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The emotional unravelling of a mind, body and soul — a remarkably new and original take on surviving the Holocaust three generations later. Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation. When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped. Her body, which had always felt weighed down by unknown hurt, suddenly suffered from chronic health conditions, and her heart felt cleaved in two. Her grief was so large it seemed to encompass more than her own lifetime, and she became determined to find out why. Sicherman grew up reading Anne Frank and watching Schindler’s List with almost no knowledge of the Holocaust’s impact on her specific family. Though most of her ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust, Sicherman’s grandparents didn’t talk about their trauma and her mother grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia completely unaware she was even Jewish. Now a mother herself, Sicherman uses vignettes, epistolary style, and other unconventional forms to explore the intergenerational transmission of trauma, about the fact that genes can be altered and carry memories, which are then passed down-a genetic imprinting. With astounding grace and strength, Sicherman weaves together a story that not only honours her ancestors but offers the truth to the next generation and her now nine-year-old son. A testimony of the connections between mind and body, the past and the present, Imprint is devastatingly beautiful-ultimately a story of love and survival.
An opera diva, Patricia, (almost 50) meets her Waterloo singing Salomé at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. In an impromptu get-together in her Nuns’ Island penthouse, on the afternoon of her return from Europe, her mother, a popular Montreal stage and television actress (pushing 70), and her idealistic committed-to-new-work daughter (pushing 30) goad her: What is the sense of an international career if your art doesn’t contribute to change (or at least to wide-spread pleasure and inspiration) in the society you live in? An international opera star lives in hotel rooms around the world, so what is the meaning (and the impact) of her art, and on what, or who’s society? Is Patricia right in thinking that in this age of globalization an artist who chooses to stay home is doomed to mediocrity? These questions, this tri-generational drama, are framed by the diva’s gay pianist who packs his bags and comes running to accompany her, whenever and wherever she calls.
Like all of Tremblay’s plays, Impromptu on Nuns’ Island is a multi-layered tour-de-force about art, life and politics from a matchless writer of tragicomic women. Grounded in the myth of the eternal return, the universal and chthonic story of the triple goddess and her androgynous male consort, this impromptu also interrogates the evolution of the role of the artist in Quebec’s increasingly distinct culture and society.
Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Jr., the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk), which plays on the television running in the novel’s background, gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists – as revealed in Alice’s mysterious, posthumous last novel, A Pure Heart. Bit by bit, as we move closer to the novel’s centre, its narrators lose reliability; their discourses and pretenses become more and more confused, fragmentary, and misleading. Good intentions become corrupted and appearances prove to be deceiving. Impurity’s conclusion is as gripping as it
is asphyxiating. After his masterpieces The Orange Grove and The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay, one of Québec’s most accomplished novelists and playwrights of the last two decades, offers his readers a riveting mystery, a self-reflective enigma whose decoding places on trial the
literary form itself.
A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, Impurity weaves a fascinating web of interlocking narratives in an epistolary puzzle connecting forms with voices, and voices with revelations.
When Frankie’s dad dies, her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave. Will, professional photographer, long-estranged brother-in-law to Ava, and uncle to Frankie, lives rent-free on the farm and isn’t eager to give up his space. While mother and daughter face the challenges of starting over and grieving, they also need to figure out how to weave a new man into the picture. Soon, though, Frankie finds in Will someone to look up to and trust during her time of emotional upheaval, and Ava discovers a companion who pushes her to grow and helps her to discover her potential. In their journey the group thread together a new understanding of family, and a tender love story unfolds. In a Blue Moon combines dance, recollection, photography, and heartfelt emotion to examine three characters who each grieve very differently. Love, compassion, and companionship are discovered and shared as each member of the trio finds peace in their new reality, in their own way.
“With strong writing and characters, In a Blue Moon is a complex, authentic story about three people learning how to live with each other after such a profound loss.”
– Tessa Perkins, The Peak
Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2010
From the very first piece in this collection, the title poem “In a Boston Night,” Sasenarine Persaud signals a return to the passionate and sensuous.
Boston, the focal point, is like a needle hole though which the poet deftly threads his reflections about places, events, and histories: a conflict between Anglo- and Franco-Canadians at a Brookline art exhibition; Georgetown and Mumbai; Tampa and Toronto; the “Boston Tea Party” as a symbol of resistance to American English, subtly underlined by the description of a Walcott reading in an overflowing university hall.
This is a fine, multilayered collection of poems by an important and accomplished contemporary poet.
In a Mist explores longing, loss and isolation. This debut collection of short stories examines the lives of socially isolated individuals with obsessive interests and desires. These lonely protagonists find solace in emotionally evocative forms of cultural expression such as early jazz, classic cinema and renaissance motets. The transcendent potential of music is a recurring theme of this collection.
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is an exploratory journey that examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. Enunciated from both a human perspective and from the imagined voices of the plants and animals that actually live in the garden itself, this collection also explores conceptual and visual articulations that function to disrupt our assumptions about poetry, meaning, and language. Woven through these dialectical conversations is a dominant elegiac thread that explores the territory of grief while simultaneously grappling with the possibilities for hope against the limits of language. The book concludes with a meditative essay or “Author’s Notes” that describe the processes and approaches employed and also work to pose questions that maintain the integrity of the entire manuscript’s fluidity, experimental form, and openness.
The mouth she drew with her red lip-liner was bigger and more shapely than her own, and it made me think, not for the first time, how wonderful life would be if I could draw a better me.
