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When Vito Santoro’s body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth.
Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
Solo Performance includes work by Hourig Attarian, David Bateman, Johanne Bénard, Diane Bessai, Jill Carter, Aleksandar Saša Dundjerovic, Helen Gilbert, Sherrill Grace, Jennifer Harvie, Kedrick James, Ric Knowles, Jacqueline Lo, Bruce McDougall, Katherine McLeod, Jenn Stephenson, Renate Usmiani, Craig Stewart, David Watmough, and Ann Wilson.
All Canadians know Marilyn Bell and her 1954 swim across Lake Ontario. Most of us can recall a few other crossers – probably Vicki Keith and Cindy Nicholas; perhaps Colleen Shields or Paula Stephanson. But few of us know that in fact, including Bell’s swim, 74 swimmers (mostly amateur and mostly Canadian) have made 66 crossings of Lake Ontario, 19 of Erie, five of Huron and Georgian Bay, two of Michigan, and two of Superior. What drives them to undertake such an ordeal? Well, to fill us in Laura E. Young interviewed over 40 Canadian swimmers, both the icons whose names we know, and the many not-so-regular Canadians who also answered the challenge to swim across a Great Lake.
Where simply yawning can be a crime…
Ali belongs to a camel-herding family of the Sudi clan, in a Somali society riven by ancient clan rivalries. When members of the rival Duki clan kill his father and steal his herd, Ali walks all the way to the capital town to start a new life. The ruling government, however, is dominated by the Duki; its actions are murderous, its rulings arbitrary, and its target the Sudi clan. For the crime of yawning–thus acting out the Great Leader’s nickname, “Big Mouth”–Ali is arrested, imprisoned, brutally beaten, and tortured. He manages to flee to Toronto, where he is assisted by two members of his clan. Celebrating his new freedom, his family now with him, this self-willed but simple camel boy is still obsessed with one mission: to avenge the murder of his father by killing a Duki. Any Duki.
Tragic, yet hilarious at times, as the camel boy negotiates the ways of his new life, this novel provides a rare insight into the complexities and conflicts of our world.
Vulnerable and hallucinatory, Rhonda Waterfall writes an alarming and vivid West Coast novel. Set in the rainforest on the outer coast of Vancouver Island, Sombrio takes us into the dark heart of lost childhoods. Three men – an artist, his apprentice and an ex-bank robber turned poet – seek refuge in an abandoned squatters shack. As windstorm descends upon the men, their thin hold on reality begins to unravel and fray. Each man must grapple with his past and with his desire for fame or infamy along with what their disastrous choices have wrought for their children. This is a tale of madness, art, love, addiction and paternal responsibility. And how men lauded as geniuses crush their daughters.
Some Birds Walk for the Hell of It is the third volume of poetry from musician and spoken word artist, C.R. Avery. In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery celebrates the virtues of the bohemian lifestyle, late-nite denizens of inconvenient madness, the dissolute and the temporary, lawless black leather pioneers of rap, and every tattooed member of this “helpless grey sky tribe.” Like a cross between Lenny Bruce and Tom Waits, Avery’s poetry is alternately profane,brilliant, vulgar, funny, brash, unsettling, and unquestionably original.
Inspired by a quote from the I Ching about how we respond to tragedy — “Some weep, some blow upon flutes” — Mary Vingoe’s play is the story of Costas, an elderly Greek shoe repair man whose wife Elena suffers from dementia and whose marriage has been eroded by a family secret. Costas is in denial of his wife’s illness but Lia, their teenage granddaughter who cares for her grandmother, is not. Costas’ life is altered when Sandra, a professional organizer who cannot begin to organize her own life, enters his shop. An unlikely, at times humorous friendship develops between the two — until we discover that Sandra’s estranged daughter Marijke is fourteen and pregnant. A chance meeting between Elena and Marijke leads to an unravelling of past lives and buried grievances which play out with unexpected results. Some Blow Flutes brings the issue of dementia into the open and explores the possibility of compassion and redemption in the face of overwhelming odds.
