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Michel Tremblay’s well-loved and award-winning play presents the story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. The older Albertines warn the younger ones of what is to come—“Our fate depends on you,” Albertine at 70 says to Albertine at 30. Together, these five Albertines provide a moving portrait of the extraordinary life of an “ordinary” woman.
This new, updated translation by Linda Gaboriau, commissioned for the prestigious Shaw Festival, celebrates the 25 years this classic Canadian drama has intrigued and delighted audiences around the world.
Cast of 6 women.
These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study of about 55 pages. Each contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.
Plunging deep into the soul, Sally Ito renders a spiritual examination like no other in her new poetry collection, Alert to Glory. With this cohesive meditation of creativity, motherhood and poetry, Ito discerns spiritual gifts in daily acts of raising children and writing. Her images tie in to profound moments with clear, fearless language: a clematis vine ceases to exist when the speaker is distracted by a poem – her first child. “I’m the poem, he says./Look at me!” Children’s teeth falling out, the endless exhaustion of mother’s work, and the sight of an old baby carriage connect to deeper insights.
“Vivid and fresh and finely crafted, this is a book that will strike a chord with anyone who has loved, lived, or wondered how we manage, in the face of our fragility, to carry on.” — Nino Ricci
This is the story of Zee, an aimless ex-lawyer who has turned his inability to make a decision into a fine art, and his wife, Alex, a practical and hard-working social worker who feels her biological clock ticking loudly. Reverberating with the emotional crises of the urban adult, Alex & Zee is an offbeat portrait of contemporary relationships, full of wickedly astute observations of city life and its multifarious life forms. Grimly hilarious at every turn, this is a terrific debut novel.
Nominated for the 1995 W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the recipient of widespread critical acclaim, Alex & Zee is the long-awaited reissue of Cordelia Strube’s biting take on contemporary romance.
In this illustrated biography of painter Alex Colville, Mark A. Cheetham charts the prodigious life and career of one of Canada’s best-known artists. Both artist and public figure, Colville engages many worlds at once: painting and politics, creativity and business. He has been given some of the highest honours for his art. He has also been charged with misogyny, opportunism, and crowd-pleasing. Where is the truth among all these contradictions? Read this biography and discover Alex Colville for yourself.
In this illustrated biography of painter Alex Colville, Mark A. Cheetham charts the prodigious life and career of one of Canada’s best-known artists. Both artist and public figure, Colville engages many worlds at once: painting and politics, creativity and business. He has been given some of the highest honours for his art. He has also been charged with misogyny, opportunism, and crowd-pleasing. Where is the truth among all these contradictions? Read this biography and discover Alex Colville for yourself.
Winner, Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award
Finalist, APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and George Borden Writing for Change Award
Alexa McDonough’s impact on Canadian politics cannot be measured solely by election victories or seat tallies. As the first female leader of a mainstream Canadian political party, she helped transform Nova Scotian and Canadian politics. In the process, she transcended party affiliation and gender to become simply “Alexa” to Canadians across the country.
In this authorized biography, veteran author Stephen Kimber chronicles Alexa’s life and political career and with it, weaves a narrative of the changing attitudes towards women in politics, from her early battles as the lone female MLA in a hostile Nova Scotian legislature to her leadership of the federal NDP to her role as senior stateswoman in Jack Layton’s shadow cabinet. Along the way, Kimber delves into McDonough’s personal life to uncover the origins of her political career: her upbringing in a wealthy family committed to progressive politics, her tightknit circles of female friends, her personal metamorphosis from “wife-of” to “leader-of,” and her emergence as a political leader whose importance goes beyond partisan politics. The result is an engrossing story of one of Canada’s most beloved politicians, whose common touch and lifelong advocacy of progressive causes made her a significant player in Canadian public life.
In Book Two of The Sun On the Mountains trilogy, Alexander James, a Quaker pursued by his violent past in the American Revolution, begins a new life as a fur trader in the forests of northern Canada. Travelling west with his Nahathaway wife and explorer David Thompson to the prairie of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Alexander cannot resist being drawn into the thrilling horse raids and buffalo hunts, and then by the mysteries of the Piikani medicine ceremonies.
Trafford’s writing is Quakerly: spare and modest, but never lacking in confident flow, illuminating that place and time as Alexander pushes deeper into the heart of the west to find the Light inside himself.” – Marina Endicott
” . . . takes readers into the borderlands of history and fiction, memory and possibility.” – Elizabeth Jameson, Professor of History, University of Calgary
“The most compelling (characters) are the women, who are made of sturdy stuff – strong, insightful, fierce and sometimes frightening.”
– Debora Steel, Editor in Chief, Windspeaker
” . . . a refreshing perspective on such Woodlands Cree concepts as the many-faceted wihtiko and the pre-Judaeo-Christian concept of the pawakan. Trafford has achieved what few novelists have managed.” – David Westfall, editor and compiler of Castel’s English Cree Dictionary and Memoirs of the Elders
“More clues cleverly concealed here than in the most ingenious Agatha Christie mystery.” – Pam Asheton
One of the Toronto Star‘s top books of the year
A year after watching Leo go through thin ice, twelve-year- old Ferd is obsessed with the idea that he can persuade his dead brother to come home through a campaign of letters. Plaintive notes appear around the house-folded squares of paper in the rain reservoir, kitchen sink, and washing machine. Ferd’s mother, Algoma, is also unravelling; attempting to hide her son’s letters, reconnect with her increasingly distant husband, and rebuild her life.
