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All Books in this Collection

  • Hunting History

    Hunting History

    $34.95

    Hunting History

  • Hunting Piero

    Hunting Piero

    $19.95

    This novel interweaves Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo’s fifteenth-century viewpoint with the twenty-first-century reality of two young Canadian students: Agnes Vane, an art history major fascinated by di Cosimo’s multi-layered imagery, and Peter (Pinto) Dervaig, a student of philosophy passionate about preventing cruelty to animals. Both Agnes and Pinto were marginalized in their adolescence because of their unusual appearance. Agnes has slightly simian features. Pinto is a huge man with a multihued skin pigmentation.


    When Agnes, as a lonely and alienated child, discovers di Cosimo’s empathetic paintings of animals and human-animal hybrids, she feels she is looked upon gently for the first time in her life. That moment influences her decision to become an animal rights activist, a commitment that ultimately brings her both anguish and insight. Her story is echoed by chapters from di Cosimo’s perspective as he pits his solitary vision, of a golden age when animals did indeed speak, against the dictatorial grip in which Savonarola, destroyer of secular art and culture, holds the city of Florence.


    Hunting Piero is the tale of a passionate moral quest, and equally, a story of redemption and of love tested by tragic missteps and their deadly consequences

  • Hurricane Mona

    Hurricane Mona

    $18.95

    It’s not easy being green, especially for Mona, a diehard environmental activist sentenced to a year of house arrest for her topless vandalism at the Global Climate March. Exiled from her commune co-op, Mona is forced to serve her sentence back home with her well-meaning parents and annoyed younger sibling who just want to enjoy their coffee pods and Amazon packages in peace. But when Mona’s tyrannical green crusade engulfs the entire household, her family spirals into a hilarious and chaotic maelstrom of hypocrisy, guilt, and generational finger-pointing, ultimately asking themselves what’s more unbearable: an ecological collapse or each other?

    Hurricane Mona is an outrageous and arresting comedy about the collisions of Boomer complacency, Millennial disillusionment, and Gen Z apathy in the face of climate catastrophe. Complete with a giant talking frog, a psychedelic mushroom trip, and some hairy activism, Pippa Mackie’s riotous rallying cry delivers big laughs and even bigger questions about the mess we’re leaving behind and who’s left to clean it up.

  • Hurricane Pilot

    Hurricane Pilot

    $16.95

    Harry L. Gill, of Fredericton, New Brunswick, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 at the age of 18. During his short but adventure-filled career, he flew a Hurricane fighter bomber over France, England, and India and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. In 1943 his airplane was shot down over Burma, and he died in the crash.

    Hurricane Pilot captures the perspective of a young man in the middle of a war in Europe and Asia. Drawing extensively on Gill’s correspondence with his parents and his siblings, this very personal account of war shows how Gill was transformed from a small-town boy to a mature fighter pilot serving in a global war on another continent. His letters depict the enthusiasm of youth, a strong sense of humour, his plans for the future, and this continuing attachment to home.

    Hurricane Pilot is volume 10 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

  • Hurricanes

    Hurricanes

    $16.95

    In 1954 Hurricane Hazel caused such destruction around Lake Ontario that it’s a vivid memory half a century later. In 2003 Hurricane Juan so devastated the Halifax, Nova Scotia, area that complete recovery will take decades. In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina, immediately followed by Rita and Wilma, held North America and the world spellbound. In fact, 2005 was a record breaking year for tropical storms, with four Category 5 hurricanes, seven tropical storms before August 1, the strongest hurricane in the Atlantic basin, and the costliest and third deadliest hurricane in US history. Yet few people know more about hurricanes than the horror they witness in the media.

    What are hurricanes? How are they formed, and where do they get their names? What should you do if a hurricane is headed in your direction? An indispensable reference book, Hurricanes: What You Need to Know answers these questions and more by combining science with handy tips, quick facts, checklists, satellite images, photographs and stories about some of North America’s most devastating tropical storms.

  • Husk

    Husk

    $18.95

    An outlandishly funny, unambiguously bloody novel about fame, love, religion, politics, and appetite

    It is one thing to die, alone and confused, trapped with your pants down around your ankles in the filthiest bus restroom in existence. It’s quite another thing to wake up during the autopsy, attack the coroner, and flee into the wintry streets of Toronto.

    It’s not like Sheldon Funk didn’t have enough on his plate. His last audition, for the reality television series House Bingo, had gone disastrously wrong. His mother was in the late stages of dementia. His savings were depleted, his agent couldn’t care less, and his boyfriend was little more than a nice set of abs. Now, Sheldon also has to contend with decomposition, the scent of the open grave, and an unending appetite for human flesh. Plus another audition in the morning.

    For Sheldon to survive his death without literally falling apart at the seams, he has to find a way to balance family, career, and cannibalism, which would be a lot easier if he could stop eating hoboes. Husk, the story of the everyzombie.

