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People of the Land
$36.95The sacred legends of four First Nations?Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh?have been passed down from generation to generation through the Elders and are integral to the teachings and Oral Traditions of First Nations peoples. These stories link people to the land and to each other, passing on Traditional Knowledge and history. For the first time, these sacred teachings are collected in an anthology of stories willingly shared by the respected storytellers of each nation and adorned with spectacular imagery and art. These legends?which range from creation stories to naming stories?add to our knowledge of ourselves and each other.
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People You Know, Places You’ve Been
$23.00The latest poetry and artwork collection from Hana Shafi examines the unlikely connections we make to the people and places we encounter. Despite the infinite variations of our lives, every urban dweller has sparred with a neighbour they disliked, seen beautiful strangers on public transit, told secrets to their hairdresser. We interact with these supporting characters on a daily basis—and often we are them for others.
Shafi celebrates the Antiheroes of the world (the alcoholic at your local bar, teenage girls); examines those in Beautiful Leading Roles (the hot professor, the rich couple); lauds older generations of Wizards and Crones; and flags the Nemeses (men who think they’re allies, competitors for produce at farmer’s markets). We sink into recognition at depictions of Palaces such as the greasy spoon, Dungeons of public transit, and the Liminal Spaces of checkout counters or waiting rooms (including that one at the end of the cosmos).
People You Know, Places You’ve Been is an insightful, charming collection that offers a sense of shared recognition and nostalgia, ultimately asking: what if seemingly mundane places are actually the foundations of who you are?
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Perfect Little Angels
$24.95Finalist, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust of Canada); Runner-up, Danuta Gleed Literary Award
A beautifully imagined story collection set largely in Nigeria that explores themes of masculinity and repressed desires through the lens of (un)conditional love
In this stunning debut story collection set largely in Nigeria, questions abound: What happens when we fall short of society’s – and our own – expectations? When our personal desires conflict with the duties we are bound to? The characters in Perfect Little Angels confront these dilemmas and more in these brilliantly imagined tales.
In a boarding school, tensions brew between students and vengeful staff. An addict seeks a fresh start in pottery class. A man returns home from university abroad with confessions that unravel his mother’s world. Amid winter storms, a ghost delights her grief-stricken partner. And atop a hill surrounded by rot and garbage, two lovers dare to embark on a secret, dangerous romance. Human desires – for connection, salvation, and understanding – imbue these deeply Nigerian stories with universal resonance.
In Vincent Anioke’s tenderly written stories, characters seek love in different permutations from teachers, parents, dead partners, and even God. Perfect Little Angels is a nuanced exploration of masculinity, religion, marginalization, suppressed queerness, and self-expression through the lens of (un)conditional love.
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Perfect Pie
$15.95In the course of an afternoon’s reunion between two long-estranged women, a buried memory, and two teenagers’ wild secret, slams into the present.
When Patsy invites her old friend Francesca, now a glamourous actress, to her home in Marmora after a thirty-year absence the two women reunite with a certain amount of unease. As the day progresses, we learn how their friendship blossomed in their adolescence and how, on one fateful day, it all ended.
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Perfect Red
$37.00Artist. Activist. Canadian. There is only one Paraskeva Clark.
The proud daughter of Russian peasants, Paraskeva Plistick was born in St. Petersburg in 1898 and was educated in art during the revolutions that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. She took this creative sense, steeped in social awareness, with her when she married Canadian accountant Phillip Clark and accompanied him back to Toronto. It was not long before Paraskeva attracted attention from the Toronto art community, her landscapes in particular garnering an invitation into the Canadian Group of Painters. But it was during the 1930s that Clark came into her own. Inspired by the war in Spain and the rest of Europe, she reflected the turmoil around her on canvas, culminating in Petroshuka, a work based on a 1937 incident that left five Chicago strikers dead at the hands of police. And yet for all her commitment to the world at large, Clark’s is a classic immigrant story, of someone who had to adjust to unfamiliar customs and rules.
Perfect Red tells the story of a woman who left an indelible mark on the Canadian art and society.
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Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit, The
$20.95The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit is about memory of being, being in body, spirit and speculation. It unravels the remembrances and cognitions forged in the mind as it recalls life through images that are intensely reflective, transtemporal, sensual, daunting and mournful, sometimes feeling like never-ending, lazy arias. As we move from poem to poem, we dwell in magnificent displays of sensations, ideas, and moods, happy and sorrowful, pleading and celebratory, allowing ourselves to reconstruct life through the physicality of the body or the world, perceiving their pulsating powers and anchoring ourselves in the house that we sometimes forget we have. The collection is also about memory of place, of family, of birth, and memory obtained through formal learning, and how that memory, in all its dimensions, is transposed to the page, recreated and reinvented. Deeply philosophic as well as lyrical, the collection interrogates the idea of memory in multiple narratives that juxtapose various modes of expression, argumentation, mood, imagery, tone, and cultural references.
