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In June of 1959, 12-year old Lynne Harper was found raped and strangled in a farm woodlot near Clinton, Ontario. A few months later her classmate, 14-year old Steven Truscott, was convicted of the murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging.
Truscott always maintained his innocence. As the youngest person ever sentenced to death in Canada, his case was a major impetus for the abolishment of capital punishment in this country, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1960. In 2007, after a review of more than 250 pieces of new evidence, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that TruscottÕs conviction had been a miscarriage of justice, and he was acquitted.
In this incisive and emotionally-taut dramatization of the case, Beverley Cooper recreates the world of Steven Truscott and his friends. Sarah, a young farm girl, is our guide to life bounded by small town hangouts, organized sports, the local air force base, school. And then suddenly that world twists into a nightmare of grief, fear, police questioning, rumour and innuendo. With finely-calibrated tension, Cooper leads the audience through the case afresh and sheds light on the human cost of what is now considered to be CanadaÕs most notorious wrongful conviction.
In the year 1907, all of Brampton is present at the sod-turning ceremony for the Carnegie Library. At the end of the event, the crowd rises as one to walk to the Presbyterian Church for a consecration service… Everyone except Jessie Stephens and her family. Her father will not allow them to enter the Presbyterian Church.
No one will tell young Jessie the reason, but she learns that it has something to do with her grandfather Jesse Brady, who built it. As she seeks to solve that mystery over many years, Jessie slowly begins to learn the history of the town in which she lives. Her tales of everyday life in small town Ontario combine to craft a vivid portrait of a life and a family that are, upon closer inspection, anything but ordinary.
These four plays – White Mice, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That’s Bad and Over – written by Darren O’Donnell for his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct.
Inoculations documents O’Donnell’s progress through the past decade, from the first presentation of Over in 1993 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb! festival to 2000’s highly acclaimed, Dora-winning presentation of White Mice at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille. Covering subjects as diverse as racism and the light spectrum, these plays are provocative, innovative and riotously funny – as entertaining to experience on paper as on stage.
Shortlisted for Best Trade Fiction at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn’t expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer, the mysterious tabloid that is airing her hometown’s dirty laundry. Alongside stories of high school rivalries and truck-bed love affairs, disturbing revelations about Amiah’s past and present are selling papers and fuelling small-town gossip. As the stakes get higher, Amiah must either expose the twisted truth behind The Inquirer or watch her life fall apart again.Jaclyn Dawn’s debut novel provides an incisive look at the lingering consequences of past relationships and the price of both staying silent and speaking up.
Wave goodbye to the American dream.
Just a heartbeat into the future, America is being dragged to its knees by social unrest and economic inequality. The furious pace of technological advancement has made medicine capable of near-miracles but has also enabled the widespread displacement of workers by automated systems. As unemployment and poverty levels rise to dangerous heights, those with fortunes to lose are pitted against those with nothing left. The threat of rebellion looms greater every day.
When a chance meeting in a Washington, D.C., slum leads journalist Richard LaPointe to a heinous discovery, he and his wife, internationally respected physician and medical technologist Allie MacKay, start down a path that exposes just how far those in power will go to protect themselves from the impending crisis. When their daughter, Skyie, an online video activist sensation, gets involved after pulling off a spectacular protest stunt, they are all plunged into a world in which no one is safe.
What they find behind the curtain is not an America made great again. It is an empire in ruin.
This anthology of prairie poetry is retrospective and gathering, meant to bring together those who have long been committed to poetry and to the prairies. The poems range from anecdote to experiment, minute recording to extravagant invention, and the poets– all distinguished writers who have been anthologized, studied, interviewed– are as likely to explore structures of knowing as details of landscape. Inscriptions is a necessary and important entry into the strangely known and wildly unknown terrain that is prairie poetry.
Between 1986 and 1991, nearly ten million people a week watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the critically acclaimed and widely successful children’s program broadcast on CBS. Now, on the 25th anniversary of the show, the complete behind-the-scenes story is being told for the first time by those who experienced it.
Complete with an episode guide, biographical information about the cast and key members of the show’s creative team, never-before-told anecdotes, and previously unpublished photos, Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse takes the first in-depth look behind the program TV Guide recently cited as one of the top ten cult classics of all time.
Paul Reubens (as Pee-wee Herman) has been making a comeback since August 2010, appearing on Saturday Night Live, The View, The Jimmy Kimmel Show, Conan, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He starred in a successful stage revival of his live show in January and February of 2010, and it hit Broadway later that year. It’s been turned into a special on HBO. His public Twitter and Facebook accounts boast over one million fans and followers.
Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse is the first comprehensive look at this amazingly successful (and still revered) children’s program. Pee-wee Herman fans have been energized recently by the character’s re-emerging presence. From casual fans to devout followers, everyone will be interested in taking a look Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning.
In Rosalind Goldsmith’s remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins.
Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers.
In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.
National Bestseller
“Inside the Montreal Mafia is an entertaining, illuminating, and often sobering look at the downfall of the Rizzuto crime family … Highly readable and engaging.” — Montreal Review of Books
A groundbreaking, exclusive inside look at the North American Mafia and the Rizzuto family
For the first time in Canadian history, a high-ranking mafioso agreed to break the code of omertà by talking to journalists. From October 2014 to October 2019, Félix Séguin and Eric Thibault held multiple secret meetings with Andrew Scoppa, getting an exclusive inside look at the inner workings of the North American Mafia. This book is the culmination of their perilous investigation. It sheds light on the life — and death — of one of the most influential organized crime figures in recent years.