Twelve-year-old Jasper is watching his mother, a sometime model named Corinne, prepare herself for what he does not realize will become an unannounced escape from the life they share in Winnipeg. A short trip out of the city turns into what Corinne calls a summer of adventure, as they drive with no set destination across the prairies. Dean, the generous story-telling boyfriend Corinne is determined to flee, vanishes in the dust rising behind her Corvair – the last and biggest gift he gave her. As Jasper and his mother settle briefly in Edmonton, and then flee again for Vancouver, Jasper feels like an exile from a life in Winnipeg that offered stability, a place to find himself, and – in Dean – a substitute for the father he never knew.
In a Wide Country is the moving story of a mother and son traveling together, but in different directions, across western Canada in the summer of 1961. It’s about two people living in a web of stories, spun from their experiences but also from things they’ve heard, imagined, or misunderstood. In this debut novel by Robert Everett-Green, stories blend into each other from many sources: family anecdotes, movies, newspapers and tales that Corinne improvises at her makeup table.
In a Wide Country is about growing up along the soft border between truth and illusion, and a boy’s awakening from a childhood ruled by stories more satisfying than true.
Jason Pierce, a 31 year old Canadian half-Native man, is packing up his urban apartment to leave it all behind for his romanticized vision of a return to life on the reserve where he grew up. As he’s leaving, he is paid an unexpected visit by a 34 year old American man, Harry Deiter, who awkwardly introduces himself as Jason’s half-brother. What Harry wants from Jason is bizarre: to be compatibility-tested for a possible kidney donation to their dying non-Native father, a man Jason has no memory of ever meeting and who, after a brief and secret affair, abandoned Jason’s mother when he was two months old.
Both Jason and Harry are about to have their most fundamental and sustaining beliefs shaken to the core by their respective relationships to the biological father they inadvertently share. Harry, the naïve historical positivist, buoyed up by a lifetime of relative privilege as a member of the dominant imperial culture, encounters in Jason the anger and bitter resistance of the exploited and abandoned colonial, in terms of both Jason’s Native and his Canadian heritage and identity.
Embroiled in the irreconcilable absurdity of their dilemma, Harry is forced to acknowledge that the father he has loved and respected all his life has concealed from his American family his capacity for an absent, heartless cruelty. Jason, on the other hand, must wrestle with the possibility that the man who so thoughtlessly exploited and abandoned his Canadian Native mother and their son may in fact have the capacity to be a loving and present husband and father.
This play raises powerful questions that transcend issues of culture, morality and history—they cut to the ethical quick of what it means to be human in a chaotic world stripped of the comfortable security of identity politics.
Four seasons after her husband Tom’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish, not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She emerges to give him her husband’s parka – strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.
What is the stranger’s connection to her geologist husband, kidnapped more than a year before by leftist guerrillas in Colombia? How does this slyly seductive young stranger happen to show up at her home in rural Ontario, thousands of miles away? He seems to know more about Colette than he should, and as he slowly insinuates himself into her life, Colette’s attentive sister, Evelyn, and her helpful
neighbour Bill become increasingly alarmed.
Part mystery, part moving story of vanished love, In Absentia explores the notion of disappearance, articulated in very personal terms. Through the tough, time-shifting action of the play, Colette reflects on her marriage and past love, offering rich associative memories while also uncovering the hidden and inaccessible – that which is made to disappear from view.
Guilt and grief, infidelity and infertility, loss and longing are the deeper subjects Panych explores here. At the same time, the play examines the desire to make connections in life – thoughts to deeds, intentions to outcomes – in scenes often enlivened by the playwright’s trademark humour.
Cast of 3 men and 2 women.
In In and Down, Michael and Stephen are young brothers growing up with no female influence in their lives. Through their father’s emotional absence and abuse, they come to believe women do not truly exist. One of the boys draws into himself, looking for answers to the confusion in his life, and throughout this descent, he experiences his past as though through a distorted carnival mirror. When he emerges from his inner journey, he is forced to confront a secret that has been buried deep inside for over thirty years.
In Another Country
This selection of David Constantine’?s best short fiction, named among Kirkus Reviews? Best Story Collections of 2015, spans the author’s remarkable 30-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare but intensely evocative dialogue, and their fearless exposures of the heart in moments of defiance, change, resistance, flight, isolation, and redemption, these stories demonstrate Constantine’s timeless appeal. Now completely sold out of its hardcover run, this attractively priced paperback edition will appeal to every lover of great literature.
A young Croatian woman travels to Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, where she meets an angel and witnesses a miracle. Twenty years later, after living in a cloistered convent, she travels to Rome where her habit of prayer transforms the lives of seven strangers. Their stories intertwine and connect in this portrayal of several Roman churches, the art of Bernini, Caravaggio, and Borromini, and Rome’s rich architectural history.
In Care is about a mother’s quest to get her children out of foster care. Janice Fisher has not had an easy life. She worked the streets as a teenager, was addicted to cocaine, and had her first daughter taken from her when she was just 15. But she’s since turned her life around, and is a good mother to three happy girls — until a false accusation gets them apprehended by foster care. Now, Janice is trapped in the system like a butterfly in a spider’s web: the more she struggles to get out, the more stuck she gets. In Care is both an indictment of the racism that’s inherent in our system and a tribute to the strength people as disadvantaged as Janice must have in order to survive.