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Fifteen-year-old Andrew has cool parents: his mother_s job is to discover and test electronic surveillance gear and covert law enforcement equipment; while his father is an environmental biologist and cook. What vaults Andrew and his family into action is a new guy, Brian Fiske; he shows up in their small village of Aylesworth with a very dark secret. Brian and his family are in the witness-protection program and are now in relocation. However, when the mobsters that Brian_s family have put into prison come looking for revenge and kidnap them, the adventure is on.
Armed only with their intelligence and high-tech gadgetry, Brian and Andrew must find a way to foil the kidnapers and find safety. Andrew_s instincts – along with his mother_s electronic skills and his father_s biological savvy – lead him on a suspenseful rescue mission that could end up in success or disaster. The measure of success will be in their ability to take responsibility for others and act quickly.
You could be married for over 10 years and still not know your spouse. You could think you knew everything about your dad but still he surprises you at your mother’s death bed. You think you know everyone in your small town but you’ll never know the dark secret your drinking buddy hides in his heart.With control, wit, and brilliance, Michelle Berry explores the hidden depths between individuals, families, and communities. Dysfunctional characters create tension in situations where they teeter on the edge of life. Psychological or situational twists pop readers’ eyes wide open and force them to pay attention. Berry uses rapid-fire dialogue to build tension and emotion. Despite the underlying dark tones, the stories carry life and hope, human kindness–and strangeness.Each story is a vivid snapshot of a raw moment in the lives of people at a crossroads. A married couple in the title story, “I Still Don’t Even Know You,” question the foundation of their relationship during a winter getaway. In “The Cat,” a life of endless purgatory stretches before a newly-wed husband. The wives in “Five Old Crows,” contemplate ways to pass the time ranging from murder to writing. And the title character in “Martin” drives around a boring country town with a shotgun in his car, his dissatisfaction with his empty life mounting as townspeople talk about recent mysterious murders.
“Daniel MacIvor’s plays have been labelled everything from postmodern to metatheatrical, but these are cold terms that do nothing to capture the warm, accessible soul of a writer whose honesty and compassion for both audiences and his characters is at the heart of all his work.” —Variety
Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm will be their last.
Preparing for the inevitable, they navigate the time they have left together. Marlen and Hilda have channeled their energy into improbably prophetic works of art. Hilda’s elderly father receives a longed-for visitor from his past, her sister refuses to believe the world is ending, and her teenaged nephew is missing. All the while, her daughter struggles to find her way home from Berlin with the help of an oddly familiar stranger. For everyone, there’s an unsettling feeling that this unprecedented reality is something they remember.
In this wise and funny memoir Ralph Benmergui, one of Canada’s beloved storytellers, shares his path from resident class clown and the son of Moroccan immigrants to gracing TV screens across Canada and into his third, unexpected, act in Hashpa’ah: Jewish Spiritual Direction. I Thought He Was Dead: A Spiritual Memoir is the perfect book for those looking to reinvent themselves at any time of life and Ralph Benmergui is the best possible guide for the journey.
A debut novel by an exciting new voice in Canadian literature, I Want to Die in My Boots weaves fact and fiction to tell the true-ish story of horse thief Belle Jane.
I Want to Die in My Boots is the untold story of Belle Jane, the woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattle thieving rings in the 1920s, who brilliantly broke every taboo, took the names of five different husbands, and nearly followed the tragic end of her great hero, the outlaw queen Belle Starr.
Dark and daring, meticulously researched and mostly true, I Want to Die in My Boots is a lyrical, unconventional literary novel that gives voice to the unheard in a long-forgotten world. After leaving Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted, Belle settles in Saskatchewan, before spending her final years in Penticton, reading tarot cards for strangers.
Written a century after her arrest, this fictional tribute to Belle Jane, an unsung hero in Canada’s west, is inventive yet thoughtful, a work of Prairie literary fiction that takes an edgy twist to history. I Want to Die in My Boots will appeal to readers of Annie Proulx, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Maggie O’Farrell, and to viewers of Yellowstone and The Power of the Dog.
Some people claim they would like to walk away from their lives. Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it an act of selfishness, or self-preservation?
Provocative, candid, and engaging, these intimate essays explore the implicit complexities and contradictions when personal and professional lives both complement and clash. How can she be a good mother when her literary calling requires her to be away — sometimes countries away — from her school-aged children? How does she reconcile the fact she is often more comfortable with
strangers in foreign countries than with her own kith and kin? Yet personal experiences — including travels near and far, parental dilemmas, relationship breakdowns, new love, emotional chaos, and the care taken in creating gardens – also inspire the work.
New poems from award-winning storyteller and poet Joseph Dandurand.
Prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand offers his latest poetry collection, following The Punishment and The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Building on his legacy as a skilled storyteller, Dandurand continues to write about trauma, love, grief and forgiveness. These poems are about the streets, the East Side, self-pity, spirits and Dandurand’s people, the Kwantlen. As the jury of the 2022 Latner Writers’ Trust Award wrote, “his quotidian reflections read like parables, with startling economy.” After putting this collection down, don’t be surprised to find yourself saying “thank you,” too.
