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From a young age, Pippa Scott was made to feel damaged for simply being different. A highly sensitive child prone to emotional outbursts, she was sent away to a rigid British boarding school. Instead of taming her, the experience of abandonment and isolation intensified her longing for acceptance and comfort.
Set amidst the changing eras from the 1980s to the 21st century, Paper Girls Burn follows Scott as she becomes a young woman and increasingly turns to sex with sometimes cruel, occasionally dangerous men. Beyond her countless one-night stands, she becomes obsessed with men who reject her and chases belonging while she hooks up with a rock star in London, trains to dazzle on Broadway, works for jaded film execs in LA and probes the depths of Vancouver’s drag world.
At age thirty-five, Scott finds answers through a comprehensive diagnosis: borderline personality disorder with ADHD, OCD, PTSD, and depression. From there, she begins her journey towards healing and inner peace.
More than one woman’s story, this memoir offers reassurance to anyone who has been made to feel damaged for simply being different and yearning to be loved.
Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one’s own writing. Dominique Fortier brings Dickinson vividly to life, as if reanimating a flower that had been pressed in a book, through her reflections on language and what it feels like to be home.
Told from three distinct points of view, Paper Lions is an epic multi-generational novel about India, set in the years from the advent of the Second World War to the beginning of modern times in the 1960s. War brings opportunities and wealth to some; Independence ushers in great hope for the future; and the nation’s Partition brings along horrors, during which fortunes are made and lost, homes destroyed and abandoned, people slaughtered. The years roll on, a new generation arrives. In the locality of Raikot, Punjab, the three main characters–Bikram, Basanti, and Ajit–and the people around them, including two newly arrived nomadic tribes, the Bajigars, endure hardships and despair, and find moments of joy, as they face life’s challenges. Poignant, tragic, and at the same time exhilarating, Paper Lions brings historical India to itself in the lives of its characters. Through their struggles India comes of age, as they do.
Paper Oranges is a poetic response to Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett’s infamous pair, who pin their hopes on salvation that never arrives. It explores the notion of human existence as an extended wait characterized by quiet desperation, loneliness, suffering and the search for self. People who find themselves suspended in time and longing for something to alleviate their boredom tend to idle rather than move forward in any meaningful direction. But could there be an alternate narrative? If so, what shape would it take and how might it forever alter those whose “graveyard lives inside them,” those who fill up their days waiting for the next thing–the better job, the bigger car, the perfect spouse, the next terrorist attack?
This is a fractured memoir, steeped in the language and images Rogers was raised on: Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dorothy Parker quips, song lyrics, Beat diatribes, the visual gymnastics of cummings, Victorian children’s stories, fairy tales, and the crumbling beauty and very real danger of downtown Detroit.
Rogers’ writing is closely related to the lyrical tradition, though she’s also interested in narrative, mystery, memory, and the possibilities for language to create an emotional effect on a reader. Rogers is drawn to the nature of utopian impulses — from nineteenth century spiritual movements to 1960s radicalism to our hopes for Obama — and the ways these impulses break down.
Research subjects include: The Shakers, John Sinclair, the MC5, communes, hippie cookbooks, shamanism, Surrealism, Detroit and Joseph Cornell.
An unhappy orphan who finds solace in paper cut-outs of her parents, an Indian doctor who displays his medical degree in his taxi cab, and waiters who tamper with fortune cookie are some of the vibrant characters who are brought to life in this anthology of six monologues that revolve around paper. From drama to comedy to crime-thriller, Yee brings us a variety of plots and characters in a series of imaginative, thought-provoking vignettes.
From the moment she holds her baby niece, Rose is on a mission. Terrified that her baby niece will fall victim to the sexual abuse rampant in the family, Rose tells us in her own warm, funny, down-to-earth voice, how she reluctantly agrees to join a therapy group, hoping she can find out how to prevent disaster and see that baby Jenny grows up unharmed. In the group, she meets new friends who will become like family: Josie, who “sees” the future; Tammy, with a suspicious bruise on her neck; good and steady Marg, whose father is threatening to burn down her apartment house; and sweet, grieving, spiritual Sally. Rose’s own chronic problem, she confesses, is picking wrong men. Josie finds a small magazine picture of a little town in northern Ontario. She sees, with her second sight, a resort hotel to be built in this town and a sunnier life for the group. As they begin to take the first painful steps of emotional recovery, an intense fantasy about this unknown town and dream hotel becomes the secret life of the group. Deep friendships evolve as the women help one another through the roller coasters of their recovery process. Despite setbacks, they cling to their dream of moving up north and running their own hotel.
Frances, a manager for a large corporation, appears to be very successful. But Frances finds her piece of mind unravelling as she becomes overwhelmed by the destructive bureaucratic nature of the work world she lives in. Frances starts to lose small body parts, hears mysterious Leider music booming throughout her workplace at random times during the day, and obsesses over the caymans that guard her office building. Meanwhile, her alter-ego has regular conversations with the ghost of Kafka, who is writing the manuscript which Frances appears in. Written halfway between poetry and prose, Paper Trail questions the rat race work ethic many of us adhere to, more often out of necessity than choice. Through the thoughts and deeds of Frances and her alter-ego, author Arleen Paré demonstrates the stress and loneliness of modern society, and the profound impact this can have on a person’s sanity.
