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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • James Wilson

    James Wilson

    $40.00

    A CBC New Brunswick Book List Selection

    “The same stage, but different actors,” explains Wilson. “There is something interesting to me about separating people from their environment, about keeping the focus on the individual.”

    James Wilson’s studio portraits capture subjects from all walks of life. They document soldiers and street people, builders and bakers, artists and labourers. There is an intimate intensity in his photographs, which together form a timeless collage of life and faces from the early twenty-first century.

    Wilson’s portraits are also the product of a purposeful gaze, distinctive observations in black-and-white. All window-lit, all photographed in his studio, all with the same black background, these photographic portraits open a door into the worlds and at times the unguarded emotions of the individual subjects.

    James Wilson: Social Studies accompanies an exhibition that will open at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB, in June 2020.

  • Jan in 35 Pieces

    Jan in 35 Pieces

    $24.95

    In his memoir, Jan in 35 Pieces, acclaimed cellist Ian Hampton recounts his years of music and camaraderie, ably capturing his life-long dedication to the history and culture of classical musical performance.

  • Jane Again

    Jane Again

    $17.95

    In his sixties, Yeats published the half-dozen poems that drew Crazy Jane out from his imagination to act as a profane voice against the strictures of the Church and the mores of his age. Wayne Clifford, in his sixties, after a lifetime of wondering why Yeats offered so little explanation of Jane’s human presence absorb his own imagination, has let Jane free to speak once more. In JANE AGAIN, we learn why Jane is crazy, if indeed she is, what part her Jack has played in her passion, how she understands the nature of the divine, and who she insists herself to be in this world almost large enough to hold her. Wayne Clifford’s JANE AGAIN is bawdy, irreverent and humorous; it is also loving, moving and beautiful, and should help to cement Clifford’s reputation as one of the most inventive versifiers to come out of Canada in years.

  • Jane and the Whales

    Jane and the Whales

    $18.95

    In this playful yet poignant debut collection, Andrea Routley muddies the line between the physical and emotional worlds: reality becomes not simply what is in front of us, but a mutable, fragile place in the imagination.

    On the verge of divorce, and in a pot-induced haze, Tom Douglas prepares to roast a pork shank in his new-and contentious-Authentic Italian Brick Oven, but some surprise visitors threaten to spoil the dinner. In a story set in 1997, the last earth-bound member of a Hale-Bopp suicide cult reconsiders her final act. In an oceanside campground, one woman resolves to lead an ascetic life, but a dog makes this difficult in a surreal turn of events. After being accused of sexual harassment, a sharp-witted but naïve teenager discovers a surprising truth about her teacher. In another story, the body of a teenager murdered thirty years earlier is uncovered near Mallory’s childhood school. Back for the memorial service, and with only vague memories of the place, she tries to make sense of his death, but walks into an unexpected mystery. In the title story, “Jane and the Whales,” Jane is on a quest to discover the meaning of her unlable astral projections, which always lead her back to the same diminishing gay bar.

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    Violence, transmutation, log booms, tenderness, a game of Bat and Moth-all have a role to play in these wildly diverse stories. Many of Routley’s characters suffer loss, shame and guilt. But the promise of clarity comes only with doubt and that frightening unravelling of certainty. With this dense and imaginative collection, Andrea Routley has firmly planted herself in the literary landscape.

  • Janey’s Arcadia

    Janey’s Arcadia

    $17.95

    It is true Canada is not exactly a Utopia, Ltd.,
    for there is hard work and a rough, raw, erudite wail
    against the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion to be done
    before comfort or affluence are built. I used to have a lot of idyl
    fantasies inwrought with Indign traits about your too bruised
    and scared surface looking into the seeds of time. How now,
    my masters! Smacks not this one-acted poem of the great
    national prosaic life of Arcady?

