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To sketch Vancouver
From dawn until dark.
From Spanish Banks
To Stanley Park
As young artist Marina explores Vancouver from dawn to dusk, she records her impressions in her sketchbook. From Stanley Park to Granville Island, from Horseshoe Bay to Chinatown, Marina delights in the diversity of this West Coast city and brings its colourful spirit to life. With the combination of lively illustration and playful text that we know from The Ferryboat Ride, My Vancouver Sketchbook is sure to delight both visitors and residents.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Year
The brilliant new novel from the fiercely talented author of Vanishing Monuments, shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
On the morning of June 2, 2016, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, a mass that – three weeks later – will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world.
For readers of Karen Tei Yamashita and Haruki Murakami and fans of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, My Volcano sets the mythic and absurd against the starkly realistic, attempting to portray what it feels like to live in a burning world stricken numb.
My Volcano is a pre-apocalyptic vision following a global and diverse cast of characters, each experiencing private and collective eruptions: an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself 500 years in the past, where he lives through the fall of the Aztec Empire; a folktale scholar in Tokyo studies a story with indeterminate origins about a woman coming down a mountain to destroy villages and towns; a white trans writer living in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse with Doctors without Borders works with Syrian refugees in Greece as she tries to grapple with the trauma of surviving an American bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic herder in Mongolia is stung by a bee and finds himself transformed into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aims to cleanse the worldâs most polluted places on its path toward assimilating every living thing on Earth into its consciousness.
With audacious structure and poetic prose, My Volcano is an electrifying tapestry on fire.
A herd of horses frozen in a river. A bargain bridge. Séances. Golden Boy pageants. A demolished hockey arena. St. Mary’s Academy for Girls. Spanky the Guide Dog through Time. An epidemic of sleepwalking.
This is the Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world’s foremost cinéaste planant, and it’s not the Winnipeg you’ll find in tourist brochures. When the iconoclastic auteur of The Saddest Music in the World decided to tackle the subject of his hometown, it could only have become a ‘docu-fantasia,’ a melange of personal history, civic tragedy and mystical hypothesizing. The result is wildly delirious, deeply personal and deliciously entertaining.
Herewith, venture deeper into the mind of Maddin with the text of his narration, wantonly annotated with an avalanche of marginal digressions, stills, outtakes, family photos, emails, essays, deoculations, animations, notebook pages and collages. There’s even an X-ray of Spanky the pug and an in-depth interview with Michael Ondaatje.
‘If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin … he rewrites history; when that fails, he creates it.’ – Roger Ebert
‘[Maddin is] the most reluctantly radical and humorously tortured maverick working in the movies today.’ – John Waters
From the acclaimed author of the International Booker Prize–shortlisted literary sensation, The Employees, comes a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.
Anna is utterly lost. Still in shock after the birth of her son, she moves to snowbound Stockholm with her newborn and boyfriend, where a chasm soon opens between the couple. Lonely and isolated, Anna reads too many internet articles and shops for clothes she cannot afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she must read and write herself back into her proper place in the world.
My Work is a fervent, intimate, and compulsive examination of the relationship between motherhood, writing, and everyday life. In a mesmerizing, propulsive blend of prose, poetry, journal entries, and letters, Olga Ravn probes the pain, postpartum depression, housework, shopping, mundanity, and anxiety of motherhood, all the while celebrating the unbounded that comes from the love in a parent and child relationship—and rediscovering oneself through art.
In the follow-up to her BC Book Prize-winning book of poetry, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, Mercedes Eng continues her poetic investigation of racism and colonialism in Canada, weaponizing the language of the nation-state against itself in the service of social justice. my yt mama is a collection of poems that considers historic and contemporary colonial violence in the Canadian prairies, a settler geography and state of mind that irrevocably shaped Eng’s understanding of race as person of colour born and raised in Treaty 7 Territory in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
These poems document an education in white supremacist ideology that began in infancy and occurred everywhere: at home where the author lived with her white mother, 1261 kilometres away from her Chinese migrant father’s family; in public institutions such as the school, the library, and the museum that erase Indigenous peoples’ histories while producing the myth of the “vanishing Indians;” and in the media and entertainment in which white supremacist beauty standards are constructed and reinforced. Keenly attuned to the language of those in power, Eng exposes the violence of the English language in the colonial project, taking on the words of Canadian politician F. W. Gershaw’s history of the city of Medicine Hat as occasioned by Canada’s Centennial, to derail the superficially neutral language of yt history that mythologizes nation and city while simultaneously deriding Indigenous ways of being (ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) as “legends” or “myths.” Like the author herself, my yt mama is hybrid: part memoir, part history, part discourse analysis, part love letter to her mother.
Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry)
Finalist, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award
Leaving a drawer open in here
is like leaving your fly undone
is like letting a scab hang off a healing wound.
In Myself A Paperclip, Finlay sketches the internal self and the external whir of the psychiatric ward, laying bare its daily rhythms. Memories, musings, echoes, and meditations on stigma coalesce: quarters dispensed into a payphone to listen to the stunned silence of a partner; Splenda packets and rice pudding hoarded in dresser drawers; counting back from ten as electrodes connect with the temple.
Deeply personal and reflective, Myself A Paperclip confronts abuse and experiences with debilitating mental illnesses, therapies, and hospitalizations, all shaped into the remarkable form of a serial long poem.
Mysteries of Wrestling: Solved is a hysterical and informative look at the sports entertainment industry, brought to you by the hosts of Get in the Ring (GIR), the longest running professional wrestling radio show in history. With Sir Adam and the Phantom, youll discover the truth about wrestling’s deepest, darkest mysteries — but the hosts of gir are not alone.
