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Jogging with the Great Ray Charles
$18.95A poetic masterclass from a writer at the height of his craft
Kenneth Sherman’s work has always displayed a vibrant lyricism, so it’s no surprise that his powerful new collection contains a number of poems with musical motifs. In such pieces as “Clarinet,” “Transistor Sister,” and the book’s titular poem, Sherman ponders our human transience while searching for “a voice to stand time’s test.” Sherman also confronts health concerns in a language that is Shaker-plain. The book concludes with the sombre, compassionate, and truly remarkable seven-part “Kingdom,” a meditation on the plight of the dispossessed.
In a Globe and Mail review of The Well: New and Selected Poems, Fraser Sutherland notes, “Sherman always seems to be listening to the voice of Canadian soil and landscape at the same time as he is attentive to the great European metaphysical theme of the soul in conflict with the world and time.” So it is with Jogging with the Great Ray Charles. Sherman has also included three brilliant translations of Yiddish poets that appeared in the Malahat Review’s “At Home in Translation” issue.
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John Fox
$39.95This beautifully crafted collection showcases Fox’s artworks created over decades from his beloved Venice — the Paradise of Cities. Accompanying an exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery opening in July 2025, the volume shows the artist’s evolution from painting the heart of Venice to painting views of canals and squares in less familiar parts of the city.
Fox’s watercolours and pencil drawings record a half-century of exploration and observation of the places that fascinated him. He returned to Venice again and again, at least once each year from the mid-1970s until 2008. Venetian colour and light were inspirational sources for all of his painting — abstract and representational images alike — and his approach was explicitly enhanced by the Venetian masters who revolutionized the act of laying paint on the canvas.
John Fox: A Painter in Venice | Un peintre à Venise features over 75 reproductions of his Venetian paintings, drawings, and watercolours, and three essays about Fox’s remarkable career by Victoria LeBlanc, John Leroux, and Sandra Paikowsky that explore his time in the city, his devotion to the authenticity of Venice’s lesser-known neighbourhoods, and his very personal exploration of Venetian art and architecture.
Ce recueil ouvre une perspective fascinante sur le legs visuel de l’artiste canadien John Fox (1927-2008) grâce à un magnifique agencement d’œuvres créées à Venise, ce « paradis des villes », que Fox aura fréquenté pendant des décennies. L’ouvrage accompagne une exposition que présentera le Musée des Beaux-Arts Beaverbrook en 2025. Il montre l’évolution de l’artiste qui, après avoir privilégié le cœur de la ville, a peint des vues de canaux et de places bien moins connus.
Les aquarelles et les carnets de croquis au crayon de l’artiste, nombreux, rendent compte d’un demi-siècle d’exploration et d’observation de lieux qui le captivaient. Fox ira très souvent à Venise, où il séjournera au moins une fois chaque année à partir du milieu des années 1970. Les couleurs et la lumière de la Sérénissime ont inspiré toutes ses toiles, abstraites et figuratives, sa manière étant d’ailleurs manifestement enrichie par la fréquentation de maîtres vénitiens qui ont révolutionné la peinture.
John Fox: Un peintre à Venise regroupe plus de 80 reproductions de peintures, dessins et aquarelles exécutés à Venise, et trois essais de Victoria Leblanc, John Leroux et Sandra Paikowsky, qui sondent la remarquable carrière de cet artiste, ainsi que sa présence dans sa ville de prédilection, son profond attachement pour l’authenticité des quartiers moins connus et son exploration très personnelle de l’art et de l’architecture vénitiens.
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John Glassco’s Richer World
$24.00John Glassco’s Richer World shows that Memoirs of Montparnasse is not the honest reminiscence Glassco presents it to be. With the narrative energy of a psychological detective story, it compares the published book to its holograph manuscript. Like Frederick Philip Grove and Grey Owl, Glassco too has transformed himself into a person of his own creation. Literary subterfuge pervades not only the premise on which Memoirs of Montparnasse is founded, but also the dialogue, the plot structure, the characterizations, and the events that are supposed to have happened. This subterfuge contributes to establishing Glassco’s distinctive position in Canadian literary history, that of a twentieth-century successor to the literary dandies, aesthetes, and decadents of nineteenth-century England and France.
