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Josef Skvorecky left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 invasion, and settled in Canada. In the course of the next twenty years, he wrote many novels, and gradually developed a reputation as one of Canada’s finest novelists. In 1985 he received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Prague Blues is Sam Solecki’s study of Skvorecky’s fiction. Book by book, Solecki investigates the elements of Skvorecky’s work, establishing a framework for future critical work.
Josef Skvorecky left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 invasion, and settled in Canada. In the course of the next twenty years, he wrote many novels, and gradually developed a reputation as one of Canada’s finest novelists. In 1985 he received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Prague Blues is Sam Solecki’s study of Skvorecky’s fiction. Book by book, Solecki investigates the elements of Skvorecky’s work, establishing a framework for future critical work.
In this contrapuntal follow-up to Governor General’s Award finalist Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse traces multiple lines of his mixed ancestry. These include the nomadic “pre-historical” movements of Wakashan speakers who were later to form various West Coast First Nations; the schismatic mindset of Jedidiah Morse, the “father of American geography”; and eternal struggles of European Jewish relations, artists, and close friends against perennial anti-Semitism. Set around the vigilantly maintained border/lines that mark the relatively “unsung” decline of natural prairie life, this unromantic “wrecklogue” radiates outward from a new real-estate development in Regina, Saskatchewan.
The first section, “Company Romance,” is a sequence of sardonic “heritage minute” poems that examine the intensely aggressive capitalist aspects of colonization that drove the fur trade in Manitoba and deeply influenced our contemporary sense of cultural and national identity. They also draw parallels between the shift in nomadic hunter/warrior culture to our own transformation as global consumers.
The second part, “Prairie Harbour,” a long poem in twenty-four parts, takes the form of postexilic elegies that transcend the dominant tradition of Canadian prairie poetry, infusing it with epical echoes of poets John Clare, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams. The work reaches its stride in a hearing of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which includes a French horn of warning for the “have-not” province.
The finale offers aesthetic fragmentation of Stephane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and “The Untroubled Mind,” a poem by Saskatchewan-born abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, salvaging space for an inner landscape and a “harbour” for the mind.
Prairie Nurse, which premiered at the Blyth Festival, is a comedy about two Filipino nurses who come to work at a small-town Saskatchewan hospital in the late 1960s. Cultural clashes, personality differences, homesickness, and the amorous but dim-witted goalie from the local hockey team complicate the women’s lives. Based on the true story of her mother’s immigration to Canada, Badian’s play is part romantic comedy, part farce, and part cultural history.
A collection of irreverent but definitely not irrelevant poetry by a master-student in the study of human psychology. D.G. Geis doesn’t worry about smoothing out the hurt in Praise Music. And all done with a smart layer of philosophic thought–most definitely irreverent but not irrelevant.
Winner of the 2024 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata spent two weeks in Canada, meeting with representatives from federal and provincial governments and human rights commissions, trade unions, civil society organizations, and academics—as well as migrants working in agriculture, caregiving, food processing, and sex work. His conclusion: the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” “I am deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with me by migrant workers,” Obotaka said in a statement. Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being denied access to health care, language courses, and other social services; of being physically abused, intimidated, sexually harassed; of the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity. In response, some farm owners and their advocates, angry at Obokata’s comparison to slavery, defended the program, citing long standing relationships with workers who returned to their operations year after year. “If the program is so damned bad,” one farmer advocate asked, “why do these guys keep coming back?”
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio seeks the answers to both the question and illuminates the charges that compelled it, researching the history of Canada’s migrant labour program and speaking with migrant workers across industries and across the country to understand who, in this global elaborate enterprise, stands to gain, who to lose, and how a system that depends on the vulnerability of its most disenfranchised actors can—or can’t—become more just.
Precarious Joys accompanies the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art — a city-wide exhibition that this year focuses on artists’ responses to the impact of colonialism on everyday life. Featuring over 120 full-colour images of artwork — including works by Ahmed Umar, Charles Campbell, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Maria Hupfield, Sonia Boyce, Tessa Mars, and Winsom Winsom — as well as a series of conversations between artists, curators, activists, educators, and cultural organizers, Precarious Joys highlights the connections and common practices that appear across the art featured in the Biennial.
The works and conversations included in this celebration of the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art address the wide-ranging effects of colonialism, tackling issues as diverse as environmental degradation, self-representation and belonging, queer futurity, and migrant diasporas. The result is a volume that emphasizes the importance of entering a collective dialogue at the intersection of art practices, social knowledge, and public action and serves as a meeting place of multiple vocabularies, geographies, and political communities.
“precedent can be rewritten, and you never had to do it alone.”
Grounded in a recent legal case that crosses borders, Precedence offers an intimate and stunningly poised insight into a young woman’s experience leaving home and facing her father in a Canadian courtroom. Pujita Verma’s tender, hopeful voice exposes the shortcomings of the international legal infrastructure in providing recourse to survivors of childhood sexual abuse, while honoring the generations of women who have protected and taught her, and whose sacrifices ultimately put her in the position to speak out publicly. What precedents, Verma asks—legal, personal, cultural—do we rewrite for ourselves and others each time we act? What does it look like to know romantic love, and come of age, after coming forward?
Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
Douglas Glover’s raucous first novel was a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and sold out its first and only print run in just one month. Now mystery fans and readers of literary fiction alike can once again enjoy this witty post-modern detective tale by the author of Elle.
The eponymous central character in Precious is a boozy, burned-out reporter with an embarrassing nickname and a penchant for getting into trouble. After three failed marriages and a humiliating stint in a Greek jail, he will do anything for the quiet life. A job as woman’s page editor for the Ockenden Star-Leader seems like just the ticket — that is, until town gossip Rose Oxley winds up dead with a pair of scissors lodged in her chest.
Suddenly Precious finds himself embroiled in a hilariously over-the-top murder mystery, brimming with delicious satire about the newspaper business and culminating in a characteristically outrageous Gloverian showdown with firearms, snowmobiles, and booze. Inviting comparisons with the novels of Jasper Fforde and Ross MacDonald, Precious deftly combines an ingenious literary parody with the plot of a richly satisfying mystery.
Trophy killing for sport? Trent Corbett finally had enough of seeing Facebook posts showing African big game hunters, their long range rifles in hand, kneeling proudly by their kill. The outraged comments below the photos were not enough. It was time for him to do something about it. His solution? Hunt the hunters. Kill them in their own neighborhoods, just like the hunters kill lions, elephants, leopard, buffalo and rhinoceros in theirs. Soon local police discover they have a serial killer on their hands. Led by Police Chief Avery Johnson, small town police forces unite in an effort to stop the man who calls himself the Predator’s Predator before his death count rises further.
The legacy of the Bush administration and its “War on Terror” includes a new logic of surveillance, suppressing public dissent and mobilizing both “fear” and “faith.” In this accessible book, Elmer and Opel show that this new logic stretches well beyond the realm of airport security and international relations into everyday police techniques, including the use of Tasers, the deployment of “stealth” crowd control, the zoning of protestors and the suppression of public dissent. Drawing on social theories and media analyses, this book reveals the underlying “logic of preemption” whereby threats must be eliminated before they materialize. By addressing the implications of this new logic, Elmer and Opel lay the groundwork for more effective resistance.
In Preoccupied with My Father, Simon Schneiderman has created a graphic memoir about his late father, Yoel. With paintings and poetry, the book depicts his father’s life, changed forever by the Holocaust. A life, where, ultimately, Yoel Schneiderman’s “. . . balance was always precarious; living in this world haunted by the last.” These twenty-six expressionistic images intimately portray the arc of his father’s transition from his athletic youth in Warsaw to a lonely vibrant presence in a community of the aged, when he was possessed of a mind too lucid and a body too infirm. The text of the book, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson, has been written in language that has the simplicity and resonance of a journal.
Simon Schneiderman grew up with a father beset by panic from the kind of thing that the rest of the world would see as innocuous and perhaps even comical. The trigger for his panic might be a bottle of ketchup in the wrong place in the fridge. If things were not the way Yoel Schneiderman expected them to be, the world became overwhelming to him and made him helpless and hopelessly destructive.
And yet as afraid as he was of the unexpected, Yoel Schneiderman was hopelessly in love with learning the unknown. He was never without a book in his hand or a newspaper in his pocket. Even as he lay in the hospital, wasted and weeks from death, Yoel Schneiderman said to Simon, “Never stop learning.”
Simon and his father were at odds for many years. But towards the end of his life Yoel Schneiderman lost the energy to resist affection and to resist being cared for. He allowed himself to be softer and to be loved.
A naïve and unbalanced teenage girl with claims of extraterrestrial origins only wants two things in the whole world–family and fame–but she can’t help getting entangled in the lives of the eccentric and troubled humans she meets along the way: Alisen Eden, a pill-popping, unemployed waitress who finds the girl strangely familiar; Neil Manson, the neurotic psychology grad student Alisen is trying to seduce; a horror film director with delusions of grandeur; the charismatic and libidinous leader of a mysterious UFO-worshipping cult; and the stoic stranger known only as 19. As it turns out that life on Earth isn’t what she thought it would be, does she even care enough to figure out where she really came from and what she’s supposed to do now?
Funny, experimental, and philosophically vicious, Pretend to Feel is a book you should definitely pay money for. . . . er, for which you should definitely pay money. Whatever. Please, just buy it. It took me years to write and my children are hungry. Fine, I don’t have any children, but coffee and videogames are expensive too.