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Rath has been on a downward spiral. And it’s not just him – the world is a polluted mess, corporate influence has replaced independent thought, and his fiancée has decided that Rath is no longer worth her time.
While Rath embraces his multiple vices, he never expected his next bender to land him in another world entirely. He finds himself in Sarah’s world –an untainted parallel universe to his own: a pristine woodland where every person is the absolute master of their domain, and where Rath’s AI chip isn’t dictating his every move.
The opportunity to change his life presents itself in permutations of reality, but Sarah wants nothing more than to follow Rath back to his world. As their mirror worlds collide, Rath teeters on the edge of oblivion.
When Elizabeth Thiessen embarks on an expedition to study the cave murals of Baja California, Mexico, she is catapulted onto a mythical, existential journey into the unknown. Within days of landing in the Baja, Elizabeth discovers that her daughter, Patricia — posted in Afghanistan with the Canadian armed forces — is taken hostage by the Taliban. Elizabeth struggles with her decision to remain on assignment and suffers extreme anxiety over her daughter’s hostage-taking. Her psychological fragility is pushed to the brink by the field expedition’s physical hardships, and is intensified by her romantic involvement with Richard Wellington, one of seven of the international team of anthropologists commissioned to study the pictographs. Believed to have been painted over 4,000 years ago by a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the murals, embodied within a cave overhang, in the Sierra de San Francisco, are a testament to the nomads’ pantheistic reverence for nature and the universe. Collaboratively with the other teams members, Elizabeth formulates her own unique interpretation of the pictographs, undergoes a catharsis and overcomes her mounting feelings of despair and powerlessness. On a personal level Elizabeth is compelled to realize that if her daughter survives her ordeal, like her father, Stanislaw, she will no longer be the same person. As the nomadic painters so aptly depicted in the cave murals millenia ago, there is only certainty in the life cycle repeating itself.
Mirrors of Absence taps into three under-examined subjects: issues concerning how the poet survives under tyrannical regimes; how the notion of “imprisonment” affects identity; and the concept of freedom that is so essential to every human being. — John Mikhail Asfour
Miscellaneous Wreckage truly is a miscellany. There are no recurring themes or dominant sections, the subject matter of the poems is all over the map, exploring the poet’s past lives, places he has lived, his elderly parents, his children, ex-wives, and his dogs. If there is a unifying force it is his recognition of his mortality and the great beyond of death. But, no matter how dark the subject matter may appear, Simison confronts it all head on with humour. As he says, “After all, you may as well laugh at death.
Raging against death is as futile as raging against the wind in Saskatchewan.” Miscellaneous Wreckage is a sit back, read, and enjoy collection, and, yes, you will likely get more than a laugh or two as you turn its pages. “Though several of the poems in Miscellaneous Wreckage were written some years ago, the majority were written since 2009 when I moved from BC to Saskatchewan. Coinciding with the move from BC were the deaths of several lifelong friends and the realization that, perhaps, I wasn’t going to live forever as I had planned. Those events triggered a writing spree that continues today.”- Greg Simison
John Terpstra chronicles the unfolding of our everyday lives with a playfulness and easy intimacy reminiscent of poets like Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy, his conversational style belying his careful control of language. Whether he’s exploring the spiritual or the temporal, the present or the past, the animate or the inanimate, Terpstra approaches his subjects with a mix of curiosity and empathy, attuned to how the right words can “begin innocently enough / to thread through the fabric of our lives.”
Mischief in High Places examines the spectacular career and personal life of the man who, in 1919, first became elected prime minister of Newfoundland.
The political successes of Sir Richard Squires’ career are overshadowed by a legacy of scandal and deceit that paved the way for Newfoundland’s loss of democracy in 1933.
Perhaps best known for slipping out of the Colonial Building during the 1932 riot, Squires had survived three corruption-ridden terms in office in the final decades of responsible government while living a high-flying lifestyle with his wife, Helena.
Toronto Book Award Winner Cordelia Strube is back with another caustic, subversive, and darkly humorous book
Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter.
In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen, while trying to learn to forgive herself and maybe allow some love back into her life. Stevie’s biting, hilarious take on her own and others’ foibles will make you cheer and will have you loving Misconduct of the Heart (in the immortal words of Stevie’s best line cook) “like never tomorrow.”
Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Award and the Cuffer Prize for Fiction
Miscreations, the second collection by Grant Loveys, mulls over the metaphorical concept of miscreation — how people, objects, and relationships are imperfectly designed by their various creators — through the use of direct, visceral language, and frank, sometimes shocking, imagery.
