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In her bold debut novel, Linda Little has crafted a story where music, creativity, and sexuality merge, as a young Nova Scotian carver embarks on a profound discovery of his sense of self. Strong Hollow tells the story of Jackson Bigney, a young man coping with a crippling past of repression, alcoholism, and poverty.
Failure seems built-in to Jackson’s life. His father, a brutal man with a short fuse, despises his son, and Jackson’s brothers thrive on drinking, violence and petty crime. Jackson finds solace only by carving tiny objects — acorns, field mice, bottle caps and leaves — as he has done since childhood. The day Jackson finds his father dead in a ditch beside the MacIntyre road is the day he begins his own metamorphosis. At nineteen, the seventh of nine children and the eldest still at home, Jackson seems predestined to follow in the feckless footsteps of his father. He becomes silent and empty, unable to feel or to articulate emotion.
Setting himself up as a bootlegger, Jackson builds a small cabin. He lives only in the present, expecting no more from life than work, alcohol and empty sex. One summer, Jackson meets Ian Sutherland, an accomplished fiddler and a powerful attraction develops between them. Twenty-nine and in love for the first time, Jackson feels alive with anticipation and fulfilment. Inevitably, at summer’s end, Ian leaves and Jackson is shattered. Seeking to fill the void in this life, Jackson begins to restore a derelict fiddle. At a music shop in Halifax, he meets an accepting circle of friends. And as the fiddle takes shape, Jackson’s perceptions of himself begin to change and he realizes that how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself.
In her bold debut novel, Linda Little has crafted a story where music, creativity, and sexuality merge, as a young Nova Scotian carver embarks on a profound discovery of his sense of self. Strong Hollow tells the story of Jackson Bigney, a young man coping with a crippling past of repression, alcoholism, and poverty.
Failure seems built-in to Jackson’s life. His father, a brutal man with a short fuse, despises his son, and Jackson’s brothers thrive on drinking, violence and petty crime. Jackson finds solace only by carving tiny objects — acorns, field mice, bottle caps and leaves — as he has done since childhood. The day Jackson finds his father dead in a ditch beside the MacIntyre road is the day he begins his own metamorphosis.
At nineteen, the seventh of nine children and the eldest still at home, Jackson seems predestined to follow in the feckless footsteps of his father. He becomes silent and empty, unable to feel or to articulate emotion. Setting himself up as a bootlegger, Jackson builds a small cabin. He lives only in the present, expecting no more from life than work, alcohol, and empty sex. One summer, Jackson meets Ian Sutherland, an accomplished fiddler and a powerful attraction develops between them. Twenty-nine and in love for the first time, Jackson feels alive with anticipation and fulfilment. Inevitably, at summer’s end, Ian leaves and Jackson is shattered.
Seeking to fill the void in this life, Jackson begins to restore a derelict fiddle. At a music shop in Halifax, he meets an accepting circle of friends. And as the fiddle takes shape, Jackson’s perceptions of himself begin to change and he realizes that how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself.
Tom Thurston has written the first biography of one of Canada’s athletic legends, Doug Hepburn. Born in Vancouver with a club foot and a severe alternating squint, Doug decided as a boy to surmount his disabilities by training with weights, setting his sights on becoming the world’s strongest man. And this he achieved. Doug is now known as the grandfather of modern “power weightlifting.”
Doug was World Weightlifting Champion in Stockholm in 1953, and he won the gold medal in the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954. Joe Weider and others claimed that Doug may have been the strongest man in history. But there was much more to Doug than his weightlifting. He went on to become an eloquent advocate for drug-free sport, and he made a reputation as an inventor. As a singer, he became well-known for his own compositions. Radio stations still play the Hepburn Carol each Christmas.