Ten-year-old Cassie lives with her working-class family in 1919 Winnipeg. The Great War and Spanish Influenza have taken their toll, and workers in the city are frustrated with low wages and long hours. When they orchestrate a general strike, Cassie — bright, determined and very bored at school — desperately wants to help.
She begins volunteering for the strike committee as a papergirl, distributing the strike bulletin at Portage and Main, and from her corner, she sees the strike take shape. Threatened and taunted by upper-class kids, and getting hungrier by the day, Cassie soon realizes that the strike isn’t just a lark — it’s a risky and brave movement.
With her impoverished best friend, Mary, volunteering in the nearby Labour Café, and Cassie’s police officer brother in the strike committee’s inner circle, Cassie becomes increasingly furious about the conditions that led workers to strike.
When an enormous but peaceful demonstration turns into a violent assault on Bloody Saturday, Cassie is changed forever.
Lively and engaging, this novel is a celebration of solidarity, justice and one brave papergirl.
Financial assistance provided by the Manitoba Arts Council.
Through the healing medicine of language, Rita Bouvier leads the reader into the world of the Métis and Cree to experience first hand the wisdom and generosity that she inherited in her birthright. Some of these poems are steeped in the tradition of the dramatic monologue; others are used as dialogue anchors to the rich oral traditions of First Nations people.
In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather. Never having thought of herself as an environmental poet, the author found that under the strictures of the pandemic the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive and unavoidable. Storms, floods, wildfires, environmental devastations sent news headlines leaping out in sharp relief – “a river in the sky,” “atmospheric rivers,” “parade of storms,” “heat dome” – and in such poetic terminology. Weather, both physical and emotional, forms the backdrop to this new collection.
Other themes that appear in the author’s previous work – relationships, the body, aging/illness/mortality, place, mood disorders, the shadows of the past – are explored here too.
Canada. 1940. In a time and country fraught with the uncertainties of war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King calls for the destruction of any “subversive elements” on the nation’s soil. The Act is supported by the majority of Canadians: anxious, patriotic and “intolerant” of fascism. After Canada officially declares war with Italy, Romano, a recent immigrant, is arrested without charge in his own home. Torn from the arms of his terrified and pregnant wife Maria, Romano is held against his will with hundreds of men of Italian descent at a prisoner-of-war camp in Petawawa, Ontario. These individuals were never officially charged with any crime. Playing out the ironies of a government acting “to protect its citizens,” Paradise by the River details the struggle to preserve morality in a nation and in a time seemingly intent on its demise.
Cast of two women and eight men.
While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras, an apocalyptic strain of mysticism threatens their existence: Anthea contends with a nascent New Age movement in the heart of the city while Liam encounters a radical theosophical commune along the coast of British Columbia, who appear to be building … something.
The Paradise Engine unfolds across a colourful backdrop of labour organizers, immaculately-attired cultists, ambitious socialites, basement offices and coffee shops. Its cast of characters and historical setting recalls Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business or Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, while its approach to memory and community is reminiscent of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this “wilderness” into an English country garden complete with vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and an elegant gazebo. After six generations, times and circumstances have changed, the family estate has been subdivided, the flowers have gone wild, the pear-tree has rotted and the heritage house has been carved up into a duplex, the property now divided in two by an ugly hedge.
The McKinnons now live in one side of the property, while the other has been sold to an immigrant family recently arrived from Turkey. The heirs apparent to both families, Day McKinnon and Leyla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, tolerating with thinly disguised amusement their ancestors’ “outdated” formalities and rituals. So alienated are they that they spend much of their time only half-jokingly speaking of themselves in the third person. Yet Leyla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old garden: its tumbled and overgrown ruins remind her of the Paradise Garden of Judeo-Christian/Islamic tradition—its layout in the four cardinal directions, its allusions to the seasons and the elements, and its walls that surround a place of secret love. For Day, however, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he has discovered a long-buried family secret, “The problem with being born into paradise is: eventually you inherit it. There’s something to be said for the bedlam of hell. Heaven is a lot of upkeep.” Abandoning their families for their careers, they are reunited years later having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but something that we must build by hand in the wilderness of our lives.
“The biggest mistake any of us could make would be to underestimate Satan.”
The seventeenth century and present day are seamlessly intertwined as Satan vents to an audience about her frustration at being cast out of Heaven and her thoughts on oppression. When she finds out that God has created delicate new creatures called “humans,” she crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty.
Erin Shields turns Heaven and Hell upside down in this witty, modern, feminist retelling of John Milton’s epic poem about the first battle between good and evil. Shields’s wickedly smart and funny script questions the reasons of the universe, the slow process of evolution and the freedom of knowledge. The debate over right and wrong has never been so satisfying.