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Perfect Youth
$22.95A forgotten musical and cultural history of drunks and miscreants, future country stars and political strategists
Perfect Youth is the story of the birth of Canadian punk, a transformative cultural force that reared its head across the country at the end of the 1970s. Bands like D.O.A., the Subhumans, the Viletones, and Teenage Head — alongside lesser-known regional acts from all over Canada — reshaped a dull musical landscape, injecting new energy and new sounds into halls, bars, and record stores from Victoria to St. John’s.
Reaching beyond the realm of standard band biographies, Sutherland unearths a detailed historical context to offer an idea of how the advent of punk reshaped the culture of cities across Canada, speeding along the creation of alternative means of cultural production, consumption, and distribution.
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Perfecting
$22.95With blood on his hands, Curtis Woolf flees his home in New Mexico for Canada, where he starts a religious commune, the Family. There he heals others and preaches pacifism while enduring the torment of this own damaged soul. Then his lover, Martha, finds his gun and goes south to discover the truth, whatever that might be. Curtis sets out to bring her back, lest the Family fall apart. In the half-light of a nursing home sits Hollis, dragon lord of a lost Mormon line, who has anointed Curtis, damned him, and now awaits his return.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s writing is full of dark humour and razor-sharp insight. Catching human fallibility head-on, she demands examination, confrontation, and a reckoning of pain with beauty.
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Perfection
$19.95Patrick Warner’s Perfection — the follow-up to his award-winning Mole — makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate-chip pancake stands accused at trial, and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a transfixed audience.
In descending the rabbit hole of this wildly imaginative collection, we find ourselves amid a field of engagement where destructive ideals of beauty, politics, art, romantic love, and spirituality are ambushed by roguish parody, acerbic satire, life-affirming laughter, and a hard-won pragmatism. And while Warner’s trademark playfulness and formal ingenuity remain intact, his classic arms-length objectivity gives ground to a private and autobiographical directness of style often evaded in his earlier work.
In Perfection, where death is certain and certainty is hell-bent on death, Warner refuses to rest on his laurels, continuing to build on his reputation as one of the most respected voices in Canadian poetry.
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Performing Back
$19.95The area of post-colonial studies is primarily concerned with how societies and cultures have been affected through the processes of colonization, and Canada is considered by many literary and cultural critics to be such a nation not only due to its historical lineage as a settler colony but also by playing host to many multicultural immigrant communities that bring with them their own histories embedded in colonialism. Performing Back aims to generate discussion about the different kinds of theatrical and political output this country is generating, and fills a glaring void in current theatre scholarship in Canada. This collection of plays examines topics such as race, ethnicity, imperialism, and notions of “otherness” insofar as they intersect with the broader theme of post-colonial theatre. This first volume of the Contextualizing Canadian Theatre series includes Yvette Nolan’s The Birds, a Native retelling of the Aristophanes play; Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef’s The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, a satirical play on Western neo-colonial forays into Iraq; and Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Salome’s Clothes, a harrowing domestic tragedy set in Côte d’Ivoire.
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Performing National Identities
$24.95If you have ever wondered why the Scots love Michel Tremblay or what Sharon Pollock has to say to Japanese audiences, or just how a Canadian play—or being Canadian—is viewed in England or the United States, you should read this volume. Each author holds a mirror up to Canadian theatre, but the images in those mirrors differ in fascinating ways. The cumulative result is a multi-faceted reflection, coming from some of the world’s most astute critics, on how Canada performs its national identities.
Performing National Identities is a collection of 18 original essays on contemporary Canadian theatre by scholars and drama specialists in Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Australia and Japan. The international scope of the volume, reflected in its co-editors (Sherrill Grace from Canada, Albert-Reiner Glaap from Germany), confirms the new importance of Canadian plays on the world stage. This is the first volume of its kind, and it celebrates the variety and vitality of Canadian theatre.
Among the playwrights whose works are discussed here are Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock, George F. Walker, Joan MacLeod, Tomson Highway, Marie Clements, Michel Marc Bouchard, Morris Panych, Monique Mojica, and Djanet Sears. There are also interviews with theatre practitioners in Hungary, Germany and Canada, including one with the late Urjo Kareda. The contributors consider many of the challenging issues addressed by contemporary Canadian playwrights—issues of race and racist stereotypes, of gender and violence, of historical events and identity politics—and all agree that Canada’s playwrights mine their local or individual situations to explore universal problems. It is this large vision, as well as the quality of the plays, that enables Canadian drama to move audiences all over the world.
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Peril at the Pleasant
$16.95Margaret Rudley has finally persuaded her husband Trevor to take a vacation, a week-long canoeing expedition in Northern Ontario. Rudley hates the idea of leaving the Pleasant, the beautiful old country inn they’ve run for over a quarter of a century, but he is reluctant to deny her a cherished dream. They set off, accompanied by long-time guests Elizabeth Miller, Edward Simpson, Norman and Geraldine Phipps-Walker, and a pair of neophytes, Vern Peters and Eric Turnbull. They leave the Pleasant and a few regular guests, including the Sawchucks and their incorrigible eight-year-old grandchildren, Ned and Nora, in the capable hands of Melba Millotte.
