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Strange Comfort
$19.95Strange Comfort collects the best of Sherrill Grace’s many published essays on the novelist and writer Malcolm Lowry, along with new pieces that incorporate her contemporary approach to his work. There are essays on Under the Volcano, on some of the stories in Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place, and on Lowry’s most important themes: endless voyaging, the creative role and identity of the artist, the nightmare of history, the pressures of memory and the urgent need to protect the garden of our world. A visionary, Lowry prophetically addressed the dominant issues of our 21st century.
In her new essays, Dr. Grace explores his disturbing vision of the devastating impact of perpetual war, only one of many of Lowry’s preoccupations, and establishes that in many respects, Malcolm Lowry was an environmentalist avant la lettre, commenting on his vision of the natural world as an escape from the horror “of existence as sold to you.”
Lowry was an intensely autobiographical writer, a quality not appreciated during his lifetime. Today, critical perspectives have changed considerably, and Lowry’s anxiety about writing elements of his own life into fiction invites critical reassessment. Many of these essays offer a fresh look at Lowry’s attempts to apprehend and portray the writer, writing.
The title, Strange Comfort, comes from a Lowry short story called “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession.” These essays illustrate some of the ways in which Lowry found comfort in the world of art, of other writers and the landscape of his beloved Dollarton, British Columbia. Malcolm Lowry was in many ways a British writer, but his spiritual home—his creative comfort—surrounded him on the beach at Dollarton. 2009 marked the centenary of Lowry’s birth and this volume of essays, old and new, celebrates Lowry’s deep and enduring relevance for our times.
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Strange Days
$21.95The 1920s were one of the wildest decades in Canada’s history, a time of frivolous fads, shocking crimes, and political and social changes that definitively yanked the country out of the 19th century and into the modern age. In Strange Days, Ted Ferguson revisits dozens of stories that could only have happened in the ’20s — tales of serial killers, athletes, con men, crackpots, prime ministers, bathing beauties, and more — all of them nearly too amazing to believe and too entertaining to be forgotten.
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Strange Ghosts
$24.95From baseball to Picasso, Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams, post-modernism to American foreign policy, these essays are an appealing mixture of polemic, politics, memoir, travelogue, and literary theory.
In a series of essays about the US, Greer relates how his mother’s obsession wih baseball is overshadowed by her distaste for the American invasion of Iraq, which ends a family tradition of watching the Toronto Blue Jays play their season opener with the New York Yankees in New York.
In another series of travel essays, he recounts being in India during the height of the Pakistan nuclear crisis, his conversations with monks in Cambodia, and his spiritual revelations in Venice.
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Strange Heaven
$19.99Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award, Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award, Dartmouth Book Award, and Thomas Head Raddall Award
Shortlisted, Governor General’s Award for FictionShe’s depressed, they say. Apathetic. Bridget Murphy, almost eighteen, has had it with her zany family. When she is transferred to the psych ward after giving birth and putting her baby up for adoption, it is a welcome relief — even with the manic ranting of a teen stripper and come-ons of another delusional inmate.
But this oasis of relative calm is short-lived. Christmas is coming, and Uncle Albert arrives to whisk her back to the bedlam of home and the booze-soaked social life that got her into trouble in the first place. Her grandmother raves from her bed, banging the wall with a bedpan through a litany of profanities. Her father curses while her mother tries to keep the lid on developmentally delayed Uncle Rollie. The baby’s father wants to sue her, and her friends don’t get that she’s changed.
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Strange Labour
$22.00“With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction” — Publishers Weekly
Strange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that live in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated, in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Miranda, a young woman who travels across what had once been the West, meets Dave, who has peculiar theories about the apocalypse.
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Strange September of Levi Pepperfield, The
$19.95This is the story of Levi Pepperfield, who tries to navigate his future as a retired English professor while indulging in the sorrow of lost possibilities that define his past. It’s about the intersection of parallel worlds, of age and youth, of teacher and student, of man and woman, of real and fictional characters. Levi needs to discover his guide, and with the help of a female rabbi who explains to him the concepts of a klipah that has imprisoned his spirit, and tikkun ha’nafesh–the repairing of the soul; of a former student who challenges him to apply his teaching of truth and beauty to his own life; of Esther Greenwood, who steps out of Sylvia Plath’s novel to help him revision his life; and of the ghosts of Walt Whitman and Richard Brautigan, Levi finds his guide and gets a second chance at his own life. Perhaps.
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Stranger in the Shadows
$19.95Now that Owen has successfully defeated the dragon Kalureth and rid the village of his terror, Owen and Uthgar face an even greater challenge. The Dwarves are reunited with their home in the mountains, but not everyone is open to sharing life with the Humans inhabiting the land. The evil King seeks to rule them all and knows he must get to Owen in order to gain complete dominance and control. When a mysterious figure is sent to capture Owen, he must fight for his life and form an alliance to vanquish the King. With the help of his new friend Kaia, can Owen abolish racial indifference and create peace or will the evil King destroy all that Owen and Uthgar have fought so hard to build?
