madman of the Kitchen, the Grand Master of Imperial Cuisine … Chef Maximo Cortés.”
The premise of the show is a once-in-a-lifetime cooking demonstration by Chef Maximo Cortés, the renowned inventor of his signature-style “Imperial Cuisine.” The audience excitedly awaits Chef Maximo’s arrival, relaxing with cocktails and complimentary hors d’oeuvres served to their seats. Suddenly their complacency is broken when Maximo’s amusing assistant, Jovanni, appears onstage. The celebrity chef in unavailable, but no worries: Jovanni, too, is an expert at preparing the traditional Filipino dish Rellenong Bangus (Stuffed Milkfish), and the audience follows along on a journey filled with humorous banter and a silky milkfish, sharp chef’s knife in Jovanni’s hand. As he cooks, he deconstructs the dish in humorous and surprising ways, serving up opinions on the European colonization of Asia, the state of modern agriculture, the ethics of food distribution and consumption – only a few of the ideas sampled in this engaging performance piece. When the actual fish dish is cooked and ready to eat, audience members are given tasting plates and even more food for thought. A Taste of Empire is truly a feast for the mind and palate. We call it “Iron Chef meets Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Bon appetit!
Cast of 1 man.
A Teatro Trilogy is three plays, written by Stewart Lemoine for his company Teatro la Quindicina. Each play, "Shockers Delight!", "Pith!", and "The Margin of the Sky" respond to the question: Well . . . what if THIS happened?
A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because “There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen… . In that sense, all art is fake… ”
The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of articles paeans, really – to Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, Nellie McClung, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, and others. Here, as friend and editor Karl Siegler states in his Foreword, “we encounter memory-not as a form of nostalgia for a bygone golden age of a romanticised pastoral arcadia … but as an historical record of who did what when, and to what end, throughout the counterculture revolution that shaped the lives of Jamie Reid and his companions over the past six decades.”