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John Greer
$65.00A man in a darkened workshop, surrounded and obscured by dust clouds. A pair of larger-than-life hands, holding a mallet, ready to strike. Spectacles that play with the idea of turning lies into truth and cynics into believers. A cinder block, precariously suspended above a fragile glass, held in place by a single line of tension. Welcome to John Greer: retroActive.
Sculptor, conceptual artist, and unconventional art maker John Greer has been telling stories through his work for more than fifty years. Drawing on his present and past experiences, his travels and exploits, and his anxieties and fears, his work offers poignant meditations on the human environment, all the while challenging the viewer’s perspective with humour, intelligence, and a trail of narrative.
RetroActive offers a comprehensive view of Greer’s work and his commitment to the discourse of sculpture. Stunningly designed by Susanne Schaal and featuring the photographs of Raoul Manuel Schnell, the book contains more than three hundred representations of Greer and his work — in situ, in galleries, in process — bringing into focus Greer’s significant contributions to the world of art and ideas. Also included in the book are essays by Ray Cronin, Andria Minicucci, Dennis Reid, Ron Shuebrook, David Diviney, Sarah Fillmore, and Vanessa Paschakarnis.
John Greer taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for almost three decades, where his thinking and teaching helped shape contemporary sculpture in Canada. His work has been included in more than fifty solo and sixty group exhibitions and is held in public and private collections around the globe. In 2009 Greer was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada’s highest distinction in the field of art and culture.
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John Muir
$21.95This historical biography – based on the life of British Columbia pioneer John Muir – tells the amazing story of a family from Scotland who came out to Canada in the late 1840s to work as “consignee” labourers for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Daryl Ashby recreates the story of the Muirs’ struggle to develop a place for themselves in the hierarchic colony ruled by James Douglas. With their vision of a country based on democratic principles, the Muirs fought to bring a new way of life to the West Coast.
Drawing on the Muir family diaries, Ashby recounts the family’s voyage from Scotland, their first years of toil in the coal mines near Fort Rupert on northern Vancouver Island, and their challenge to the Company when they initiated what may have been the first strike in Canada. Muir went on to acquire property and became an important figure in the economic development of the province. Muir built the first successful steam-operated sawmill in B.C. and developed the largest privately owned fleet of ships in the Northwest. He became a magistrate with his own sense of justice for the working man, and later a Member of the first Legislative Assembly.
So fascinating is Muir’s personality and so intriguing is his struggle for a democratic way of life that his life’s story reads at times like a novel. Ashby is to be commended for vividly bringing back to life this historic figure, a man who deserves to be better known in his own right and for his contribution to the development of the West.
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John Newlove and His Works
$9.95This volume explores the life and works of John Newlove. 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.
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John Stokes’ Horse
$21.95One of the great privileges of running a literary publishing house is that of working with particular writers over time, helping them to shape their voice and vision and to foster a readership. One such writer intrinsically associated with Gaspereau Press is the poet and essayist Peter Sanger. Building on the themes of his 2006 collection Aiken Drum, Sanger’s new volume of poems takes its title from the subject of an engraving by Newfoundland printmaker David Blackwooda simple wooden horse carved by a Cape Freels man in 1907 as a gift for his grandson. In the figure of John Stokes’ horse, Sanger locates an imaginative gesture requiring the suspension of disbelief, for child and adult alikea winged mount into a world where myth and memory mix. Looking at language, memory and art through the lens of language presents the very sort of riddle on which Sanger’s poetics thrive. As well as the title sequence, the book features a section composed of object poems (“Fishing for Jade”) generally expressing a preoccupation with lightshadows and reflections, signals, moon, waterand a more topical section (“Civics”) which assails the present state of public discourse in a tone and cadence reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land. The book also includes a short essay (“Leaping Time”) which combines memories, childhood books and equine lore to provide a sort of mirror to John Stokes’ horse. These poems evoke, in Sanger’s words, “imagination’s creative energy, immanent in time and yet timeless, evidence of love, devotion and patience, evidence that by seeing art through its eyes we see more clearly through our own.”