“Algoma is a strong debut novel with a haunting landscape, convincing characters and a vivid sense of the haphazard nature of our lives.”—National Post
“A very good first novel from a refreshing new voice.”—Quill & Quire
In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities.
Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in 2008, collective optimism for a more tolerant, peaceful, and co-operative post-Bush world spreads to Canada – and to the backroom of Salim’s Falafel Shoppe in Toronto. There, Ali Hakim and Ali Ababwa, refugee entertainers from the fictitious, war-torn country of Agraba, are inspired to write a stage play in celebration of the new president’s message of “hope and change.” The premiere of their Yo Mama, Osbama! (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Half-Black President) halts abruptly when an RCMP constable arrives at the theatre and arrests the pair for its financial ties to the Agrabanian People’s Front, an alleged “terrorist organization” on the Canadian government’s watch list.
Continuity becomes more apparent than change when Ali and Ali are swiftly put on trial. As the hapless playwrights try to defend themselves in the farcical deportation hearing that unfolds, racial and cultural stereotypes are invoked – and lampooned – as quickly as dubious evidence is presented. But, in the midst of the biting comedy, more serious questions are raised about the cost for some when we endeavour to protect the “freedoms” of others.
Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
A beautifully poetic exploration of being both a new mother and an artist, told using her own unique graphic novel and fine art approach.
>When Alice was born her mother only found time to draw her while she napped. Gradually Alice is multiplied in a tapestry of selves, both large and small, while an overarching narrative whispers through the pages, musing on the meeting of former and future selves. At its core, Alice at Naptime tells a universal story, of a parent pining for past freedoms, while simultaneously descending down a rabbit hole of all-encompassing maternal love.
A beautifully poetic exploration of being both a new mother and an artist, told using her own unique graphic novel and fine art approach.
>When Alice was born her mother only found time to draw her while she napped. Gradually Alice is multiplied in a tapestry of selves, both large and small, while an overarching narrative whispers through the pages, musing on the meeting of former and future selves. At its core, Alice at Naptime tells a universal story, of a parent pining for past freedoms, while simultaneously descending down a rabbit hole of all-encompassing maternal love.
It’s been 150 years since Alice first entered Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s beloved classic book. My, how times have changed! Now, from the multi-award-winning poet and scholar Steve McCaffery comes Alice in Plunderland, a reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books that will forever change the way readers negotiate Wonderland and its menagerie of characters.
McCaffery is your tour guide to Plunderland, a rough-and-tumble world where theft, drugs, and gangs hold sway, and nary a tea party is to be found. Meet the Cheshire Cat (a junkie from the UK), and just try to keep your head on as the King and Queen reign over the land of Cocaine. Yes, in this remarkable land of drug addiction, looting, and civil disobedience, even Alice’s adventures are transformed in her quest for a fix.
Clelia Scala’s translated collages beautifully annotate McCaffery’s renewed vision of Wonderland. Just as McCaffery has plundered Carroll’s original text, Scala uses John Tenniel’s iconic artwork to create a new look for the world of Alice’s Plunderland.
Fans of McCaffery’s work will find plenty of poetic marvel to sink their teeth into. In this, his first foray into prose-parody, McCaffery’s innovative poetics (in tandem with Scala’s provoking images in full colour) transform this classic story according to McCaffery’s theory of “palindromic time” by which the past is contemporized and the present historicized. Alice in Plunderland is sure to break open an exciting new initiative for fans of experimental writing and linguistics in the years to come.
Canadian-born Alice Munro has established herself as one of the world’s finest contemporary short story-writers. Since the publication of her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, she has tantalized a steadily expanding readership with her ability to present, “ordinary life so that it appears luminous, invested with a kind of magic.” In Alice Munro: A Double Life, the first full-length biography of Munro, Ross charts the development of Munro as a wife/mother and serious writer, and her struggle to balance the demands of this “double life.”
This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, “Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer”; by Munro’s renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith Thompson, poet John B. Lee, poet-playwright-teacher James Reaney, and local historian Reg Thompson. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or personal approach, while also providing judicious readings of the subtle literary dimensions of key Munro works.
This rich volume begins with a major new essay by renowned short story critic and theorist Charles E. May, “Returning to the Source: Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty,” followed by a major new essay by one of Munro’s most long-standing and most perceptive readers, Catherine Sheldrick Ross, identifying and examining the major concerns which Munro has revisited so compellingly for the duration of her astonishing career. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Everlasting take an ardently literary approach, with each essay focussing — uniquely amongst studies of any short story writer — on the last stories in Munro’s fourteen volumes from Dance of the Happy Shades to Dear Life. Collectively, the many different contributions to Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting offer a new model for the art of the critical essay — combining imagination and analysis, personal testimony and scholarship. They are intended equally to honour the genius of Alice Munro and to give enjoyment to all interested readers. And as one excited advance reader remarked, “I imagine that these two books will form the core of Alice Munro studies in the future.”