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Strangest Dream, The
$22.95Lauded as the most eloquent book about Canadian communists and written like drama, The Strangest Dream animates the history and life of militants from the 1930’s to the 1956 Khruschev revelations about Stalin.
Published originally in 1983, this Third Edition contains a new preface by the author, additional photographs, and previously unpublished letters.
An antidote to recurrent anti-communist vitriol, The Strangest Dream evokes not only the struggle “to make a better world,” but the warmth, generosity, songs, theatre, art, and exhilaration of party members for whom comradeship meant a way of life. Merrily Weisbord‘s research and contacts unearth historical documents and rare testimonies, including that of Canada’s only communist MP, and of the accused in the Cold War spy trials.
The Strangest Dream is witness to the heyday and legacy of Canadian communists’ courage and social conscience, and to the forces that destroyed their dreams.
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Stratford Perth Museum
$1.00Stratford Perth Museum’s permanent collection and new and innovative exhibits honour the past, celebrate the diverse communities of Perth County and embrace the dynamic future of this artistic and agricultural heartland. From Bard to Bieber catalogues, in photos and descriptions, some of the museums’s best exhibits: Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom, Such Stuff as Dreams, Railway Century, and Perth Regiment. This informative and visually appealing book goes beyond the simple workings of a catalogue; it takes readers through a visual and written journey of the artistic and historical events that make Stratford a Canadian hub of art, culture, and diversity.
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Stray
$19.95Allison LaSorda’s Stray shows the formation of a considerable poetic talent. These poems are sun-bleached, at once gritty, raw, and playful. LaSorda can conjure childhood memories of beaches and ice cream, ponder the elemental force of the ocean, and plumb the depth of loss in a coal mine disaster. Bringing to mind the poetry of Robert Hass and Louise Glück, LaSorda presents the messiness of daily life with emotional honesty and humour.
Stray examines intimacy, memory, and decay, often betraying existential bewilderment. Deft word play and musical sense underscore the absurdity these poems explore, while surprising rhymes and unexpected images resound in deeply personal narratives. In this dazzling debut, LaSorda both disarms her readers and breathes fresh life into Canadian poetry.
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Stray Dog Embassy
$16.95In these deeply humanistic poems of witness and questioning, Croatian-born poet natasha nuhanovic finds beauty and hope amid brutality and the smouldering debris of landscapes both personal and geographical. In these simply stated, sometimes surreal lullabies in reverse, it is the moment of awareness that is paramount, that difficult achievement of presence in the physical world. The poems in Stray Dog Embassy are about seeing what is in front of us: ‘Everybody talked about clouds but nobody mentioned / the old forgotten sky that shakes like a beggar.’ This collection marks the debut of a unique voice on the Canadian literary landscape.
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Strays
$18.95Strays, Ed Kavanagh’s first work of fiction since the award-winning novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney, features ten memorable stories that explore the lives of those who somehow find themselves adrift. In “The Strayaway Child” a ninety-year-old woman recalls her girlhood during the Great Depression when she was a “sad, silent little nobody”; in “The Red Merc” a boy learns deep truths about his often absent father; and in “The Wind” a Newfoundlander in a big Canadian city struggles with issues of identity. Affecting, finely crafted, and often humorous, Strays speaks, ultimately, to our desire to belong.
What one critic said about The Confessions of Nipper Mooney applies equally to Strays: “Kavanagh writes beautifully . . . poignantly illustrating how experience shapes character . . . . The lyrical cadence of the writing is reminiscent of Alistair MacLeod, making it a book that begs to be read aloud.”
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Streams
$16.00Streams
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Streams that Lead Somewhere
$20.95Winner of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, 2022
Winner of the Hamilton Literary Award, Poetry, 2023
Longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2023Fareh Malik’s debut collection aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination. The book focuses on perseverance and the silver lining that is ever on the horizon with the expectation that you can make it out of any trial or tribulation, if you just follow your dream to wherever it leads.
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Street Legal
$19.95A Toronto lawyer defends a hit man as the Midnight Strangler stalks the city in a legal thriller based on the author’s popular CBC drama Street Legal
From the two-time Arthur Ellis Award winner and Dashiell Hammett Prize recipient
Toronto, 1980. Three ambitious young lawyers are out to make a name for themselves with their own practice. Chuck Tchobanian and Leon Robinovitch are testing the boundaries of free speech with a pair of controversial cases. Carrie Barr, fresh from her success defending a drifter charged as the notorious Midnight Strangler, takes the most dangerous case of all: a suave hit man who proves to be far more dangerous — and alluring — than she imagined.
Soon Carrie finds herself drawn into a web of terror as a rogue police operation, a ruthless drug lord, and a series of brutal murders threaten to tear the fledgling firm apart. Meanwhile, the Midnight Strangler is still at large . . . and may have chosen Carrie as his next victim.
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Street Stories
$20.00Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late ?70s and early ?80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.
However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has no longer been the determining factor influencing the growing number of homeless in the city. The “new poverty” that emerged in the 1980s is a product of the transition from an industrial-based capitalist economy to a post-industrial, global economy and a culture of consumerism, and the images of the homeless continue to haunt our social imagination.