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Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)
Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman with a strange power over him. Myra and her family return to an unnamed, middle-class, grey Canadian city and she falls in with a pot-smoking, intellectual anarchist crowd. When Gayl and Elijah travel north and infiltrate Myra’s life, she walks willingly into their world: Myra continues to experiment sexually with Elijah, while Gayl plays an integral part in the increasingly abject games. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl’s self-consciousness. How does a girl feel scared? What is she scared of? And how does telling yourself not to be scared really work? As Myra enters worlds unfamiliar of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.
It is a hot June day. A woman sits in a bar in Montreal’s Main, waiting. Pushing down the disturbing scene (the police, a blanket) she saw that morning in the park. To focus herself, she tries to guess the stories of other women who come and go as the day darkens into night: the teenager Nanette; Adele of Halifax, who’s constantly on a train; a woman just back from Cuba; two lesbian lovers (one’s a “cowgirl”); Z., a performance artist; Norma jean from Toronto; the taunting radio voice of a woman promising a tango. Between the portraits, the woman watches and drinks and spins a setting for her “brides.” The question is, why does she keep deferring going home?
It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family leads an ordinary suburban existence. Former high school volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife Trixie serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful genocide studies journal. Their son Owen has just returned from juvenile prison to the vast horrors of high school. Heath, Parker’s brother, has vowed to cut down on weed and fried chicken for a regimen of self-improvement. All appears normal.
Yet in this summer’s swelter and the rise of Y2K anxiety, grim truths will be revealed. Sprawling yet scalpel-sharp, Maintenance, like some twenty-first-century White Noise, takes the suburbs to a geography you won’t recognize.
Pierre Nepveu is unique among French Quebec poets for having forged a voice at once unadorned, sensuous and adventurous.His new collection, The Major Verbs,is a masterwork consisting of three sequences: one focussing on an immigrant night cleaner glimpsed on a subway, another, a riff on a group of stones on a table, and the third concerning the poet’s parents and their deaths.The book closes with a long meditative poem written in the American southwest. The Major Verbs (under its original title, Les Verbes Majeur) was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 2010. Nepveu’s poetry collection, Mirabel won the 2003 Governor General Award for its original French-language edition and the 2004Governor General Award for Translation (Judith Cowan,translator, Signal Editions).
Nicole Fortin is on the cusp of realizing a long-held dream when her life takes a sudden turn. Instead of participating in the Olympic Games, she finds herself struggling to master the challenging physical demands of her job in an aerospace plant and win the confidence of her male colleagues.
As her involvement in union activity deepens, she is drawn into the centre of a bitter labour battle that pits her workmates against their employer.
In the midst of this escalating confrontation, incidents from Nicole?s past threaten to destroy her credibility with her coworkers and her relationship with her daughter. Workplace and family ties become tangled and stretched to the breaking point.
Chasing Baseball is a book that provides a snapshot of grassroots baseball in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Played as it is in the rain and cold, on temporary diamonds that are sometimes less than ideal, baseball is still fragile in these places and an enormous group effort is needed to sustain it. The book is the story of people who love the game, the story of people who believe that baseball can flourish where it’s been planted, developing according to the idiosyncrasies of each location.
On one hand, baseball is baseball, and what is depicted – despite some idiosyncratic rules and an incredibly wide range of talent and experience – is not dissimilar to what one might see in North America. On the other hand, it feels different. More precarious, yes, but also more communal. This is baseball played for its own sake, played in public parks by people who have somehow fallen in love with the game or are searching for a piece of home.
Written in the tradition of Dave Bidini’s Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places, Chasing Baseball provides readers with a vivid picture of baseball as it is played in these places.
In some Canadian provinces, people with severe physical disabilities are simply warehoused in nursing homes, where many people, especially in the age of homecare, are in the final stages of their lives. It is difficult for a young person to live in a home geared for death; their physical assistance needs are met, but their social, psychological and emotional needs are not. Jen Powley argues that everyone deserves to live with the dignity of risk.
In Making a Home, Powley tells the story of how she got young disabled people like herself out of nursing homes by developing a shared attendant services system for adults with severe physical disabilities. This book makes a case for living in the community and against dehumanizing institutionalization.
Making Moscovitch: A Feminist Theatre Scrapbook is the first critical volume dedicated solely to the work of Hannah Moscovitch, one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights. Blending scholarly essays, conversations with close collaborators, and unique production ephemera, this eclectic collection offers an intimate and multi-faceted portrait of a writer whose plays have significantly shaped contemporary Canadian theatre. Inspired by scrapbooking as a method of feminist historiography, the book reveals the collaborative contributions behind Moscovitch’s success and explores the resonant themes at the heart of her work. Both an archive and an invitation, Making Moscovitch is for artists, scholars, fans, and anyone interested in the messy, collective, and deeply political act of making theatre.
