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‘Lonesome Monsters’ is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn. Mr. Osborn’s writing is as much chronicle, confession, testimony, as it is poetry-an unwavering account of inner-city struggle and the tenacity of the human spirit.
“Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn’s ‘Lonesome Monsters’ successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life.” – Geist Magazine
In this companion anthology to Digital Performance in Canada, six works of digital theatre illustrate how audiences are forced to re-evaluate definitions of performative space, bodies, and relationships.
Alien Contagion: Rise of the Zombie Syndrome by Andy Thompson, Tyler Clarke, and Finn Ghosh-Leudke is an immersive theatrical adventure in which audience members need to work together to save the world and conquer the undead. In AVATAR, Freya Björg Olafson uses contemporary dance paired with the ambiguities of virtual social networks to navigate the digitally altered notions of exhibitionism, orientation, and identity. Helen Lawrence by Chris Haddock and Stan Douglas is a hard-boiled tale of loyalty and money that uses both filmed and live sequences to create “live cinema.” Theatre Replacement’s Town Choir features text that was transmitted live from across Canada to the Vancouver Youth Choir, who then transformed the text into songs. Barbra French’s Muse tells a story from inside an institutionalized young woman’s imagination with the help of a nurse, the audience, projections, and light. And You Are Very Star by Electric Company Theatre is a virtual site-specific treasure hunt between the height of the Space Race and the dawn of new humanity.
The novel is the story of three generations of women, a grandmother who as a young woman went to China as a Canadian missionary nurse and who falls in love with a Chinese doctor who acts as her interpreter. Shortly after anti-western sentiment sends her home in a hurry she discovers she is pregnant by him. Attempts by her, and later their daughter, to contact him fail. Her daughter, Meihua, goes to China to look for her father and ends up marrying a Chinese man and teaching art. The cultural revolution sees her sent to prison as a American spy and anti-revolutionary, and her husband confined to a gulag. Their children, still at home, are raised by the family’s illiterate servant, Yao. Yao’s crude manner and resourcefulness partly shield Yezi, Meihua’s daughter, and the novel’s main character, from family tragedy, poverty and political discrimination, negotiating their survival during the revolution that she barely understands. Only after her mother released, does Yezi hear about her foreign grandmother, Agnes, who lives in Boston and has lost contact with the family since Yezi’s birth. Curious about her American ancestry, Yezi now an adult, decides to join her grandmother in the U.S. Reading her grandmother’s diaries helps Yezi get to know her grandmother as a young Canadian missionary and her life in China with the man who is her grandfather, and who her mother longed to find.
Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize Finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire and willfully prods the veil at the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to push the boundaries; she is also easily bored. Her disdain for all that is conventional and “vanilla” launches her on a journey of personal discovery: first via the local swingers’ scene, then through the world of clandestine S&M clubs, and on to more adventurous and dangerous “private” diversions.
She eventually pushes the envelope so far that she attracts the attention of alien beings she refers to only as the “Woodenheads.” They do strange things to her, alchemic things, as she is slowly transformed into wood and steel and electricity.
You won’t soon forget Nonni; she won’t let you.
Praise for Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands:
“[I]n Martin West’s impressive debut short story collection … readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O’Connor and Barry Hannah.” (Foreword Magazine)
“the 11 tales in Martin West’s debut collection … often surprise with strange, startling images.” (Alberta Views)
Ideal for a range of readers, from drama students to aspiring theatre practitioners, and for those working in community and professional theatres, Long Story Short gathers from acclaimed and emerging playwrights a breadth of plays that are united in their ability to create complete and moving stories that transcend the page in about ten minutes each. Included in this anthology are works by Lawrence Aronovitch, David Belke, Chantal Bilodeau, Per Brask, David James Brock, Trina Davies, Sandra Dempsey, Francine Dick, Josh Downing, Jennifer Fawcett, Catherine Frid, Ron Fromstein, Meghan Greeley, Matthew Heiti, Arthur Holden, Florence MacDonald, Linda McCready, Yvette Nolan, Jivesh Parasram, Talia Pura, Ann Snead, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, José Teodoro, Michael Wilmot, and Laura Mullin and Chris Tolley.
On a remote lonely mountain, Constance skis toward her death and Harry Weinstein loses himself in an avalanche. Meanwhile, back in the city, Gully Jillson is the suspect in the investigation of a murder that has taken place in Constance’s high-rise condo. The collision of this strange ménage a trois is at the heart of Cecelia Frey’s latest novel of love and death, sex and life. Complicating matters for Constance in her pursuit of a recalcitrant and perfidious muse are the ongoing intrusions of Sgt. Rock, homicide detective with ulterior motives; daughter Lara and her rock musician partner, Rowlf, fugitives from a California religious cult; and 84-year-old Aunt Olive, one floor down, who shoots from the lip, and the hip, if anyone messes with her boyfriend, Fred. In the ensuing hijinks, Constance becomes a character trapped in her narrative, which is hijacked by her former husband. Ultimately, a novel about how to find a way to live in the world.
Finalist for the 2019 Foreword Indie Award for General Fiction.
Upon the death of their art-loving parents, thirteen and fourteen year old Jewish sisters are kidnapped by a family friend and taken to a brothel. There they are held captive by their shared shame and by the younger sister’s forced addiction to morphine. Love and psychodrama gives them the courage to finally escape Vienna. Once in England, however, Hedy discovers her younger sister Susannah longs to be independent– and in Italy. But in 1938, despite the safety they each have found among the privileged, they return to Vienna just before Hitler arrives, putting their own lives and those of two children in danger. With the background of anti-Semitism and exploitation, of sex and love and art and dramatic ruses, all during the terrifying rise of fascism in Austria and Italy, Look After Her reveals this truth: no matter how close we are to another human being, even a beloved sister, that’s what we are: close– we all have our own secrets to keep.