At exactly 2 p.m., there was a knock at the door. It was him: the source every journalist dreamed of having. The short man was armed and placed his gun on a table.
“Are you impressed?” he asked with a broad grin.
“Yes. Very much.”
Before me was Andrew Scoppa, close confidant of the late mafia boss Vito Rizzuto, international heroin trafficker and cold-blooded killer.
Longlisted for the Magpie Award for Poetry
Inspired by contemporary English language haiku, accomplished poet, Jude Neale, explores ordinary objects through both poetry and photography in her new collection, Inside the Pearl. These photos and haiku-like poems capture moments and memories – recording and archiving, the history and treasures of Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, Canada. The images range from colourful household items to grainy, black and white snapshots of times past, reminders of a most difficult period in Japanese Canadian history that still resonate today.
For anyone who’s ever wished the American president’s name was Bartlet … Since bursting onto the airwaves in 1999, The West Wing has emerged as one of North America’s favourite TV shows — and for good reason. Through its snappy dialogue, Washington-insider references and stellar acting, the show, produced and written by Aaron Sorkin of The American President and A Few Good Men fame, looks at U.S. politics like no other TV series has before.
As a testament to the show’s success, it copped nine Emmy Awards — an all-time record — in September 2000. Its all-star cast, which includes Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe, Alison Janney, and John Spencer, is regularly praised in the press, and the second-season-opener, “Who Shot President Bartlet,” aired to record ratings in the fall of 2000.
In Inside the West Wing, author Paul Challen takes a detailed look at this hugely popular series: how it’s put together, what ideas and political themes drive its plots, and ultimately, why it’s so popular. Through in-depth interviews, commentary from political and entertainment-industry observers, plus extensive searches of the numerous official and un-official show Web sites available in cyberspace, Challen provides a comprehensive look inside the show for die-hard fans and casual watchers alike. To round out the package, Inside the West Wing also contains actor profiles, and an episode-by-episode guide to the first two seasons.
For fans of Ducks, Newburyport and Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, a day-in-the-life of a plumber whose troubles are all coming to a head.
In an addictive, interior-monologue lyric novel, we meet Joseph. Back on the job after a long leave, he’s not at all sure he’ll make it through the day.
Bad thoughts keep creeping in. He believes that his son, suffering from a condition in which he believes someone close to him has been replaced by an imposter, has tried to kill his wife. And that he’ll try again. And that his wife is planning to leave him.
Meanwhile, he’s fixing a sink for his wife’s friend.
Insignificance unfurls over the course of a single day. Placing the reader inside the head of the struggling Joseph, it works double time, as a portrait of the uncertainty and awkwardness of one vulnerable man and his relationship with the world, and also as a tense, emotional, and gripping drama.
In this deeply human and highly inventive story, we have a novel that portrays the thoughts of one working man on his own terms, without artifice or condescension. James Clammer pries open the head of a plumber to reveal the portrait of a fracturing mind taking us closer and closer to the edge.
“Hands down the best novel about a plumber changing a water tank – and, incidentally, dealing with matters of grave and threatening existential weight – I have ever read.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“In this short and powerful novel author James Clammer places readers inside the mind of Joe Forbes, a delightfully perceptive, middle-aged plumber who is trying to recover from a mental breakdown precipitated by his son’s criminal conviction. Joe is very much an ‘everyman,’ yet his way of looking at the world and his circumstances is far from ordinary. With writing full of wit and sensitivity, Clammer’s blue-collar hero goes back to work, longing to once again be strong, healthy, and confident – fully engaged within a society that stigmatizes weakness and mental illness. Insignificance is an absolute marvel, and one of the best books that I’ve read in quite some time.” —Lori Feathers, Interabang Books
“A brilliant look at family, mental health, and mid-life, Insignificance is a marvel. Tender, moving, and written with subtle humour, Clammer’s novel takes the reader through a single day in the life of Joe Forbes, reluctant plumber and anguished father. A superb novel that hits all the right notes. I couldn’t put it down.” —Mark Haber, bookseller at Brazos Bookstore and author of Reinhardt’s Garden
A murder mystery set within the complex world of an anthropological museum. Berry Cates has undergone a “radical lifectomy,” remaking her life at fifty-three, newly single and in a new career at a museum. However, she soon becomes the target of serious accusations at the museum. Determined to prove these as false, Berry gets into deeper trouble. Her sleuthing uncovers museum staff casting illicit bronzes and blackmail being delivered via a Roman curse tablet. Curatorial fraud and accusations by aboriginal people of poisoning their heritage regalia with toxic pesticides come to light as well. Only when Barry realizes she has been asking the wrong questions does she stop her slide into a web of deceit.
Winner of the 2014 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Prizes!
Finalist for Best Book Cover / Jacket Design at the 2014 Alberta Book Design Awards!
Edith Stoker’s father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall–a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black.
It is 1969, and far away, preparations are being made for man to walk upon the moon. Meanwhile, in the Stokers’ shabby home in the East Midlands, Edith remains a virtual prisoner, with occasional visits from her grotesque and demanding Aunt Vivian serving as the only break in the routine.
But when shy, sheltered Edith begins to quietly cultivate a garden in the shadow of her father’s wall, she sets in motion events that might gain her independence… and bring her face to face with the mysterious Edward Black.
Rosie Chard’s followup to her award-winning debut Seal Intestine Raincoat is an engrossing, often mordantly funny portrait of a young woman who miraculously finds her own pathway to freedom within the most stifling of environs.