In their absence, chaos reigns at the Pleasant. A serial murderer is on the lam in cottage country. Ned and Nora disappear and a ransom note is received by the local paper. The laundryman’s truck is stolen. Tiffany encounters an intruder in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning. Detectives Brisbois and Creighton are on the scene to investigate these various crimes, including the appearance of a dead body in a ditch a few miles from the Pleasant and a guest of the inn with some strange habits.
While intrigue swirls around the Pleasant, the canoeists continue downriver, oblivious to the threat that lurks around the next bend. When Gil the guide and Vern Peters disappear, the lives of the group are in peril. Miss Miller and Norman must come through to save the day, but can they?
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Perilous Departures
$17.95A small-town Bill Clinton look-alike agonizes over whether to accept a tempting offer from the CIA; an obese young woman finds love in a prairie cafe; a lonely child encounters a supernatural being; a teenage girl struggles with a sexual predator as she hitchhikes on the autobahn; a newly divorced man tries to return his adopted children; two brothers and a sister take their father’s ashes back to the North, trying to make it over the ice road before break-up.
These are just a few of the stories from Margaret Macpherson’s remarkable debut collection, Perilous Departures. Perilous though they may be, all of these stories represent a departure from the ordinary and all celebrate the chaotic splendour of life. Each story, in its individuality, illuminates the path that leads to home, but home isn’t always what we expect, and paths in Macpherson’s world are rarely straight and narrow.
With compelling exuberance, Margaret Macpherson entices her readers to leave behind their familiar comforts and join her on a unpredictable journey of hazardous navigations. In Perilous Departures, the risks are many, the rewards transformative.
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Permanent Carnival Time
$18.00?I?d rather have a transorbital lobotomy / Than a transnational economy.?
In his new book of poetry, Colin Smith?s droll humour and meticulous control of language are metered out to explore the stakes of pain and the pain of folly. Language plays throughout the text, bringing a blithe tone to dark matters, and evoking fruitful tensions for the reader. Scattered topics of climate change, labour disputes, war, and massive inequities within cities are encountered by a voice that seems to scorn humanity as much as it delights in human language. Permanent Carnival Time is laugh-out-loud language poetry.
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Permanent Danger | Danger permanent
$49.95Anna Torma’s large embroideries are complex expressions of her experiences of family, immigration, joy, and the act of creation. Her richly layered textile narratives draw references from popular culture, thrift shop aesthetics, and traditional Hungarian textiles and demonstrate her deep concern for the world we live in.
Permanent Danger takes its title from Torma’s large-scale 2017 work, making reference to human strife and vulnerability, threatened natural environments, and the highs and lows of daily life. Fifteen large-scale works produced by Torma between 2011 and 2021 are featured, along with essays by curators Sarah Quinton, Anne Koval, and Emily Falvey. The result is a stunning volume that allows readers to appreciate the intricacies and complexities of Torma’s magnificent works.
Born in Hungary, Anna Torma immigrated to Canada in 1988 and lives in New Brunswick. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, she was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts — Saidye Bronfman Award in 2020. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Canada and abroad, including at the prestigious 16th International Triennial of Tapestry in Łódź, Poland, in 2019, and CONTEXTILE 24, the contemporary textile art biennial in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2024.
Les grandes broderies d’Anna Torma sont des tableaux complexes qui illustrent une expérience particulière de la famille, de l’immigration, de la joie et de l’acte de création. Autant de récits emboîtés, inspirés de la culture populaire, d’une esthétique de friperie et de l’art textile hongrois traditionnel, qui expriment son inquiétude à l’égard de notre monde.
L’ouvrage Danger permanent emprunte son titre à une œuvre de grandes dimensions que Torma a créée en 2017 et qui évoque les combats et la vulnérabilité de l’être humain, les menaces qui pèsent sur le monde naturel, ainsi que les hauts et les bas de la vie quotidienne. L’ouvrage fait la part belle à quinze œuvres à grande échelle des années 2011 à 2021 et à des textes de Sarah Quinton, Anne Koval et Emily Falvey, toutes trois conservatrices. Résultat : un livre superbe qui rend accessibles aux lecteurs la subtilité et la complexité des œuvres magnifiques de l’artiste.
Née en Hongrie, Anna Torma est arrivée au Canada en 1988 et vit actuellement au Nouveau-Brunswick. Membre de l’Académie royale des arts du Canada, elle a reçu en 2020 le Prix Saidye-Bronfman, de l’importante série des Prix du Gouverneur général en arts visuels et en arts médiatiques. Ses œuvres ont fait l’objet de nombreuses expositions au Canada et ailleurs, notamment la prestigieuse Triennale internationale de la tapisserie de Lodz, en Pologne, en 2019, et CONTEXTILE, la biennale d’art textile contemporain présentée à Guimarães, au Portugal, en 2024.
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Permanent Revolution
$23.00Finalist for the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montreal
“A writer may do as she pleases with her epoch. Rage accumulates.”
From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l’écriture-au-féminin in Québec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott’s ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, “Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment.”
With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall and an Afterword by Margaret Christakos.