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John Thompson
$24.95During John Thompson’s sadly attenuated lifetime, he completed only two volumes of poetry. At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets and Stilt Jack (published posthumously), but seldom has such a slim oeuvre supported such a large reputation. When John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations was first published in 1995, the reasons for Thompson’s stature became clear, and in the twenty years since then, his influence has only grown larger.
Thompson seeks out the darkest places of the heart, then floods them with light. These remarkable poems evoke the deep woods, the relentless turning of seasons that churn life into death, and back again to life. They unflinchingly examine his relationships, drawing out the pain and joys of domesticity.
Confessionally raw, but oblique and beautiful, Thompson’s poetry — and in particular, his experiments in Stilt Jack with adapting the ghazal, a poetic form with origins in Arabia — has influenced three generations of poets. As Peter Sanger notes in his definitive introduction, “For many young Canadian poets, composing a ghazal sequence has become a rite of passage, and Thompson is often addressed or alluded to as a tutelary figure.”
Reissued to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of its first appearance, this volume, edited and introduced by Peter Sanger, now revised and updated with new information and insights, gathers together all of Thompson’s extant mature poems and translations, including, in addition to the two published books, poetry published only in periodicals, unpublished poetry, and Thompson’s haunting translations from several of his French Canadian contemporaries and the great French poet René Char.
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John Winslow at Grand-Pré
$59.95John Winslow was one of the most significant American military leaders of the generations before George Washington. Winslow’s career carried him to the corners of the Atlantic world, soldiers flocked to his banner, and his exploits were celebrated in song. But instead of creating a country, he destroyed one. Following the successful siege of the French Fort Beauséjour at Chignecto in 1755, Nova Scotia Governor Charles Lawrence ordered Winslow to deport Acadian families from their settlements in the middle of the province. Winslow found these instructions both surprising and disturbing, but he followed them, recording his actions in his journal.
The 1755 deportations of the Acadians forever altered the social and political landscape of Atlantic Canada and contributed to the unique character of the Acadian and Cajun communities that developed in their aftermath. In John Winslow at Grand-Pré Jonathan Fowler and Earle Lockerby have faithfully transcribed and extensively annotated Winslow’s eye-witness account of this seminal event of 18th-century North American history. Supported by maps, illustrations, and extensive contextualizing essays and appendices, this new presentation of Winslow’s 1755 journal provides an invaluable window on those troubled times.
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Johnny Delivers
$22.95Eighteen-year-old Johnny Wong’s dead-end life consists of delivering Chinese food and holding his chaotic family together in Toronto. When his sweet but treacherous Auntie, the mahjong queen, calls in their family debt, he fears the family will lose the Red Pagoda restaurant and break apart.
Invoking the spirit of Bruce Lee and in cahoots with his stoner friend Barry, Johnny tries to save his family by taking up a life of crime delivering weed with a side of egg rolls. He chases his first love, but his hands are already full with his emotionally distant mother, his dream-crushing father, and his reckless, sardonic little sister.
As he fights to stay ahead of his Auntie, sordid family secrets unfold. With lives on the line, the only way out is an epic mahjong battle. While Johnny is on a mission to figure out who he is and what he wants, he must learn that help can come from within and that our heroes are closer than we think.
Dripping with 1970s nostalgia, Johnny Delivers is a gritty and humorous standalone sequel to the much-loved and award-winning Letters From Johnny.
