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Incorporating elements of creative nonfiction and oral history, Let It All Fall: Underground Music and the Culture of Rebellion in Newfoundland, 1977–95 is a collection of interview-based first-person monologues that describe the experiences of a generation of independent musicians, artists, and activists.
Beginning in the late 1970s, a new raw sound began to emerge from the basements and garages of St. John’s which, by the mid-’90s, had grown into a vibrant community. With few resources, dozens of bands produced a staggering amount of music.
Let It All Fall traces how underground youth culture challenged social and economic inequity, as well as cultural norms, during one of the most turbulent times in Newfoundland history.
Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of North America to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals?on the streets, by rivers, in museums, in playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie?Oliver reflects on issues of escape, exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.
Award-winning authorJoe Schwarcz continues his crusade against purveyors of poppycock as he investigates the surprising and sometimes sinister science of everyday food and life
Do you know if your waiter sings in the bathroom?
Or if the lady who whipped up the icing on your cake wore false fingernails?
When was the last time you microwaved your dishcloth?
Is your orange juice pasteurized?
The bestselling popular science author of A Grain of Salt serves up “interesting factoids about the way that science has helped shape our everyday lives” (Joe Culotti, PhD, professor of molecular and medical genetics, University of Toronto).
What difference does an atom make? It could mean life or death! Get the lowdown on oxygenated water, the healing powers of prayer, and the health benefits of chocolate. Could there be a link between McGill University and Jack the Ripper? Find out how cinnamon helps to counter high cholesterol, and learn just how sweet sugar alternatives can be.
In the tradition of Schwarcz’s five previous bestsellers, Let Them Eat Flax fries scientific baloney with humor, wit, and information. From food poisoning to the secret of the Stradivarius violin, fertilizers to spontaneous human combustion, Schwarcz investigates explosive subjects and delivers the unbiased, scientific facts readers need to make informed decisions in their everyday lives.
Finalist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, Manitoba Book Awards
From the killing fields of Europe to the merciless beauty of the Canadian prairies, Let Us Be True tells the story of three women whose lives have been shaped and damaged by secrets–their own and those that stretch back through time, casting their shadow from one generation to the next.
At the heart of the novel is seventy-four-year-old Pearl Calder, a woman who has thrown away her past and kept it a secret from her daughters. But as Pearl confronts her own mortality, she begins to understand what her dead husband, Henry, has always known: secrets are like dark and angry ghosts. And they don’t just haunt you. They haunt everyone you love.
Alternating between the past and present, and between Pearl’s voice and the voices of her family members, both living and dead, the story explores how all of our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, are shaped by secrets: our own as well as ancestral secrets we may know nothing about, but which affect who we are and who we become.
Pearl is no exception. With a life that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the deep conservatism of the postwar boom, Pearl’s secrets are rooted in events over which she had no control: the death of her mother; a father destroyed by war; a brother who adores her but who dies on the beaches of Dieppe, and a sister who abandons Pearl to save herself.
Peter Midgley’s let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Gradually, the poems assemble an ombindi–an ancestral cairn–from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is an exploration of African philosophy and its potential for changing our view of the world. Even as the poems look to the past, they push the reader towards a future that is as relevant to contemporary Canada as it is to the Namibian earth that bled them.
Peter is putting on a show. He’s a bit stressed. In the show, he will read from a manuscript. It’s a large manuscript, but don’t worry, he’s only going to read the parts about him, and there aren’t many. It’s a memoir written by someone who abandoned him twice—once as a baby and once when he was a young man of thirteen. This person has figured prominently in Peter’s life for over fifty years now, but judging by the memoir, he has not figured so much in theirs. So perhaps it’s going to be a very short show? Again, don’t worry, Peter has other skills which he will share. And if Peter can keep his cool, and if the people who work at the theatre can help him set everything up, and if the audience can just give him a little bit of their time and their attention and their silence, maybe he can tell everyone something about who we really are and who we are to others and who we might be to ourselves when we’re alone. And maybe that can make it all a little bit easier.
“When an organized drug gang starts selling crack dyed black, Division 51 of the Toronto Police gets the brunt of the action, and street cop Jack Warren and his partner face the ugly realities of crime in their city. Verdict: Pilkey, a veteran of Division 51, writes with authority in this first of a planned trilogy. His characters ring true, and the gritty side of Toronto shows. For lovers of hard-boiled police procedurals.” — Library Journal
Lethal Rage follows the journey of Jack Warren, a young Toronto police officer, as he enters the dangerous streets of downtown’s 51 Division. Accustomed to the white-bread policing of his previous division, Jack is staggered when he first arrives at his new job. No TV show or movie prepared him for the reality of 51, where the officers wade through the filth of humanity on a daily – hourly – basis.
Warren is immediately thrown into a war between the cops of 51 and a new crack cocaine dealer intent on taking over the downtown drug trade. No one is safe from the dealer’s quest for domination and soon the war becomes horrifically personal for Jack.
Working with the boss of the division’s elite Major Crime Unit, Jack learns there is an imperceptible yet enormous difference between the law and justice, and being a police officer and surviving as a 51 street cop.
In Letter from Brooklyn, Jacob Scheier examines love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of his new poems is the notion that we understand who we are by where we have been. Here, a confessional voice digs deep into a radical Jewish heritage rooted in New York City. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical.
Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, being startled while biking down a prairie road or searching for a European village wiped clear off the map, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.