    Zolf’s fifth book assembles a pirate score of error-ridden historical and current documents – missionary narratives, immigration pamphlets, settler writings – to decry the ongoing violence of Canadian colonialism. It stars Janey Settler-Invader, a foul-mouthed mutant slouching toward the Red River Colony, along with a host of cacophonous, carnivalesque appropriations.

    Praise for Janey’s Arcadia:

    ‘That poetry can be forcefully consequential is not a safe assumption in our contemporary crisis of sustainable attention. To deploy an intricately political poetics as Zolf’s performative texts do is a wager on expansion of the genre with no small risk of misreadings. The driving courage of Janey’s Arcadia is in fact its digital-age enactment of an allegory of misreading. Subjecting Canadian settler texts (in which indigenous peoples’ humanity can be casually or fervently dismissed) to Optical Character Recognition software, a chilling and ludicrous display of misreadings occur, inescapably charged by the cultural politics of non-recognition. A reader’s encounters range from the philosophically profound “Each person is an asking…” to the OCR mutated government questionnaire. Q: ‘Do you expei’ience any dread of the Indigns?’ A: I have no fear of Indigns, for I never see one.’ – Joan Retallack

    ‘Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.’

    – CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE

    ’I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba….”’ – Kevin Killian

  • Jawbone

    Jawbone

    $20.00

    A young woman has one minute to speak on a submission video to win a one-way trip to Mars, a location she views as the ultimate escape. As she barricades herself in a cottage by the sea and prepares to record, she examines her fixation on the colour red, shame, guilt, a dramatic breakup with her boyfriend, and the breakdown of her relationship with her best friend. There is another problem however, her jaw has been wired shut for a long time, and she’s having trouble speaking. A passionate story about queer love and loneliness and a dazzling debut from author Meghan Greeley..

  • Jay Macpherson and His Works

    Jay Macpherson and His Works

    $9.95

    This volume explores the life and works of Jay Macpherson. 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.

  • Je me souviens

    Je me souviens

    $16.95

    In this powerful dramatic monologue, Lorena Gale remembers, by reconstructing for the audience, her childhood and coming of age as an African-Canadian in Montreal.

    Her autobiographical protagonist is unabashedly one of those spoil-sport “ethniques” who, for political factions led by the likes of Parizeau, undermined and destroyed the separatist “pur-laine” vision of a new Quebec nation, sparkling and clean in its coat of only three colours—the seamless snow-white of the landscape, the royal blue of the sky, and the golden yellow of the sun (king), all allusions to the symbology of the imperialists who founded this “new nation,” this “new France.”

    In a dream-sequence / folksong which is played in ironic fragments between the voices adopted by the actress, Gale lyricizes the long, parallel process of rediscovering her self, first as a dark speck on the horizon where pure white meets pure blue, then finally as a full-grown adult, whose race, gender and class are far more definitive of her person than the vapid dreams of the neo-nationalists of the late 20th century.

  • Je Nathanaël

    Je Nathanaël

    $18.00

    Je Nathanaël is an endangered text. Neither essay nor poem nor novel nor sex-show, what it takes from language it gives back to the body.

    In this new and updated edition of Je Nathanaël, first published by BookThug in 2006, Nathanaël explores ways in which language constrains the body, shackles it to gender, and proposes instead a different way of reading, where words are hermaphroditic and transform desire in turn. Suggesting that one body conceals another, it lends an ear to this other body and delights in the anxiety it provokes. With parts written in French, other parts in English, this is truly a hybrid text, throwing itself into question as it acts upon itself in translation. It is both originator and recipient of its own echo. In this regard it does not, cannot exist, pulling insistently away from itself in an attempt to draw attention to the very things it seeks to conceal. In this way, Je Nathanaël is a book of paradox, negating itself as it comes into being.

    With an afterword by Elena Basile, and a postface by the author.