The Derrick Humphreys Story is a superb biography, a life of adventure that begins in Dickensian England before World War I, then moves to the Western Australian mining frontier of the 1930s and ’40s, with excursions into the New Guinea campaign in World War II, the De Beers’ South African diamond empire, a foreign aid project in Brazil and the rebuilding of the townsite at Churchill, Manitoba in the mid-1970s.
For many years Derrick Humphreys was the mayor of West Vancouver. His memoir of life in office offers the finest published account to date of the ins and outs, the personalities, and the bare-knuckled fights that have marked the politics of North and West Vancouver for over a decade. Never have Canadians been presented with a more engaging opportunity to examine the working of government on the street where each of us lives.
This book is destined to become a bible for every aspiring municipal politician. Above all, seniors will be inspired by Humphreys’ commitment to the values of “grey power.” Now in his ’80s, Humphreys still plays a part in municipal politics, helping seniors fight for their rights and for the amenities they so clearly require.
Making strange to yourself beats with a great, raw desire to know and experience; the poems rage with truth, sing their steadfast faith in the body, chant their incantations, moving us to deeper sorrow, greater longing and imagination.
In Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock, Sherrill Grace has written the story of Pollock’s life from her family roots in New Brunswick through her pioneering years as a Canadian playwright to the present as she continues to make theatre. It focuses attention on Pollock’s distinguished career as a playwright, director, actor and artistic director, and it places her story in the context of what is the flowering of Canadian theatre—the four decades from 1967 to the present. Grace also discusses each of Pollock’s major plays and many of their most interesting productions in Canada, as well as their productions in the United States, Japan and England. In her research for this volume, Grace interviewed theatre people across the globe and visited archives from coast to coast.
Sharon Pollock has won the Governor General’s Award for Drama twice (for Blood Relations and Doc), received several honorary doctorates, and won numerous other prizes and awards. She has also paved the way for the creation of new Canadian plays by championing the work of younger playwrights and mentoring their work across the country, but especially during her years at Banff.
While readers interested in Canadian theatre and in theatre history will find this biography of great value, those more interested in the personal story of a writer’s commitment to her craft and discipline will find Pollock’s story fascinating. While she has often called her family past a “ghost story,” over the course of her career she has had to cope with many challenges much more corporeal. As a woman in a male dominated field, as a mother of six children, as the survivor of an abusive marriage, she has managed to slay what Virginia Woolf once called the “angel in the house” to become one of Canada’s greatest living writers.
Making Up the Gods is equal parts quirky and sincere in its thoughtful exploration of tragedy and recovery, of new and old relationships, and of deeper questions of when to let the past rest.
Simone, a retired widow, would live a quiet and isolated life, if not for the lingering ghosts of her family. One day, Simone is visited at her home by a man named Martin claiming to be her cousin. When Martin asks if Simone is willing to sell her cottage by the lake, a proposition made sweeter by the prospect of a condo in Florida, Simone, though pleased at the thought of a cousin, also questions his intentions.
Where among her past has Martin even come from, and why has he emerged in this moment? The burden of making a decision is all the more difficult because Simone has agreed to take care of a friend’s nine-year-old boy, Chen, for a short time while his mother enjoys a much-needed vacation. Simone finds her match in Chen, a curious and precocious boy grieving the loss of his father and stepbrother in an accident that has shaken the entire community.
Can Simone hide her ability to see her family ghosts? Will Martin succeed in extorting Simone’s beloved home–and worse, is he a danger to Chen? Because of Chen and Martin, Simone is caught between her ties to the past and her desire to embrace the company of the living.
Distinguished in part by its attention to language of place, natural science, local flora and fauna, land and seascapes, and receptivity to aboriginal forebears, much of the literature from British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest region of the US is increasingly informed by cross-border and multicultural perspectives. Within the context of the region’s still relatively young written hsitory, these vivid signifiers may be regarded as effectively constituting a previously undefined literacy of place. The nature of the material is diverse and the aim has been to compile a kind of nurse-log compendium-an anthology rich in critical thinking, archival memory, creation myths, and homage to celebrated elders of the region’s literary tribe. From this trail-clearing work, further explorations can begin.
“The book is a welcome addition to a burgeoning field and an instigation to further critical inquiry into multiple literary traditions of the Northwest.” – Prairie Fire
Garry Ryan follows up Smoked with his most revelatory Detective Lane adventure yet. Under investigation by the Calgary Police Department, Lane finds himself fighting for his career. Then, when an Eastern European war criminal winds up dead in the city, and his partner Arthur is diagnosed with cancer, Lane must contend with dangerous criminals, broken allegiances, pressure from his superiors, a determined bomber, and the very real fear of losing the person he cares for most of all.
Winner of the 2018 Alex Award (ALA Youth Media Award)
Longlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic Adult Fiction
Honorable Mention at the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Awards
“[A] sly and affecting novella.”— Wall Street Journal, Best New Fiction
“An immensely touching tribute to a very human struggle with mortality.” — Publishers Weekly
A precisely crafted, darkly humorous portrait of a family in mourning
Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.
She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.
Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.