Using post-Apartheid South Africa as a point from which to reflect on Canada and beyond, Letter Out : Letter In is a poetry collection of social commentary, political-economic analysis, and philosophical meditation. Historic and persisting structures of racism, sexism and economic inequality are explored, but also the nature of gender and ethnic divisions within and among oppressed groups. Moving from critique, Letter Out : Letter In further proposes love as an alternative to the binary of competition/solidarity so prevalent in Western thought. The Sufi notion of love is defined and redefined at recurring moments in the collection, making use of poetic subtlety to offer a new vision in a fractured world. The book is structured in four parts: Letter to South Africa, in which the poet explores her homeland; Letter to Canada, in which she explores her adopted country; Letter to All, in which she attempts to understand the bigger picture of racial and gender issues as well as political ones; and Letter-out : Letter-in, in which she attempts to reconcile all these matters and focus on a positive outcome: love.
Letterati spans the history of competitive Scrabble in North America from the colourful hustlers of the 1960s New York game rooms, to the hard driving quantitative tile pushers who dominate the game today with strategic skills and memorized vocabularies. Yet, there is more to the history of Scrabble than just playing the game. There is a parallel plot line that revolves around many of the top players, who over the years have wanted to see the game develop through the outside sponsorship of tournaments, the unfettered publication of strategy books and the encouragement of a professional class of players. Along the way the reader will learn about how and why the Official Scrabble Dictionary was compiled, then expurgated in 1993, and now is sold to the public without such words as “jew” as a verb, blowjob, or fatso, while club and tournament players have their own word list, where some 200 such words are legal. The book also covers the obsession that Scrabble becomes for those who play seriously, traits that make a top player successful, how gender affects game play, and how teen players are able to rise above their limited educations and life experience to best their elders. There’s also a look at the Scrabble trademark and how its so-called required protection by its owners has been used as a justification for prohibiting outside sponsorship of tournaments, the publication of strategy books and the growth of a professional class of players. At the same time, the book provides a glimpse of how the players’ enthusiasm for the game has been harnessed so that they have de facto ended up working for free on the owner’s PR plantation, publicizing tournaments, putting on promotional events, talking up the game, and sporting Scrabble geegaws, all unwittingly helping to sell ever more Scrabble sets.
Tuning a fine ear to Lawrence’s letters from 1906 until his death in 1930, Barry Dempster’s poems uncover the man within the myth and give voice to Lawrence’s passionate mortality. Dempster’s act is one of imagination and homage, a kind of lyrical readership which traces the life-and-death line in a great writer’s life, with its constant illness and energy, a line “green as the vein of a young man’s desire.” In this book, Barry Dempster, acclaimed as a writer of short fiction and novels as well as poetry, extends his range and the genre of poetry itself.
Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
During the Second World War, hundreds of New Brunswick woodsmen joined the Canadian Forestry Corps to log the Scottish Highlands as part of the Canadian war effort. Patrick “Pat” Hennessy of Bathurst was one of them. For five years, Pat served as camp cook with 15 Company of the Canadian Forestry Corps near the ancient town of Beauly, Scotland. A middle-aged New Brunswick farmer and lumberman with a third-grade education, Pat saw more of the world than he had ever dreamed of, visiting ancient battlefields he had learned about as a child, travelling to his ancestral Ireland, and attending a course of lectures in British history at Oxford University.
While in Scotland, Pat regularly corresponded with his family in New Brunswick. Drawing from this unique collection of more than three hundred letters, as well as hundreds of archival documents and photographs, Melynda Jarratt provides a rare glimpse of what life was like for Canadian servicemen overseas and for their relatives at home.
Letters from Beauly is volume 23 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, co-published with the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society.
Winner of BEST CRIME NOVELLA at The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence 2022
Set in Toronto 1970, just as the FLQ crisis emerges to shake an innocent country, eleven year old Johnny Wong uncovers an underbelly to his tight, downtown neighbourhood. He shares a room with his Chinese immigrant mother in an enclave with American draft dodgers and new Canadians. He is befriended by Rollie, one of the draft dodgers who takes on a fatherly and writing mentor role. Johnny’s mother is threatened by the “children’s warfare society.” A neighbour is found murdered. He suspects the feline loving Catwoman next door and tries to break into her house. Ultimately he is betrayed but he must act to save his family. He discovers a distant kinship with Jean, the son of one of the hostages kidnapped by the FLQ who have sent Canada into a crisis. As his world spins out of control, his only solace are letters to Dave Keon, who “as Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, can be trusted.”
Letters From Montreal: An Anthology documents the experiences of Montrealers past and present, creating a portrait of the storied city unlike any other. Drawn from the celebrated column in Maisonneuve magazine, this anthology features Canadian writers documenting a quintessential part of local life. Narrated with the intimacy of journal entries, each letter bridges the playful and profound. In early dispatches, Melissa Bull ditches a boyfriend over pétanque in Parc Laurier; Sean Michaels watches Arcade Fire lose Battle of the Bands; Deborah Ostrovsky frets over the sublime sophistication of the Plateau’s French children. More recently, Ziya Jones spends a summer herding sheep through Parc du Pélican; Eva Crocker performs in a “fake orgasm choir” at the Rialto Theatre; and André Picard takes a pause from the pandemic by running up Mount Royal.
Edited by Maisonneuve/i> Editor-in-Chief Madi Haslam, these letters buzz with a sense of possibility, surprise and transformation. They remind us that a city can’t quite be defined, that every person inside it interprets it anew. Together, they explore how we make meaning in the place we call home–how our surroundings shape us, and how we shape them in return.