  • Je rêve d’être une bétonnière

    Je rêve d’être une bétonnière

    $12.95

    Je rêve d’être une bétonnière est un conte revigorant sur la puissance de l’amitié, la quête de sa propre place dans le monde et la concrétisation de ses rêves tout en restant soi-même. Haddam est un petit engin démolisseur qui grandi au sein d’une famille aimante. Ses parents vont tous les jours au travail qui consiste à démolir des immeubles à l’aide de leurs gros boulets de démolition. Mais le cœur tendre de Haddam n’aime pas détruire. Il préfère construire et rêve de devenir une bétonnière. Lorsque Haddam pleure, ses boulets de démolition tanguent et détruisent tout ce qu’ils touchent. A chaque battement de cœur, il laisse derrière lui une trainée de destruction. A l’école, ses copains se moquent de lui, mais il n’abandonne pas son rêve. Jamais Haddam ne peut devenir une bétonnière. Mais peut-être y a-t-il d’autres voies, plus adaptées à sa nature. Après quelques prospections, la Sage Vieille Grue trouve pour Haddam un travail dans une usine qui utilise les boulets de démolition pour lisser le ciment une fois déversé sur le sol. C’est un travail difficile, mais Haddam est enfin heureux, et devient plus fort et plus habile de jour en jour.

  • Je t’aime Cowboy

    Je t’aime Cowboy

    $14.95

    In Montreal, sex and politics frequently mix, and T.F. Rigelhof’s stories are sexy and political. His contemporary cowboys — immature, vulnerable men hoping to achieve masculinity by wearing cowboy boots, playing with guns, listening to Tom Waits — get the treatment they deserve: ironic understanding.

  • Jeanne’s Road

    Jeanne’s Road

    $21.00

    It is 1933. A journalist travels to the small mining town of Rouyn in northern Quebec – a community that has become a refuge for Russians, Finns, Ukrainians, Chinese, and Jews. While there, he crosses paths with famed Canadian Marxist Jeanne Corbin, who has come to rally a group of striking workers, and sees his life forever changed.


    Jeanne’s Road is an essential read, bringing to life a lost era of Quebec history through its powerful yet unsentimental love story.

  • Jelly Bean Row

    Jelly Bean Row

    $9.95

    What’s red and green and a sticky, mushy mess? The legendary Jelly Bean Row no less! How did The Jelly Bean Row get its name? Here’s a slap happy tale nestled inside dozens of bright, rainbow-drenched illustrations that will tickle the imagination and bring a sparkle to the eye of codgers and kids alike. You’re invited to meet some of the colourful characters from one of the most famous streets in the City of Legends. So, don a pair of hip waders and join in the foolishness, fuss and fun. Everyone is welcome and entertainment is supplied, but please bring your own blueberry buckle!

  • Jelly, Baby

    Jelly, Baby

    $24.95

    In this revelatory collection of personal, lyrical essays, Therese Estacion explores vital themes relating to her life as a disabled person.

    Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.

    Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by Estacion’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche. 

  • Jenneli’s Dance

    Jenneli’s Dance

    $12.95

    Jenneli is a young girl who feels that she is nothing special until she learns about the Métis Red River Jig from Grandma Lucee. One day Grandma Lucee enters Jenneli into the jigging contest, and Jenneli is both horrified and excited. With Grandma Lucee’s love and support, Jenneli places her doubts and fears aside to dance in the contest.

  • Jennie’s Story & Under the Skin

    Jennie’s Story & Under the Skin

    $18.95

    Winner of the 1983 Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Jennie’s Story is set in the late 1930s on the Canadian prairies. It concerns the Sexual Sterilization Act that was enacted in 1928, allowing a sterilization procedure to be performed without consent on individuals that were deemed to be unfit or mentally challenged. Jennie McGrane takes the title role, and her discovery of what the priest Father Fabrizeau has done to her is the central drama of the play. Believing she had an appendectomy when she was a teenager, the truth is revealed when she’s unable to conceive.In Under the Skin, Emma, the twelve-year-old daughter of Maggie Benton, has disappeared. John and Renee Gifford, Maggie’s neighbours and friends, attempt to console her, but their own ominous behaviour makes this a cold comfort.