A contemporary retelling of the story of Cassandra, Rhonda Douglas’s Some Days I Think I Know Things explores what “truth” really means and asks what Homer’s iconic young prophetess might have to say to anyone wise enough to pay heed to her in the twenty-first century. We find Cassandra walking among us once more and, just prior to the sacking of a Troy not unlike any modern city, she sheds light on the idyllic domestic life that she shares with her father Priam, mother Hecuba, and the rest of her doomed, if royal, family. No sooner has she relished in the timeless sexual awakening dreamt about by most girls, than she must stoically submit to the indignities of the invading Greeks. As a captive, she pronounces a series of prescient “Lost Prophesies” intended for our time. However much her Cassandra remains faithful to the figure of the ancients, Douglas destabilizes her heroine’s primacy as “truth-teller” with a witty, varied chorus whose voices we can’t fail to recognize from the quotidian of our present-day lives.
In prose thats as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young womentough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say no to love and smart enough to know why.
McWhirter unearths a community of adult-kids seldom chronicled
Realistic dialogueheavily peppered with slang, swearing and esoteric pop-culture referencescontributes to the novels overall believability. The humour and wordplay alone mark McWhirter as a writer to watch. Quill and Quire
Some Girls Do is a sharp, poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanites
surprisingly, McWhirter makes them touching rather than alienating. Elle Canada
Winner, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Herring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life, bored of thinking the same old thoughts. One December day, following a hunch, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the course of everything in his life. His wife Euna leaves with their children. He buries the family dog in a frozen grave on Christmas Eve. He and his friend Gerry crash his truck into a field, only to be rescued by a passing group of Tibetan monks.
During the spring lobster season, Herring and Gerry find themselves caught in a storm front. Herring falls overboard miles from the harbour, is lost at sea for days, and assumed to be drowned. And then, he is found, miraculously, alive. Having come so near to death, he is forced to confront the things he fears the most: love, friendship, belief, and himself.
Some Hellish is a story about anguish and salvation, the quiet grace and patience of transformation, the powers of addiction and fear, the plausibility of forgiveness, and the immense capacity of friendship and of love.
CBC BOOKS “CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024”
For bpNichol’s 80th birthday, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work.
One of Canada’s most beloved poets, bpNichol (1944–1988), left a huge legacy of poetry, prose, scripts, comics, and playful interrogation of language after his untimely passing in 1988. In celebration of what would have been Nichol’s eightieth birthday, Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from Nichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits of writing.
Lovingly edited by noted poet-scholars Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, who provide an afterword contextualizing Nichol’s practice, Some Lines of Poetry is a map of hidden corners, a guidebook to poetic play, and a tribute to Nichol’s ongoing influence.
“No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent.” – Michael Ondaatje
In Some Mornings, Nelson Ball’s trademark minimalism takes on a new expansiveness. It is a book of both profound joy and mourning. In sharply observed poems about nature and the nature of people, Ball offers an instruction manual on how to be in the world: how to see beauty in the tiniest of things and how to recognize the bittersweet vitality of life through the smallest of gestures.
An evening at the opera spills out onto the street and into an odyssey through Montreal by night. The narrator, both innocent and cynical, rushes headlong down what appears to be the road to ruin—or perhaps merely to the loss of his virginity. We follow him from a café called El Cortijo (spanish for a country house with a farm building attached) to a nightclub called the Four Corners of the World. This is an urban metaphor for the classic story of the shrewd country boy bedazzled and led astray by the bright lights of the big city. We discover along with him a burlesque world of transgression and madness, where pleasures are far from simple and love is somewhat less than pure. On the street, as at the opera, passions are on the loose and truth and falsehood leave their marks in the service of the urgencies of desire. Will our hero find love and pleasure after all? This evocative account of his adventure is stamped with the ironic and the affectionate wit and humour that characterize all of Michel Tremblay’s novels and memoirs.
Drawing its fiction from many of the autobiographical sketches to be found in Bambi and Me, Twelve Opening Acts and Birth of a Bookworm, and from a collision of the Francophone east and the Anglophone west of Montreal, this novel marks a hiatus between Tremblay’s six-volume Chroniques and his more contemporary novel, The Heart Laid Bare.