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It is Katie MacLeod’s fifty-fifth birthday. While her daughters throw her a celebratory brunch, Katie takes stock of her life and her loves. Will she take a chance on her internet penpal, Francois, and embrace this virtual romance?
In gentle prose, Louise Desjardins continues her observations of human relationships. In the small town of Arntfield, where the narrator spent her childhood, we join her as she recalls the mythical Look-Out Country Club, the site of past sins where her father played the violin, and the MacLeod Music Store.
The story of the enigmatic woman who captured the hearts of two extraordinary artists — now in trade paper
At 22, Marianne Ihlen travelled to the Greek island of Hydra with writer Axel Jensen. While Axel wrote, Marianne kept house, until Axel abandoned her and their newborn son for another woman. One day while Marianne was shopping in a little grocery store, in walked a man who asked her to join him and some friends outside at their table. He introduced himself as Leonard Cohen, then a little-known Canadian poet.
Complemented by previously unpublished poems, letters, and photographs, So Long, Marianne is an intimate, honest account of Marianne’s life story — from her youth in Oslo, her romance with Axel, to her life in an international artists colony on Hydra in the 1960s, and beyond. The subject of one of the most beautiful love songs of all time, Marianne Ihlen proves to be more than a muse to Axel and Leonard; her journey of self-discovery, romance, and heartache is lovingly recounted in So Long, Marianne.
In a support group for bereaved parents, Shayla, Lyle, Linee, and Jed each fight their personal demons in the search for life after the death of one’s child. Set in the vast and remote landscape of Whitehorse, Yukon, playwright Celia McBride plunges into these characters’ painful struggle to find a voice for their grief.
Reluctant amateur detective, Reverend Charles Lauchlan, departs the prairie city of Winnipeg and travels abroad to Scotland with his fiancé Maggie on a bicycle tour of the highlands. Two near fatal accidents put members of the tour on edge and, to make matters worse, a shadowy figure seems to be observing their every move. Stuck in the remote highland countryside, the group is thrown back on their own resources. While Charles and Maggie are trying to decipher what these strange events mean, they make another grisly discovery. It’s murder most foul and we’re not just talking about Scottish weather. So Many Windings is the second in a three book series that began with Put on an Armour of Light (winner of the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction). Deftly wrought, meticulously researched, and scintillating with charm and period prose, Macdonald weaves a winding, cross-country tale that will require all of the detective’s ingenuity and test the measure of his resolve.
So This Is The World & Here I Am In It is a stunning collection of creative essays by poet and critic Di Brandt.Written over a period of ten years, these essays circle around questions of exile and violence, eros and wildness, land and mentoring, home and language. They are experimental engagements with a lively array of personal and cultural memories, of places ranging from Winnipeg and Windsor to Berlin, Germany, of joyfully unruly characters in Canadian fiction, of the esoteric lives of Mennonites, honeybees, and twins.
Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.
O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity,abundance and power of the social sphere.
Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.
‘No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O’Donnell’s talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses … The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.’
– The Globe and Mail
Corporate power is one of the strongest forces shaping our world. More than half of the top 100 economic entities today are private corporations. With their immense size comes commensurate influence, to the point where corporations are able to wreak social and environmental destruction with few serious consequences. Yet, amazingly, this subject is essentially absent from the study of economics. The conservative economic theory that dominates the profession is based on the core belief that as little as possible should interfere with businesses’ pursuit of profit. This approach to economics ignores history, politics, poverty, the natural environment, and social class, among other inconvenient realities. Conservative economics would almost be laughable–were it not for the fact that this way of thinking helps prop up the worst excesses of capitalism.
Socialist Cowboy is a political biography detailing the life and activism of longtime New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos, one of the most colourful and controversial political personalities in the history of Ontario politics. Throughout his illustrious twenty-three year career as a member of the Ontario legislature, Kormos’s unapologetic commitment to democratic socialism and his shoot-from-the-hip brand of small-town populism won him strong accolades back in his blue-collar hometown of Welland, while raising eyebrows at Queen’s Park and within his own party. From his days as a student strike leader, to his short-lived time in Bob Rae’s cabinet, to his run for the Ontario NDP leadership and his epic battles with the province’s political establishment, the book chronicles Kormos’s political trajectory, through interviews and archival research, with a view to unpacking the ideas and traits that have made him a New Democrat icon.
‘Socket’ tells the gripping tale of Ronald Percy, an international aid worker who travels to Ethiopia to assist with an irrigation project for the African Development Organization. Upon arrival, he is unable to locate his agents or company representatives, and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of bureaucracy and state corruption. ‘Socket’ was selected as the Grand Winner from over 400 entries in the 2001 International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest.
” The language is vivid and economical, and the plot charges ahead with relentless momentum.” – Broken Pencil
“The story is so tightly written that you can’t put it down.” – Giest Magazine
Winner 2001 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
Lambda Literary Award and Sunburst Award finalist; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
It’s the summer of 1990, and Crystal Beach in Ontario has lost its beloved, long-running amusement park, leaving the lakeside village a virtual ghost town. It is back to this fallen community Starla Mia Martin must return to live with her overbearing mother after dropping out of university and racking up significant debt. But an economic downturn, mother-daughter drama, and Generation X disillusionment soon prove to be the least of Starla’s troubles: a mysterious and salacious force begins to dog Starla; inexplicable sounds in the night and unimaginable sights spotted on the periphery. Soon enough, Starla must confront the unresolved traumas that haunt Crystal Beach.
Sodom Road Exit might read like a conventional paranormal thriller, except that Starla is far from a conventional protagonist. Where others might feel fear, Starla feels lust and queer desire. When others might run, Starla draws the horror nearer. And in turn, she draws a host of capricious characters toward her–all of them challenged to seek answers beyond their own temporal realities.
Sodom Road Exit, the second novel by Amber Dawn, is a book that’s alive with both desire and dread.
“What a wonderful, fresh voice Gillian Wigmore brings to the page. These wise poems know the push and pull within family. They reveal the tender truths behind the rough edges of small-town life. Her voice resonates with authenticity, and whether she is writing about a near drowning or ice fishing, she is ultimately writing about the complications of love. These are poems you will not soon forget.”
— Robert Hilles, Governor General’s Award-winner for Poetry
In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet’s rapidly evolving reality where kindness is a scar, though not all scar-makers are kind. ,” Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of “afterpost-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-deaththese poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.
Watch out for those who have, seek, and hold onto power.
So drink
As the fanged stoat from the rabbit’s nape
As though from a flagon of river water
Shaken with ancestral ash
As if it isn’t knowledge you seek
But some osmotic soul-food
To be filled up with blurs
That might later resolve themselves
Into memories
To return to where you really live
With changes in your blood
Lyrical yet shot through with experimental and political veins, the poems in Soft Power are engaged with both the here-and-now of a world on the brink and the hope of something better, a planet where “generations hence / Inactivists will bathe under a sun made safe / By the collapse of oil-can economics.”
Traversing badlands, sandhills, prairies, suburbia, Miami, London, Dublin, Paris, and beyond, Cole’s voice revels in questions of travel while resonating with the unheimlich “Canadalienation” of his expatriate existence. Whether bog surfing, gallery hopping, bug hunting, or meditating on the “strange genre” of national anthems, the poems in Cole’s long-awaited follow-up collection to his critically acclaimed Questions in Bed exist in a searching exchange with the world, both entering and being entered by it.