The ordinary becomes charged with occult power; Ursell’s poems hold up deceptively familiar settings and subjects to reveal sensual and frightening patterns.
Jeremy Knowles is a 17-year-old outcast who dreams of being a great artist. But when he suffers a severe mental breakdown brought on by bullying and other pressures at school, his future is called into question — as is his very existence! Can he survive the experience through the healing power of art? And just what does it mean to be “crazy,” anyway?
Home and away-the lives and thoughts of immigrants.
These creative works and brief essays by accomplished immigrant writers offer fresh perspectives, images, and insights that richly enhance our cultural imagination. Short creative works in a variety of genres-poetry, fiction, drama, and screenplay-address issues of truth, secrecy, love, loss, connections, and community. The essays in this volume grapple with the impact of immigration on art. Several of the contributors are well known in their counties of origin but endure obscurity here in Canada, their new home. This collection should serve as a gateway to the recognition of these writers in Canada.
The contributors to this volume come from Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Syria, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Ethiopia, Germany, China, Mexico, Philippines, and Nepal.
Looking East Over My Shoulder is a book that wakes with the dawn and goes on to explore how the day unfolds, in poems populated by animals, plants, and people both real and imagined. Drawing on the natural world around her and on an inner arena of love and family – both worlds infused with their inevitable darks and lights – Jill Jorgenson finds voice for the tender and the bitter, the peace and the turmoil, the playful and the wise. Her attention alights on often unlikely subjects: a pinwheel, a basket of overripe lychees, the hollow shaft of a spent lily, a jerryrigged shopping buggy, a dead hornet, the sounds that different kinds of sprinklers make, the moon’s reflection in her mug of coffee. Of such seemingly unpromising material, she is able to make something that elicits a surprised smile of recognition. Riffs of exuberant wordplay and soundplay alternate with quieter music in meditations that touch on spiritual and philosophical questions. Humane, intelligent, unjaded, this first collection hums throughout with liveliness of observation and love of the language.
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006
The Summer of Love is already like a distant memory; the psychedelic underground has turned in on itself. John Dupre has deserted a perfectly satisfying life as a student in Toronto, drawn back to the US by the need to make a difference in the Revolution. He’s living in Boston—under an assumed name because he’s on the FBI’s wanted list for draft evasion.
His best friend is Tom Parker, an ex-GI turned righteous drug dealer. When John, Tom, and the militant feminist and Situationist Pam Zalman seize control of an underground newspaper and are put on the Weatherman hit list, there’s really no place to hide—they’re wanted on all sides.
It’s the year of the Harvard Square riot, the invasion of Cambodia, and Kent State. Campuses across America are host to demonstrations and riots. Burning ROTC buildings has become an everyday pastime. Pam and John forge a relationship where they’re struggling against sex roles. The Left is splintering into ever smaller and crazier micro-factions. And that’s when things begin to get really weird . . .
Looking Good is a masterfully crafted, meticulously reconstructed social history of the ’60s counterculture and a searching examination of gender identity—the magnificent, explosive climax to Difficulty at the Beginning.
For centuries, Signal Hill has dominated both the skyline of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the hearts and minds of its residents. The Lookout traces the hill’s remarkable history as a military site and communications centre, with special attention to its most famous building, the former signalling station Cabot Tower.
Conceived in 1897 as an expression of Newfoundland nationalism, the tower’s meaning would change drastically over the years. Those changes, however, were always in step with broader currents in Newfoundland society. Signal Hill was the site of the first attempted transatlantic wireless transmission by Marconi in 1901. It has also been the site of defenses for St. John’s Harbour from the eighteenth century right up to the Second World War.
Signal Hill is now one of the most popular tourist destinations in eastern Canada.
Finalist for the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
The Pacific Cinematheque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers.
There is no better way to start off Pacific Cinémathèque’s Monograph Series, celebrating West Coast filmmakers, than with the work of David Rimmer. Mike Hoolboom’s essay tantalizes us with a romantic myth that contextualizes David, while Alex MacKenzie’s interview lets the artist speak for himself. Both offer a unique insight into the art practice of one of the most influential Canadian filmmakers of the 20th century. – Ann Marie Fleming, independent filmmaker and visual artist
The most exciting non-narrative film I’ve ever seen … images become polarized into grainy outlines, like drawings in white or colored chalk which gradually disintegrate and disappear. The film [Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper] resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction. – Kristina Nordstrom, The Village Voice
The riveting story of one man’s descent into hell. Losing Mariposa is the harrowing memoir of Doug Little’s two-year binge as a compulsive gambler — a fall from grace that made national front-page headlines, destroyed his life, and brought him to the very gates of prison, insanity, and death. As a community leader, Little bet on a world-class casino as the economic salvation of his town while he himself was hopelessly addicted, gambling feverishly to win back the thousands of dollars he had “borrowed” from the eight bank accounts he controlled. Little spins his whirlwind tale from his desperate midnight visits to Casino Rama, vividly recounting the heart-pounding, adrenalin-pumping allure of the roulette wheel, the flip-snap of a card at the blackjack tables, and the ding-ding-ding of the reels, bells, and whistles of the slot machines. He then confesses the despair of the parking lot and the life-threatening rides home, broke again, another $10,000 of other people’s money gone. Losing Mariposa is a cautionary tale of obsession and escape, a compelling story told with brutal honesty but not without irony. Told in the first person from the last time Little gambled — October 22, 1996 — it recounts that terrible day, hour by hour, both in terms of what was happening and what he was thinking and feeling. His story provides a rare first-hand chronicle of the devastation wrought by the addiction to gamble, a social problem growing throughout North America to epidemic proportions. It is a book that needed to be written, and a book that needs to be read.