  • Hutchison Street

    Hutchison Street

    $18.95

    With one side in Mile End and the other in Outremont, Hutchison Street is inhabited by characters from many different backgrounds, including a community of Hasidim and a writer whose newest project is a novel about the people she has lived among for thirty-nine years. She traces the life stories of an aging singer, a bag-lady who feeds birds in a back alley, an Italian widow who grows tomatoes in her front yard, a Jamaican woman who longs to dance the night away, and a young Hasidic girl who keeps a diary. A moving account of isolated individuals attempting to reach out to one another in one of Montreal’s most diverse neighbourhoods.

  • Hymn

    Hymn

    $19.00

    A journey in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body.

    Improvising on a variety of poetic forms and traversing disparate landscapes — from Belfast to the clear-cuts of Vancouver Island, from the subterranean heat of Jules Verne’s Iceland to the ventriloquism of the Alberta Rockies’ echoing eastern slopes — John Barton documents the path of the male body in the search for love in an increasingly unstable, supposedly tolerant contemporary world. Hymn, stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude.

    … though he files all forethought of the unknown life now going

    on without him, a life he confuses with his own, his life promiscuous
    however rearranged his surfaces or clean his drawers, the unclarifying

    distractions of the body portentous in his downfall, the downfall
    of his own body a matter of time, but thinking of the man who left

    the accidental man come between them, the man he may yet become
    it is impossible for him not to sing them unwashed hymns of praise.

    — from “Hymn”

  • Hypatia’s Wake

    Hypatia’s Wake

    $18.95

    This compelling new poetry collection presents Hypatia of Alexandria, the Neoplatonic philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who was murdered by Christians in the fifth century. The dearth of fact and truth about her has led to many false and fanciful representations of Hypatia. Hypatia’s Wake addresses these and the reliable truth about her life.

    The double bind, a situation in which a person is given two different messages one of which negates the other, features largely in Hypatia’s Wake. It links Hypatia’s life and example to Luce Irigaray’s philosophical theory. If you’re a woman you’re damned if you fail at philosophy, but also if you succeed at it. If we make amends to history and the river of time by waking Hypatia’s death, we wake up to her life, and the significance of our loss.

  • Hypochondria

    Hypochondria

    $24.95

    A personal and literary examination of hypochondria.

    A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria combines cultural critique, literary history, and Rees’s own experience of health anxiety to ask what we might learn from the hypochondriac’s discomforting experience of their body.


    Hypochondria
    is unashamedly capacious in its range of references, from the writings of Robert Burton, Franz Kafka and Charlotte Brontë to original yet accessible readings of theorists like Lauren Berlant and Maurice Blanchot. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne or his own hypochondriac past, Rees reveals himself to be a wry and perceptive critic, exploring the causes – and the costs – of our desire for certainty.

    An exercise in what Freud calls “evenly suspended attention,” Hypochondria demonstrates the rewards and the perils of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our everyday lives.

    “In Hypochondria, Will Rees pulls off an almost impossible balancing act. He recalls his personal history with great clarity and vulnerability, and he assembles a dazzling archive of his fellow writers and hypochondriacs: Melville, Kafka, Freud, Sartre, Didion. Hypochondria, Rees shows us, is a specific case of fantasizing about what we cannot know – we are all, in our own ways, hypochondriacs.” – Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

    Hypochondria is a beautifully written, exacting, exquisite piece of literature and an urgent intervention into a deeply necessary conversation that has languished in the shadows for far too long. This book is as clever as it is brave, and it will change and move everyone who reads it. To capture the intricacies of our relationship with illness, both individually and in our collective consciousness, is one of the most difficult things a writer can do – Will has done it perfectly. Everyone must read this book.” – Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of The Lasting Harm

    “I marvelled at this elegant and intellectually capacious book. Unmoored by its elusive subject, Rees innovates an utterly engrossing mode of inquiry that seems forged from the very material of hypochondria itself — radical doubt. And, like all good hypochondriacs, this book is many things at once: a philosophical intrigue, a meticulous catalogue of symptoms, a literature of writerly ailments, and a gripping tale of desire’s shadow. Here are hypochondria’s many indignities, but also its raptures and romance. What emerges from Rees’s ability to dwell in uncertainty is proof of doubt’s generative potential; its questions are insistent and hard-won vital signs. What if we are what we read? What if health is little more than blissful ignorance? What if we can never be sure of just how sick we really are?” – Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

    “This elegant and finely crafted essay will be enlightening not only for those who suffer from health anxieties but, more generally, for anyone confronting the problem of inhabiting the human body. Blending autobiography, history, and theory, it raises crucial questions about our embodied existence in an engaging and accessible way.” – Darian Leader, author of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression

    “‘The position of hypochondria has never been less certain,’ Will Rees writes in this extraordinary and utterly compelling new book. Part personal memoir, and part riveting history of the fateful and absorbing uncertainty that is hypochondria, this book will be an illumination for anyone who has ever wondered if they are ill.’ – Adam Phillips, author of On Giving Up

  • hypoderm

    hypoderm

    $16.95

    The idea for this book, says Weyman Chan, is simple—approach the world as metaphor, and it will come to you. Subtitled “notes to myself,” Hypoderm is a manifesto of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality that get under the poet’s skin—that remind the reader that poetry is documentation and speculation, not a sentimental fabrication of the rapture (rupture) of our “end times.”