They’ve enlisted the help of some of pro wrestling’s biggest stars. With names like Steve Austin, Kamala (yes, he talks!), Chyna, Sid Vicious, and Bobby “the Brain” Heenan, there’s a wealth of insider information from scores of wrestling legends all packed into one book. Mysteries of Wrestling: Solved digs into the extensive archives of gir’s library, and pulls out classic interviews with some of wrestling’s most beloved stars: the Rock, Bret “the Hitman” Hart, and Hulk Hogan are all here!
No turnbuckle has gone unsearched, no foreign object left behind, and no feelings spared as grapplers from all over the world have been tracked down to provide answers to wrestling’s most disputed issues. Who was the toughest guy outside the ring? Did the Kliq really run wrestling? Just how much influence has Hulk Hogan exerted — in getting jobs for his buddies?
At the heart of Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father’s death; the senior Shintani’s body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area.
The impetus for Mike’s search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father’s, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani’s dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams.
Another great mystery of Mike’s life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians.
The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father’s life and Boku’s uncle (Daniel Sugiura from the Three Pleasures), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off.
Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. The Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is an imaginative examination of the effect of the exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).
The date is March 31, 1914. Flushed with the success of a great hunt, the SS Southern Cross is heading back to St. John’s, loaded to the gunwales with seal pelts. Somewhere off Newfoundland’s southeast coast, the ship founders, leaving no clue as to her fate or that of her 173 crew members. The ship simply vanishes, as if whisked off the face of the Earth, the worst disaster ever to befall the sealing industry. The Mystery of the SS Southern Cross is a novel that engages the human story behind this long-standing mystery. It interweaves the crankiness of an old ship, vicious weather, and the passions of men caught up in the frenzies of the time.• John Lundrigan, a young sealer with special gifts, struggles against the weight of his oppressive father. He escapes to join the crew of the Southern Cross, where, despite his small stature, he establishes himself as a top hand. • George Clarke is the burly captain of the Southern Cross. Returning from the hunt he decides to push forward into the teeth of a growing storm.• Walter Baine Grieve, merchant and member of the St. John’s elite, manages a fleet of decrepit, old wooden sealing ships. He delegates responsibility for outfitting the ‘Cross to a junior assistant. This young man betrays Grieve’s trust, helping to set the stage for the disaster.These stories intertwine to paint a portrait of the immensely rich and complex events that led to the tragedy of the Southern Cross. This fictionalized account offers insight into the mysterious loss that has lingered unresolved for a century. So too do the vibrant times of pre-war Newfoundland come to life–humour, passion, and songs breathe vitality into this relatively untold tale. In addition to being a rousing sea story, this novel honours the memory of the gallant crew and the lives they were forced to live.
Myth, Origins, Magic is an examination of Eli Mandel’s work, from early poems to the Family Romance.
“Poets with Kathy Mac’s impeccable technical skill are not too hard to find, but very few can touch her for emotional power, thematic range, gentle humour or quiet courage. As Robert Heinlein said of another writer, these poems should be served with a whisk broom, so that the customer may brush the sawdust off himself when he gets back up.” —Spider Robinson, author of Telempath (1976), The Free Lunch (2001) and many others in between
On Mac’s 1991 chapbook, Dust From Outer Space: “Mac’s poetry is incisive, witty, and thought-provoking.” —Saint Mary’s Journal
On Mac’s 1995 hypertext, Unnatural Habitats: “a rare disquieting beauty… The images come from the newspapers, television, or books, but are interiorized and made part of the narrator, whose voice is dry and evocative, an impossible combination that Kathy Mac achieves with apparent lightness… a pessimistic beautiful report from the front of what it means to be human.” —Susan Pajares Tosca, Hipertilia
In this collection, Chris Craddock tackles the weighty issues of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and sex and pregnancy in the lives of teens and their families with humour, insight, and candid reality. Throughout all three plays subversive wit and outright laugh-ability keep students, parents and teachers entertained, while building new awareness of these significant social issues.
“Doug Melnyk works with the fragment, the fleeting insight, the shocking contradiction, the bizarre repetition to give us a collection of texts that are comically and painfully original.” Robert Kroetsch. Did you heart about that terrible accident at the intersections of Pembina and Corydon and Osborne? A car crashed right onto the bus shack and killed three people. The people who were sitting on the bench inside the shack could see the car coming. It crashed on top of the bus shack and on the bench and it killed three people. For a long time after this there was no bus shack on the corner. And then they finally did rebuild it but they put the bench inside the shack facing the other direction.
Having visited both Poles and circumnavigated the world, Yosef Wosk, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, has developed his own field of psychogeography. The title piece describes the time he almost died climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza at midnight. The next day he descended into an ancient cavern beneath the Great Pyramid where he took off all his clothes, alone, and meditated. Probably more people have walked on the moon than have done that. Here, then, is an unconventional book by an original thinker, a former rabbi who owns ancient Torah scrolls, Stars Wars memorabilia, Pee-wee Herman’s bike and a yellow star from the concentration camps. There is quite simply nobody like him. A scholar-turned-philanthropist-turned-art-collector-turned-writer/philosopher, Yosef Wosk is a reclusive Lone Ranger who frequently helps others but remains a stranger. Here, for the first time, he has gathered a medley of observations to reveal his private world.
Subjects include Leonard Cohen, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus as a storyteller, knowing Elie Wiesel, visiting anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, technology (welcoming The Global Brain) and visits to both Poles (expunging Westerncentricity and Northerncentricity).