All Books

Jackfish, The Vanishing Village

$22.95

Jackfish, The Vanishing Village tells the story of a woman unravelling from a traumatic past and her yearning for redemption. When her sister dies prematurely, Clemance-Marie Nadeau leaves her family and village behind, boarding a train bound for Sault Ste. Marie, where she falls under the spell of a charming stranger who promises her a life of adventure, and then holds her captive with her guilt and his threats of violence. Years later, when Clemance moves to the United States, she feels like an outsider, but Clemance is also in exile from herself. Discovering she is pregnant at the age of forty-two sets in motion a series of events that awakens a painful memory, long-buried in her embattled body, and so begins the long and sometimes harrowing journey back to her homeland, and to herself.

Jackrabbit Moon

By: Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos

$18.95

This hard-hitting novel explores the gritty underbelly of contemporary urban life revealing the shocking chasm between demonized media images and the everyday life of the uneducated poor. At the centre is thirty-seven-year-old Maggie MacKinnan, a star reporter at the Montreal Tribune who is wrenched from her life of respectability when she meets Nick, a young biker who has been arrested, along with his stripper wife, Eileen, for causing the death of their infant son. As a reporter covering the court case, Maggie is caught between her newspaper’s hunger for a sensational story about child abuse and her own growing awareness that there are no simple answers. Probing deeper into the child’s death, Maggie uncovers the reality of ordinary people with no skills who are forced to live by any means. This is a novel that removes the facade of the justice system, opens the doors to the horror of prisons, and eventually reveals what a thin line separates the conventional middle-class person from the world of crime and prostitution. In the end, Maggie is transformed by the darkness that she enters and, so great is the skill of Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos as a novelist, even her readers come back similarly changed.

Jackrabbit Street

By: Joseph Welsh

$9.95

Joe Welsh irreverently and poignantly recreates the forties, fifties and sixties in and around Lebret, Saskatchewan. His ear for voice and his deprecating homespun portraits paradoxically intensify his loyalty to his people &#151 the Métis. Enriched throughout with a relentless stream-of-consciousness, the writer merges vignette, poem, and dramatic monologue into a form that is unique in its authentic language and local colour.

jacks

By: Anne Stone

$14.95

Part fictional memoir, part fairy-tale, jacks is the story of Hermeline, a young girl whose fabulated world is an interlacing of myths, rhymes, incantations and memories, a thousand and one tales beneath whose surface lies the violence of childhood, forever lost in the brilliance of fiction. Like a disturbing and recurring dream, jacks will plunge you into the terror of language and myth. jacks: a gothic gospel is the first novel by Montreal writer Anne Stone. It is a book sure to make a profound impression – a powerful and moving novel unlike any other in Canadian literature, and one that you are not likely to forget.

Jacob’s Prayer

By: Lorne Dufour

$18.95

In 1974 Lorne Dufour moved to Alkali Lake Reserve, a Shuswap community near Williams Lake in British Columbia, to help reopen the local elementary school. Like many First Nation communities across Canada, Alkali Lake had been ravaged by decades of residential schools and forced religion. Colonialism had robbed them of their language and culture and had left a legacy of abuse and alcoholism. But in 1972, Chief Andy Chelsea and his wife Phyllis took it upon themselves to lead their community on a long and painful road to sobriety and what ensued was a dramatic transformation of a people enslaved by a seemingly unstoppable plague. By 1985, Alkali Lake was almost a hundred percent dry and had become a role model for many other communities in BC.

Jacob’s Prayer takes place during this time of transformation and it speaks to the unexpected existence of resiliency in the most unassuming of characters. It centres around one tragic Halloween evening in 1975 when two men lose their lives and another is saved by a friend who chooses not to be destroyed by his own tragedy and devastating loss. Jacob’s Prayer is the haunting and poetic story of a community’s suffering, loss and eventual healing.

Jacob’s Wake

By: Michael Cook

$17.95

Jacob’s Wake explores the relationship of a father, Winston, with his three sons, Wayne, a corrupt politician, Alonzo, a cynical business man, and Brad, a failed priest. It quickly moves from an apparently realistic family drama to nightmarish, expressionistic drama of 20th century failure as an approaching storm begins to dominate the stage. Once again, ritual lies at the heart of this play; Cook establishes clear patterns of behaviour that are transgressed and broken by the gathered family. The whole play, not merely the last few moments, is a wake, specifically for Jacob, the lost son of the title, but more generally for Newfoundland.

A Maritime family’s tragedy, set in a raging storm. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.

Jacqueline the Singing Crow

By: Mandi Kujawa

$14.99

The uplifting tale of a crow called Jacqueline who lives to sing. After a bruising encounter with opinionated people that crushes her confidence and self-belief, Jacqueline flies south to escape the pain and rediscover her true self. A story that will help anyone who has ever been told they couldn’t do something, to stand firm against their critics.

Jacques Hurtubise

$60.00

Showcasing the major career highlights and some of the most recent work of abstract painter Jacques Hurtubise, this lavishly illustrated bilingual volume captures the key works of Hurtubise’s formidable fifty-plus year career, many of which have never been brought together in a major exhibition or publication.

This exceptional collection offers new insight into the development of Hurtubise’s paintings — from the early graphic abstract paintings in the 1960s and 1970s to the mask to the brushy and stencil work of his blackout paintings. His latest map-based work, which brings together the passion of his “sun” series and the exotic and hypnotic lines of his “masks” and “splash” paintings, brings his mastery of the medium to the fore.

An abstract painter who followed a generation of plasticiens, Hurtubise’s bright, geometric patterning have often prompted comparisons to peers Claude Tousignant, Guido Moinari, and Yves Gaucher.

This book includes five major, groundbreaking essays on his work by Québec curator Bernard Lamarche,; artist, writer, and critic Jeffrey Spalding; art critic René Viau; Sarah Fillmore, the editor of the book and curator of the exhibition that accompanies this major publication; and art historian Nathalie Miglioni.

Cette monographie abondamment illustrée présente les principaux jalons de plus de cinquante ans de carrière de l’artiste Jacques Hurtubise. On y recense sa production actuelle ainsi que ses œuvres phares, dont un grand nombre n’avaient jamais éunies auparavant.

La compilation exceptionnelle permet de mieux comprendre l’évolution d’Hurtubise, depuis ses premiers travaux graphiques des années 1960 et 1970 jusqu’à ses masques, ses tableaux aux traits ardents et le recours au stencil dans sa série Blackout. Ses œuvres plus récentes réalisées à partir de cartes routières — qui allient la passion qui habite ses « soleils » et les lignes exotiques et hypnotiques de ses « masques » et de ses « éclaboussures » — témoignent de sa pleine maîtrise des techniques les plus variées.

Les formes géométriques abstraites aux couleurs vives de cet artiste qui a succédé à la génération des plasticiens ont souvent suscité des comparaisons avec Claude Tousignant, Guido Molinari et Yves Gaucher.

L’ouvrage Jacques Hurtubise propose des textes des conservateurs d’exposition Sarah Fillmore et Bernard Lamarche, des auteurs et critiques Jeffrey Spalding et René Viau, et de l’historienne de l’art Nathalie Miglioni. Sarah Fillmore est conservatrice en chef du Musée des beaux-arts de la Nouvelle-Écosse.

Jaguar Rain

By: Jan Conn

$18.00

Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead. Sources for this collection include Mee’s journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest. She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.

Jail Baby

By: Hope McIntyre

$15.95

In this powerful new play based on work with incarcerated women, hilarious parody is interspersed with the harsh reality of the cycle of incarceration.

Jailbreaks

$19.95

In 1910 Lawrence J. Burpee published an anthology of 100 Canadian Sonnets. Poet and critic Zachariah Wells figured it was high time for an update on that dusty tome. In Jailbreaks, Wells has gathered 99 of his favourite sonnets written by Canadians, from the 19th century to the present day. Jailbreaks does much to question the standard assumption that the best Canadian poetry is written in free verse, while showcasing the enormous versatility of the sonnet and of the poets who use it as a vessel for their thoughts and feelings. It just might change the way we think about Canadian poetry.

Jake and the Kid

By: W.O. Mitchell

$18.99

When Ma, the Kid, her twelve year old son, and Jake, the hired man, first appeared on the pages of Maclean’s and shortly after on CBC Radio, the lively boy and his cranky hero found their way into the hearts of thousands of readers.

Now, in this new edition of Jake and the Kid, Crocus, a prairie town in the forties and fifties, comes alive once again. In these lovingly rendered stories, we encounter the glorious minutia of small town life on the Canadian prairie. Jake and the Kid are surrounded by an entire community of richly eccentric characters: old Sam Gatenby, a rival to Jake and just as cantankerous; Miss Henchbaw, the stern and proper Rabbit Hill schoolteacher; and Mayor MacTaggart, the owner of the town’s General Store. In all, W.O. Mitchell created about eighty characters to populate the town, including Daddy Johnson, the oldest man in Canada; Repeat Golightly, the philosophizing barber; and Professor Noble Winesinger, a conman with a heart.

Touching and laugh-out-loud funny in equal measure, this classic Canadian story collection epitomizes the magic of W.O. Mitchell’s storytelling. Pitting tall tale against reality, Mitchell delivers a realm resplendent with a vibrant setting, a compelling cast of characters, and everyday events that speak directly to what it means to be human.

james i wanted to ask you

By: Michael Holmes

$12.00

james i wanted to ask you is a book-length elegy that explores the transitory nature of friendship, memory, and love. It documents the odyssey of a writer who travels the globe in an attempt to escape memory and culpability, in the process exploring the breakdown both of romantic relationships and personal defence mechanisms.

James Reaney

By: J. Stewart Reaney

$18.00

James Reaney is a prolific Canadian playwright and poet. This analysis of his work, written by Richard Stingle, explores his place within English and Canadian literary traditions and ability to make local, Ontario life universally relatable.

James Reaney and His Works

By: Richard Stingle

$9.95

This volume explores the life and works of James Reaney. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.

James Reaney on the Grid

By: Stan Dragland

$28.95

`Set up a trellis for flowering plants to climb all over: it’s there but unseen, supporting all that floral leaf-green beauty.’

In James Reaney on the Grid, Stan Dragland examines an artist fiercely loyal to his artistic practice, deploying the metaphor of the grid to explore the inherited literary patterns and archetypes underpinning works of London poet, playwright and educator James Reaney. With extensive references to Reaney’s considerable oeuvre (from early publications such as A Suit of Nettles and The Box Social to what is arguably his master work, The Donnellys), and to an eclectic collection of theorists, artists and contemporaries whose ideas inform and respond to Reaney’s, Dragland seeks to reveal not only what Reaney’s work is about but also what it does. In so doing, he takes readers by the hand in a surprisingly personal ramble through the processes and productions of one of Southern Ontario’s most influential writers.

All Books in this Collection