    We live in an age of anxiety, where social order and the imagination are as alienated as they have ever been, creating our estrangement from a sane and necessary privacy the cause of which the poet locates in the anthropocentric doctrine that man has been divinely ordained to take dominion over the earth. Chan’s lines “What monster taught Adam / to see a bird and say the word” echo those of Blake; his “the name that can be named is not the real name” recall the words of Milton; his “shouldn’t the ?nal / translation of any word in any language / be silence” invoke the teachings of Buddha.

    Drawing on cosmologies as disparate as molecular biology, Chinese and Mayan celestial cycles, and the conflict of Horus and Seth in Egyptian mythology, Chan finds everywhere the recognition that: “As all prey let out / sounds of deepest obligation / when they’re caught, so / the binding surrounds.”
    Every living thing is already looking over its shoulder in its necessarily parasitic conditions for existence. It is within this dance of coordinates, as biological drives encounter mental constructs, that these poems document how micro and macro worlds collide, and speculate that just as our somatic mitochondria were once free-?oating protozoa that got inside us and adapted to our metabolism, so the earth’s green skin is being infected by the drills and dragnets of our Nietzschean will to power.

  • Hypotheticals

    Hypotheticals

    $17.95

    For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis’s lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions the linguistic roots of the hypothetical, both as they apply to the Scientific Method and its faith in certainty, and tothe word’s alternate meaning, as something that is merely ‘supposed to be true,’ and often, over time, is proved false. Under the poet’s wide-angled, open-hearted, open-minded gaze, scientific method slowly begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves and the world one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question: ‘At the heart of all matter/ is a single immutable point/ Listen, climb in, I’ll show you/ what I mean by rock.’

  • Hysteric

    Hysteric

    $20.00

    ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015

    Type Books Awards Winner

    In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn. When the writer’s aunt read her tarot cards, no predictions for her future ever appeared. This tale, an astounding feat of literary realism, shares the story of a woman who loses her identity in a man in hopes of finding love. Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Nelly Arcan manages to answer the challenges she set down for herself in her previous books.

    Praise for Hysteric:

    “She writes from a place that is both deeply embodied and highly intellectual – if someone’s womb really did end up on their brain, and that person then wrote a book, it might read something like Hysteric. English readers are lucky to have access to more of Arcan’s brains and guts, and this translation is hopefully a herald of growing appreciation for a uniquely talented and brutally brave writer.” (Montreal Review of Books)

    “Hysteric is a raw stroke of wild love that explores desire and memory, fear and love, a novel that leaves the lights on for its readers, hurts as much as it haunts, and brings a much-needed philosophy to the genre of urban literary fiction.” (The Georgia Straight)

    Praise for Nelly Arcan:

    “… With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan’s novels in translation. … Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion – and honesty – her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve’s Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan’s work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work – Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit – so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer.” (The Times Literary Supplement)

    One of the Telegraph Journal’s Most Anticipated Books of 2014

  • I (Athena)

    I (Athena)

    $23.95

    When Athena was a young girl in the 60s, she lost her hearing to a childhood fever but was misdiagnosed as “profoundly retarded” and institutionalized for thirty years. Now she’s out of the institution, awkward and bookish, and learning to integrate with mainstream society where nothing works quite like she thinks it should. Athena researches her past, trying to understand why she was institutionalized in the first place and why the people looking after her made such a huge mistake. At the same time, she tries to find a way to live with the man who was her lover in the institution, uncovering all sorts of surprises along the way.

  • I & I

    I & I

    $24.95

    Shortlisted, Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry and Dartmouth Book Award

    In the “Boogie Nights” era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back — meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. Rastafarian for “you and me,” “I & I” expresses the oneness of God and man, the oneness of two people or the distinction between body and spirit.

    In George Elliott Clarke’s hands, this existential aesthetic crystallizes in a love story of Gothic grit. The narrative gives this verse novel shape; the poetry makes it sing, straddling folk ballad, soul, and pop music, all the while moaning the blues.

  • I Am a Rose

    I Am a Rose

    $16.95

    “The poems are poignant and moving.…The poet’s vision is precocious — she had an unexpected sophistication in the way she saw the world.…” — Rosemary Sullivan

    Stacey was a superior dancer and athlete, a top student, and a friend to many. She was also a gifted poet who demonstrated an extraordinary ability to capture in words the wonder of her world.

    Stacey’s parents published her journal of poems, I Am a Rose, shortly after her death. This book of poetry served as an inspiration for the CBC/Vision TV documentary, I Am a Rose, which filmed her father’s arduous completion of Stacey’s climb up Mt. Ixta in Mexico, which had been cut short for her by a storm.

    This collection, and Stacey’s story, have become known by climbers from around the world as they read her work at a memorial set up for her before the final ascent.