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Johnny Kicker
$19.95Who is Johnny Kicker? A murderer, a prophet, a scapegoat, a puppet, a degenerate, a hero, and a counter-revolutionary. Since the invention of music, those who perform it have been accused of sedition. And while rock ‘n’ roll has forever aspired to become the anthem of revolution, its momentum has always petered out or collapsed upon itself. That is, until The Witness arrive and start singing about marching in the streets and smashing every window they see. The band gains a following that turns into an army awaiting orders, and when they’re forced to flee the United States, the vacuum left behind is filled with a terrible new ambition. Johnny Kicker is a story of ideology, betrayal, and the manipulation of youth.
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Join the Revolution, Comrade
$19.95Join the Revolution, Comrade
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Jokes for Roasts & Toasts
$13.95How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you had to make a toast or a short speech at somebody’s birthday or wedding? Or when you had to deliver a snappy putdown speech at a friend’s roast? Well, take heart. Jokes for Roasts and Toasts, the second volume in the Yuk Yuk’s Joke Book series, has come to your rescue. Full of pithy remarks, quotable bon mots, and merciless insults, Roast and Toasts will provide you with the cerebral arsenal you need to shine at social occasions. The first section of the book is party roasts that would make Dean Martin proud. And in the second section there are many toasts to celebrate having a drink with a friend, or just having a drink. Memorize them. Here are some roasts, followed by toasts.
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Jonas and Barry in the Home
$15.95“When life comes knocking you don’t want it to find you on the couch in a soiled bathrobe.”
Norm Foster’s quick wit is strong in this lighthearted buddy comedy about living life to its fullest.
Barry is annoyed that he’s already living in a seniors’ home at sixty-seven, but it’s worth it to live near his daughter, Rosie. Rosie, who works at the home, brought him in so he wouldn’t be alone in case he has a heart attack like his father, brother, and uncle did before they were sixty-five. So Barry spends his time shuffling around in his slippers, taking naps, and having dinner with Rosie, and that’s good enough for him.
But Barry doesn’t get to revel in the quiet for long. Enter the loquacious and flirtatious Jonas, who wrote one hit song thirty-seven years ago. Jonas likes to indulge in the finer things in life, like decadent dates and nice clothes, and he sees Barry the curmudgeon as a fixer-upper. As they bicker and bond over women, sports, and family values, Jonas and Barry must learn to open up and face how to keep living their lives.
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Jonas Brothers Forever
$14.95The Jonas Brothers have gone from obscurity to superstardom in the course of a year, and there’s simply no stopping them. From their top-selling albums, to their sensational sold-out tours, their Disney Channel original movie Camp Rock and forthcoming TV series J.O.N.A.S., Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas are here to stay.
Jonas Brothers Forever: The Unofficial Story of Kevin, Joe and Nick chronicles the boys’ lives and careers from child performers to their first disappointing Columbia Records deal to being signed by Disney’s Hollywood Records. From that point, their lives changed forever. Their Meet the Robinsons song “Kids of the Future” became a major hit, and the brothers Jonas were everywhere: from Miley Cyrus’s sold-out tour to the White House to the top of the charts.
Jam packed with photos, Jonas Brothers Forever: The Unofficial Story of Kevin, Joe and Nick is the only complete guide to the amazing world of the JoBros: the life and career of this talented trio; their family and the importance of their faith; their friends, girlfriends, costars and management team; their albums, videos, tours and TV shows; and the true-blue fans who will support the Jonas Brothers forever.
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Jonas in Frames
$19.95Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett.
In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas in Frames contorts time and space. Rootless, nostalgic, socially inept, Jonas is the modern questless hero, an exemplar of generational anxiety eternally on the brink of pitching into a graveyard spin.
A volatile amalgamation of identity crisis, fitful employment, and fanciful poetic imaginings delivers Jonas from sterile offices to anarchist squats, from skull-shattering saloons to faux-edgy hipstervilles and back again to capital-N Nowhere. As Jonas navigates an onslaught of geographical, mental, and temporal turbulence, his lives collide, splinter, and too often shatter.
Jonas in Frames does and does not cohere. Its sense is clandestine. Its form is fractal.