Ryszard Kapuscinski was considered among the most important journalists of the 20th century. Several of his titles — including Shah of Shahs, The Emeperor, and The Soccer War — are considered part of the modern canon. What was not known, at least in the English-speaking world, is that Kapuscinski was also a poet. I Wrote Stone brings together the best of the poems from his published work, offering them for the first time in English. Kapuscinski’s is a thoughtful, philosophic verse, often aphoristic in tone and structure, and as one would expect, engaged politically, morally and viscerally with the world around him.
“Man in Scrubs” follows the story of a queer black nurse who is getting awfully tired of being put in a box. He’s queer, not gay, and he’ll tell you the difference. He’s always been an outcast, and constantly finds himself at the bottom of any and every hierarchy. With his patience waning, he confronts what it means to be an outsider, and, more importantly, what it means to take charge of one’s own identity. “Boy in Hoodie” is the story of the “Dead Cat Kid,” as he’s known by his classmates. He’s fascinated by death—curious about it in a philosophical sense—but he’s not morbid, and he didn’t kill a cat. But which is more important, the truth or perception? “Woman in Prada” centres on an attractive, middle-aged woman who enjoys the finer things in life. And now that she’s no longer a suburban housewife, she’s finally free to explore her own desires. But what if they are leading her to be with a much younger man? Can she choose to put social optics to the side and do what makes her happy for once?
In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections – the writer or the written? The thinker or the alphabet? The calligrapher or the pictograms hidden in her Chinese written characters?
Intimate jealousies between writers, wagers of courage and ambition, and histories of the colours violet and yellow are some of the subjects in the first section, “Caravan.” Struggles of mothers, fathers, and sisters (and the figures drawn in the Chinese written characters that represent them) unfold as tales of love, death, and revenge in the group of stories in the second section, “Orientalisme.” In “Scriptorium,” the third section, we find out how Bartleby’s father, a Caucasian cook specializing in Chinese cuisine, got Bartleby into writing in the first place. In the fourth series of stories, “How to Write,” we learn how Bartleby loses her I while meeting Allen Ginsberg, Alice Toklas, and a real Chinese cook who works in a fictional house of Ethel Wilson, and how Malcolm Lowry’s life came to an end. The fifth and last section, “Moccasin Box,” investigates how a Sebaldesque Bartleby is silenced by Pauline Johnson.
Taking its cue from genre-bending writers like Robert Walser and Enrique Vila-Matas, I, Bartleby cunningly challenges boundaries between fiction and reality.
Poems that reach towards the lost or the might have been.
In her debut collection, Susan Elmslie delves into the life and mental illness of the real person behind André Breton’s surrealist romance, Nadja, recovering the story of a flesh and blood woman who became a symbol for the unknowability of the feminine and the irrational side of the human psyche. Ultimately, I, Nadja is about many women as Elmslie’s lyrically astute, confident lines move into the daily world of motherhood, adolescent memories and heroines like Marie Curie and George Sand. With her great fury of a voice, Elmslie’s poems are forthright and daring, fearlessly rhapsodic, as “they sing/your shape through doorways, … sing/the whole house awake.”
I can get perfect distance between us — maybe
language is what washes the sheets eventually,
snapping on the line, telling us how neat things must be.
Like irony: a man spent eighteen years building a plane, only
to have it crash on its maiden flight, killing him completely.
Some throw themselves in to the role of the timeless lover,
believing only in their own ability to endure, endure,
and prepare for that chance meeting at an airport bar.
You look at me and I know I have blown my cover.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
from “Four Postcards”
“What range and abundance! A catalogue of trench coats, a daughter’s first hunger, the stories of George Sand, Marie Curie, and, of course, Breton’s love, the unforgettable, unknowable Nadja. Each of these poems is fully felt, finely formed, astonishingly different from the next. Susan Elmslie compels you to linger with admiration — but also to keep turning the pages, breathless for the next discovery.” — Stephanie Bolster
“If for no other reason, buy this book for the ‘I, Nadja’ poems. They are brilliant. But there is another reason — the book itself — all of it.” — P.K. Page
America lies in ruins during an age of decline, despair, and death. The year is 1975 and a radical far-left group has kidnapped a young woman from one of America’s richest families. She will later join their cause and will eventually be arrested and convicted of armed robbery. She will claim it was a “different personality” that robbed the bank.
The jury didn’t buy it, but author Brian Joseph Davis did. The important difference is: Davis thought her “different personality” was more interesting and deserved her own fake memoir.
Welcome to I, Tania, a book that uses the memoir format just enough to spin off into a crazed, bawdy, and seditious charge through pop culture, politics, and the meaning of fiction itself.
I, Tania begins by recounting the highly fictionalized true story of the rise and fall of the Symbianese Liberation Army, as it never happened. Brainwashing will never be as much fun as when Tania takes you on an armed-to-the-teeth trip through one of the strangest episodes in history while writing her memoirs in the year 2005.
Tania may have survived bank heists and open relationships, but will she be able to survive the savage world of contemporary book publishing and promotion? More than just a run-of-the-mill fake memoir, I, Tania will blast you into a million little pieces with:
Do violent debutantes have a place in political struggle? After Tania and Katie Couric’s climactic talk show, you’ll know the shocking, surprisingly funny answer.