Unconcerned with aesthetic imperfections, Miscreations focuses instead on how people and situations can be created from unstable, often opposing, elements and examines how these people and situations manage to survive. This is poetry that looks beyond a misprinted shirt and deep into the person wearing it … beyond empty memes and Instagram platitudes and into the complicated, flawed and searching human readers who navigate a world that is often at odds with itself.
How does a farm girl in 1950s Ontario escape the stall-cleaning, cow-milking, hay-baling drudgery of life on Rural Route 2? She becomes a movie star, of course! The quickest route to Hollywood for a plucky gal in the mid-twentieth century was to enter as many beauty pageants as possible and to sing, twirl and pivot her way into the hearts of judges.ÊAnd so Peggy Ann Douglas did just that, as did so many other young women of her generation, hoping to follow in the footsteps of starlets like Debbie Reynolds.
As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture—even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.
David French’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant has an eerie feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of Miss Julie, French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original—scenes of conflict, desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission and deceit—and backgrounded the historical elements of the play which have made it a favourite “period-piece” of the repertory theatre circuit. His revisioning of Miss Julie foregrounds the ruptures of identity and faith that ambition and desire eternally work in their rending of social norms, strictures and conventions, and he has re-enacted them in a contemporary idiom and vernacular that virtually cries out for the casting-call of a Paris Hilton to play the lead role.
As with his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, David French, one of Canada’s best-loved playwrights, has here once again paid homage to one of the enduring masters who have brought to the stage the most elemental and universal dramas of the human condition.
When a mad dentist steals people’s teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town.
Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate.
Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp’s memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There’s Miss Lamp’s mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There’s the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There’s naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp’s grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair – could it be love?
These characters’ stories weave together into a tangle – like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floralhotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else’s shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.
‘To read Miss Lamp is to see daily life again in clear, sharp lines and delightfully bright colours.’ – Larissa Lai
Fran longs to be a star of stage and screen, but she’s too poor to afford elocution and dance lessons. When she lands the leading role of Miss Matty in a school production of Cranford, she’s determined to make a splash. Far away, in Europe, World War II rages on, but Fran isn’t worried, because her boyfriend is stationed in Canada. Her life seems to be heading in the right direction, finally — until she begins to unravel a web of lies and deception. Much as she wants to cling to familiar fantasies, Fran may have no choice but to face the truth.
Miss O: My Life in Dance is the candid autobiography of Betty Oliphant, founder of Canada’s renowned National Ballet School. World War, two failed marriages, two daughters, an abortion, a long battle with depression, back-breaking work, eventual world-wide recognition, and friendships with some of leading dancers of our time make Betty Oliphant’s exceptionally frank autobiography both a vivid picture of the birth of ballet in Canada and the story of an exceptional woman. With an introduction from Mikhail Baryshnikov.”Betty Oliphant has written a moving account of her pioneering efforts to launch ballet in Canada. She paints vivid behind-the-scenes pictures of the school and company she founded and of the ballet stars she nurtured, among them Veronica Tennant, Karen Kain and Rex Harrington. With characteristic candour, she recounts her many battles along the way and her experiences with international stars Erik Bruhm and Rudolf Nureyev.”–Diane Solway, author of A Dance Against Time
Sixteen-year-old Miles has run away from home, inviting his childhood companion, the fourteen-year-old Inuit orphan Chateaugué, to join him in a rented flat opposite Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Montreal. There they construct a chaste life for themselves, living as brother and sister. They spend their days riding bicycles wildly through the streets of the city, dodging the automobiles that symbolize for them the adult world they despise, a world that has dominated the landscape with its roadmaps of social discourse. They spend hours at the library, laughing with disdain at how the classics have become venerated, how their authors’ words and turns of phrase have become confused with the things and actions they signify. Enthralled by the works of the “mad” poet Nelligan, Miles begins a journal, determined to free language from the constraints of convention, but finds he cannot write anything without immediately conjuring up its opposite.
To escape the boredom that history seems to have decreed shall be re-enacted endlessly by all grown-ups, Miles and Chateaugué enter into a suicide pact to preserve their childhood freedom and purity from the debasement of the adult roles pre-ordained for them.
Destitute after spending what little money they have, Miles goes to a bar in search of a drink, where he is seduced by an older woman, and suddenly finds himself both attracted and repelled by the pleasures and debasements of the flesh. Having stepped out of their world of childhood innocence, can he return to Chateaugué and consummate their vows, or is this brush with experience irrevocable?
Written in a style that echoes the work of Arthur Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs, Ducharme’s vision is darkly prophetic of a world that has lost its innocence, and on which “our lady of good help” now only gazes with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile.