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Z.A.K.A is an Orthodox Jewish volunteer force in Israel that collects the remains of Jews killed in accidents. When Jacob, a Z.A.K.A volunteer, makes the split-second decision to treat a young woman — instead of the soldier she may have killed — his world is changed forever.
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006
In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning, John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic athlete: ?A sound mind in a sound body.?Together they want to experience all of life — athletics, philosophy, beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures that seem to come from another planet: girls. By their junior year they’ve taken to hitch-hiking around, fired up on Kerouac, James Dean and St. Augustine, and their horizons begin to expand like an endless sunrise. They’re out for experience and suffering, and that’s just what they’re going to get. Written as though on the back of the pages of Gloria (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, 1999), Running depicts the lives of young men in late-1950s America with humour, pathos, and muscle. Taken on its own or as the prelude to Difficulty at the Beginning, it’s a memorable and invigorating piece of writing that shows how the smug, grey culture of the 1950s was shattered forever with three little words.
Set in a small town in Quebec, Running Downhill Like Water is made up of four interconnected stories spanning fifty years of the lives of four people whose prospects have been violently shattered. Lucy, a perennial misfit, is thwarted in her desperate hope for love and belonging; Sheila, a classical violinist, fails miserably in both her career and as a mother; and Brothers Evan and Neil, struggling with the disastrous fallout of a rigid fundamentalist upbringing, endure not only severe mental illness but catastrophic crises of faith. Running on quicksand, keeping small hopes aloft on faint breath, these four misfits move in and out of one another’s lives, somehow managing to drag themselves kicking and screaming to that place of acceptance and hard-won peace hiding in the deepest heart of failure, weakness and humility.
For fans of Don Winslow and readers of noir comes Running from the Dead, critically acclaimed and award winning author Mike Knowles’s newest crime novel
THREE STARRED REVIEWS
“The best private detective novel I’ve read in some time … This one deserves an award.” — Bay Observer
After his six-year search for a kidnapped boy ends in a suspicious murder, private detective Sam Jones is forced to take matters into his own hands: he must track down a missing girl and clear his name before the police track him down.
Private detective Sam Jones’s six-year search for an eight-year-old boy ends with gunshots in a basement and cold bodies that would eventually lead the police straight to him. Jones had never promised Ruth Verne that he would find her son alive, but he knew deep down that she believed he would — worse, he had believed it too. Jones wasn’t ready to look Ruth in the eye and tell her he had failed. He wasn’t ready to admit that he lost everything and had nothing to show for it.
But an unsigned note scrawled on a bathroom door gives Jones a second chance — a chance for redemption. Thirteen words left by a young girl in trouble give him someone to chase and a reason to keep moving before the cops move on him. Jones follows the trail from an idyllic small town to the darkest corners of the city, running from the boy he failed toward the girl he could still save.
When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father.
As the narrator’s journey becomes one of essentials – gasoline, fresh water only in bottles, and gas-station food – and as the crisis engulfing his surroundings begins to weigh on him ever more, he seeks refuge in a woman, and later, with a fellow traveller he meets on the road. These two kindred souls join him on his path, though they seem to seek a different sort of redemption.
As the road grows longer, and the narrator’s exhaustion grows in kind, parallels are drawn between his own journey and Thesus’s journey through the primeval Labyrinth. However, the beast that our narrator seeks to slay might not be one of flesh and horn and blood; instead, it is his own failing mental state and his thirst for the apocalypse around him. In the end, the obsession with which he pursues this beast will be his undoing.
Running on Fumes, is a road novel that carries with it influences of the genre, with its storylines of redemption through distance travelled, often in a failing world that reflects the protagonist’s interior. It is a hazy line that delineates whether the world is reflecting the narrator’s state or whether the narrator’s mindset is reflected by the world, and there remains a level of uncertainty on the truths the narrator speaks.
In a collection as fine in scope as it is intimate in detail, Running the Whale’s Back presents a host of Eastern Canada’s brightest literary talents, all putting pens to paper to explore the multiple facets of what we call “faith” through a unique Atlantic vantage point.
In a satisfying mixture of styles and themes, the full breadth of Atlantic Canadian spirituality is revealed. These are pieces that poke and prod, ruminate and circulate with themes of religion and cultures of spirituality. Mysticism meets piety, holiness argues with practicality, and hope lives side by side with despair as the stories spiral and waltz themselves across the four provinces.
As the authors leap from subject to subject, we discover death lurking in the lonely wilderness, ski jumpers participating in miracles, and preachers suffering marital discord. Featured authors are Michael Crummey, Sheldon Currie, Joan Clark, David Adams Richards, Kenneth J. Harvey, Clive Doucet, Deborah Joy Corey, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Michael Hennessey, Lynn Coady, D.R. MacDonald, Jessica Grant, Michael Winter, Samuel Thomas Martin, Michelle Butler Hallett, Kathleen Winter, and Ann Copeland.
This one-woman play explores the life of Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Elizabeth Bishop (19111979), setting Bishop in a Halifax hotel room prior to receiving an honourary degree from Dalhousie University in the fall of 1979, shortly before her death. Includes reproductions of eleven black and white photographs.
Running Unconscious is the first collection of poetry by Toronto poet and poetry promoter Peter McPhee. ‘Never Trust a Polar Bear in Shades,’ ‘Leaning against a lamppost at the corner of King and Diversity,’ and, of course, ‘Why the Stegosaurus is my favourite dinosaur’ ? Running Unconscious assembles all the McPhee classics in one good-lookin’ volume.
Pete Sarsfield paints his stories in the words of a true traveler, who lives exactly where he is at the moment. As a community physician in remote and northern areas for almost 25 years, Sarsfield looks at the people and the landscape of his world with an insight that borders on the poetic.
At the height of the Great Depression, two Prairie children struggle with poverty and uncertainty. Surrounded by religion, law, and her authoritarian father, Cora Wagoner daydreams about what it would be like to abandon society altogether and join one of the Indian tribes she’s read so much about. Saddened by struggles with Indian Agent restrictions, Hunter George wonders why his father doesn’t want him to go to the residential school. As he too faces drastic change, he keeps himself sane with his grandmother’s stories of Wîsahkecâhk. As Cora and Hunter sojourn through a landscape of nuisance grounds and societal refuse, they come to realize that they exist in a land that is simultaneously moving beyond history and drowning in its excess.
An intelligent and perceptive book about rural landscapes, Rural Night Catalogue sidesteps the linear world of the lyric poem to embrace linguistic playfulness, unusual perspectives and surprise. deBeyer has a gift for setting strong moods, colouring an afternoon on the veranda with a “sierra drawl” and giving specific texture to the smells in the air. These poems put time, light and humanity on the same plane, bending them together into tangible, familiar, forces.
Grounded in the rural landscape, deBeyer’s poetry reflects a fierce attention to detail and an inherent wildness. Devoted to sharing his encounters with fox, deer, barn doors and dusk, he shows his love of countryside and his passion for description. Though place names are few and far between, the reader is gripped by a distinct sense of belonging, longevity and connection, irrespective of specifics, as though each poem has its own frequency. George Elliott Clarke calls this a collection “powered by sense and by science.”
This debut collection was shortlisted for the 2003 Gerald Lampert Award.
The publication of bill bissett’s Rush: what fuckan theory; a study uv language in 1972 firmly ushered Canadian poetics into the postmodern era. Out of print for 40 years – and reissued here complete with an interview with bissett about the book’s creation and a critical afterword by derek beaulieu and Gregory Betts – Rush embodies a collagist, multi-conscious approach to art that recognizes no division between the work and the world, the author and his sexuality, his breath, his influences; the theory and the practice. Arguing that “a new line has startid,” Rush captures the urgency of a new model of production that resists the closure and mastery of any one mind. It is an elegant rejection of aesthetic ego and all presumptions of authority. Rush: what fuckan theory; a study uv language is a vital, vocal protest against business as usual and the exploitation of the individual from one of Canada’s most important avant-garde poets.
The star of Gladiator, The Insider, and L.A. Confidential is revealed as never before.
In this innovative biography of one of Hollywood’s kings, Gabor H. Wylie gives Russell Crowe fans what they’ve been longing for — the stories that make up a lifetime, little anecdotal gems strung together like pearls on a necklace. The star of Gladiator, The Insider, and L.A. Confidential is revealed as never before. From Crowe’s New Zealand roots to his emotional Oscar triumph, Wylie traces his journey to stardom with true stories that have textured his life along the way. Imagine Crowe’s campy portrayal of transvestite Frank N. Furter in an Australian stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or the moment Crowe revealed to his shocked father that, since the family couldn’t afford to send him to university to study history as he had planned, he intended to make his way as a performer. This is Russell Crowe — the dedicated musician, the acclaimed actor, the fascinating man — rendered in the most intimate medium we know: the stories of his life.
Joe Fiorito spent 18 hours in total, over the course of three days, on the corner of Victoria and Queen in downtown Toronto watching the city go by and recording what he saw. The rhythms of the city ebb and flow according to the time of day. The declarative sentence is the best brush to paint an objective portrait of the city we live in. It is an example of what happens when you stay in one place and observe a single place or thing for a very long time.
Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared to author Robin Philpot that “the Rwandan Genocide was 100 percent American responsiblity.” Yet a more official narrative would have it that horrible Hutu génocidaires planned and executed a satanic scheme to eliminate nearly one million Tutsis after the Rwandan presidential plane crashed in the heart of dark Africa on April 6, 1994. Where do these two contradictory narratives come from? Which is true? Robin Philpot’s vast and methodical research, extensive interviews, and close analysis of events, testimony in courts, and popular writings on the subject show not only that that official narrative is false, but that it was edified to cover up the causes of the tragedy and to protect the criminals responsible for it. What’s more, to make that story more believable, the storytellers have unfailingly reproduced the literary traditions, clichés, and metaphors that provided the underpinnings of slavery, the slave-trade, and colonialism. Nearly 20 years later, the facts about the Rwandan tragedy have been so distorted and the adjudicated facts ignored that Rwanda is now used everywhere to justify so-called humanitarian intervention throughout Africa (and the world). It has become a “useful imperial fiction,” and for that reason, this book seeks to find out what really happened there.
Thirty years ago, all parameters were in place for regime change in Congo: US military assistance to Paul Kagame’s troops in Rwanda, Western political cover for an invasion, US satellite data needed for Rwanda’s military sweep, and secure financing from multinational companies poised to profit from the most resource-rich nation in Africa.
Crucial to this overthrow were the concerted international efforts to cover up or at least minimize the body count associated with the invasion, which marked the beginning of a long and ugly conflict that has stripped Congo of its sovereignty, its safety and its resources.
Rwanda’s 30-year assault on Congo traces the roots of Kagame’s campaign and the impunity he’s been granted from the United States and its allies, including Canada. It explores the early US support to Kagame’s rebels from the 1980s to their seizure of power in Rwanda in 1994, via Uganda, Washington’s geopolitical lynchpin on the African continent.
The author examines the tactics Rwanda has used to infiltrate and subjugate Congo in a military campaign that has left millions of Congolese dead, created wealth for Rwandan oligarchs and enriched a handful of multinationals and international elites.