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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.
Zul Premji’s passion has been science and its use for the benefit of his fellow citizens. From a background of abject poverty in a village in Tanzania, he rose to become, progressively a laboratory technician, a medical doctor, and finally a malaria expert and professor of pathology in a public university. In his practice he observed the clash between tradition and modernization, between “the iPod and the mullahs.” What he discovered is that more important than drugs and vaccines in combating widespread disease is the human spirit. Zul Premji tells his story in all its details–his family life, the obstacles of poverty and the impediments of politics, bureaucracy, and the human ego.
Malarky
Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.
As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men’s individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.
An unprecedented take on cancer and recovery
Winner of the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing
“Mitchell does a convincing job sorting fact from fiction, diffusing fear, and challenging the manipulative language of fundraisers who aim for pocketbooks rather than intellectual honesty . . . Mitchell’s research is rooted in science, while her writing remains grippingly personal.” — Quill & Quire
Alanna Mitchell explores the facts and myths about cancer in this powerful book, as she recounts her family’s experiences with the disease. When her beloved brother-in-law John is diagnosed with malignant melanoma, Alanna throws herself into the latest clinical research, providing us with a clear description of what scientists know of cancer and its treatments. When John enters the world of alternative treatments, Alanna does, too, looking for the science in untested waters. She comes face to face with the misconceptions we share about cancer, which are rooted in blame and anxiety, and opens the door to new ways of looking at our most-feared illness.
Beautifully written, Malignant Metaphor is a touching and persuasive book that has the power to change the conversation about cancer. Clear-eyed and compassionate, Mitchell opens the door to new ways of looking at our most-feared illness.
One day a moose walks into town, and inexplicably, two mallards tag along. The moose wants nothing more than to get rid of those pesky mallards, but they follow him everywhere. He can’t duck them at the harbour?they’re afraid of the seagulls; downtown, the pigeons give them pause. No matter where he goes, those mallards follow. Until, that is, the moose finds the perfect solution?duck, duck, goose.
With vibrant illustrations, and simple, playful language, Doody has created another charming story for young readers and listeners.
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“Walsh’s writings are stunning examples of how to look, how to feel, how to see.”
For 30 years Meeka Walsh has been the Editor of the Canadian art magazine, Border Crossings A selection of her much-admired essays published in each issue of that magazine have been selected for this substantial book.
Noted international critic and art writer, Barry Schwabsky, has written an introductory essay. The persistent engagement of memory winds through the book and resonant is EM Forster?s dictum, “Only connect.” Walsh makes her particular kind of connections throughout.
“With this collection of forty-seven pieces on literature, painting, photography, music, and a multitude of other fascinations, hauntings, and obsessions, Meeka Walsh stakes out a position as one of today’s most omnivorous and original lyric-essayists. Her restless polymathic mind leaps from one artist and discipline to another in always-unlikely permutations of inquiry and engagement. Her curiosity operates within a complicated architecture of deeply felt personal experience, while her vivid inhabitation of myths built-in her earliest childhood explains her relationship to the world and art. Her work is airborne, bearing aloft Robert Frank, Walter Benjamin, Fleur Jaeggy, Clarice Lispector, Rilke, and Caravaggio on flights that never fail to nail their landings. Walsh’s departed parents and grandparents and her beloved ghosts of the diaspora are never far from her thoughts. She bounces her reactions off those who came before, off the people and places who made her. In line after line, page after page, piece after piece, she makes us realize we are all writing our own artful autobiographies. She is a writer in mad, mad love with art. I love this book!” ? Guy Maddin
“Although all of the pieces in Malleable Forms circle around books, movies, pieces of music, and works of art, Meeka Walsh strikes me less as a critic than as an ideal reader of things. It?s a quality she shares with some of the philosopher-artists whose works haunt this book, who she returns to over and over again. As a “reader,” Walsh makes the most astonishing connections between contemporary art, the 20th-century modernist canon, and the small and incredibly rich daily things she observes. Although she travels a lot, her writings are beautifully grounded in her experience as a life-long resident of provincial and landlocked icy Winnipeg. Through her eyes, the Canadian prairie comes into breathtaking focus. Stories of exile, Judaism, immigration, and forgotten injustices wrought throughout Canadian history are never far away.
Collapsing the boundaries between “criticism” and “the personal essay,” Walsh?s writings are stunning examples of how to look, how to feel, how to see.” ? Chris Kraus
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Mallory doesn’t fit in. Growing up in the small town of Kenwick, Ontario during the late 1960s, Mallory gets taunted for looking like a boy, ostracized for her almost freakish intelligence, and can’t even get comfortable in her own skin, thanks to a ‘difference’ that makes her hate her own body.
Mama Dada
Winner of the 2016 Grand Prix litt�raire Archambault
Written with gritty humour in the form of a confession, Mama’s Boy recounts the family drama of a young man who sets out in search of his mother after a childhood spent shuffling from one foster home to another. A bizarre character with a skewed view of the world, he leads the reader on a quest that is both tender and violent.
A runaway bestseller among French readers, Mama’s Boy is the first book in a trilogy that took Quebec by storm, winning the 2016 Grand Prix litt�raire Archambault, and selling more than twenty thousand copies. Now, thanks to translator JC Sutcliffe, English readers will have the opportunity to absorb this darkly funny and disturbing novel from one of Quebec’s shining literary stars.
Now I’ve killed another person. I’m a serial killer. Sure, two people is hardly serial, but it’s a good start. I’m still young. Who knows where opportunities might lead me? Opportunity makes the thief, or the murderer, or even the pastry chef. It’s well documented.
Mama’s Boy Behind Bars is the second book in David Goudreault’s wildly successful and darkly funny Mama’s Boy trilogy. Once again written with gritty humour in the form of a confession, Mama’s Boy Behind Bars, picks up where the first book in the series left off.
Mama’s Boy finds himself in jail following a tender and violent search for his long-lost mother. In an attempt to survive his incarceration, he sets out to make a name for himself in the prison and is desperate to achieve his ambition of joining the ranks of the hardcore criminals. But things get wildly complicated when he falls in love with a prison guard. Can Mama’s Boy juggle love and crime?