For those interested in building a super-strong body that will last well into old age, Doug’s complete, drug-free training secrets are revealed in a way that are easy to understand and employ. For those looking for the inspiration to tackle some of their own goals, Doug Hepburn presents a fine role model. For all Doug’s successes as a strongman, his life was filled with much sadness, many setbacks and even, at times, poverty. Thurston’s biography does justice to all aspects of Doug’s life, illuminating the fortitude with which he met his many challenges. A truly splendid biography with many black and white photographs.
Meet Finnigan Heller, drifter: reclusive, abrasive, and clairvoyant. He’s also been struck by lightning more times than you’ve had hot dinners. It happens in every town he passes through. But is he following the weather or is the weather following him? Heller’s bizarre “gift” has him on the run from a scientist, a Canadian Intelligence agent, and an Englishman with a taste for violence. ‘Struck’ is a story about thunderstorms, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the nature of luck, andthe fate of one very attractive nose.
” ‘Struck’, a brisk and brain-tweaking debut from Calgary writer Geoffrey Bromhead, graduates lightning from flash-and-boom backdrop to driving force of theme and plot.” – The Globe & Mail
25th Annual 3-day novel contest winner
Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. Stuck charts the roller-coaster odyssey of Jack, a twentysomething would-be actor is search of sex, drugs, and cash. As Jack wanders the streets of Toronto, his series of wild encounters include nuns on the make, Mormons on the hustle, venal directors, and a host of venereal and utterly unforgettable characters.
“Refreshingly realistic … as good as having Sunday brunch with a girlfriend.” — Winnipeg Free Press
Mara Brennan is about to unravel. Three days after her 28th birthday, her boyfriend dumps her, leaving her with nothing but a basement apartment, a futon and a pile of unpaid bills. Mara realizes it’s time for an identity makeover. Navigating the dueling worlds of yoga and cosmetic surgery, gourmet dinners and Frankenberry cereal, etiquette handbooks and too-helpful loved ones, Stuck in Downward Dog is Chantel Guertin’s unforgettable comic debut about how to get unstuck when you’re caught in a rut.
Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. One hundred years since publication, Carl Peters offers a sustained reading of the 1914 edition, responding to the eccentric sounds and rhythms of this long prose-poem with annotations that bring understanding, in particular, to the composition’s syntax, which is noted for its defiance of conventional norms; for example:
ROAST POTATOES.
Roast potatoes for.
[Annotation] Grounded! Such annotations demonstrate that an apprehension of Stein’s whole art comes from the project and praxis of reading the work literally, actually. “Read her with her for less,” she asserts. “Translate more than translate the authority.”
In Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Peters demonstrates ways in which Stein’s thought questions everything, underlining reasons that her work has long served as the wellspring for generations of experimental poets, inspiring Language movement poets such as bill bissett, bpNichol, and George Bowering, and novelists such as William Gass, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway.
The Modernist work Tender Buttons can be used to show how in the early twentieth century Stein and others helped us discover a different world in our midst, a moment of the Modern.
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife’s lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. However, these events, which predate his subsequent obsession with stopping time and freezing motion, become the ghosts that haunt Muybridge in the fictional world of Governor General’s Award winning dramatist Kevin Kerr’s new play, Studies in Motion. Attempting to absolve himself of the tragic consequences of his past actions by inventing a new world where action is neutralized by scientific analysis, Muybridge uses instantaneous photography to dissect time into its smallest possible fragments—to reconstruct his life, his identity and his legacy.
On the surface, these sequences of still photos signify a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science: understanding through controlled observation and rational analysis, using the potential of technology to transcend the limits of our own senses, to enhance our powers of perception. Women and men, usually nude, are presented performing “everyday” actions alongside movements that are ritualistic, comic, sensual, absurd and even diseased and pathological. The variations seem endless. There is a tension in the collected images: scientific, classical, elegant, erotic, startling, disturbing and grotesque.
But taken together, particularly as the technology pioneered by Muybridge lead to the world of cinematography, they seem to say something else—to inescapably construct a narrative that has shaped our culture into one that objectifies human beings, where information is fragmented, mediated, where observations through the filter of technology are trusted more than those acquired directly through our physical senses, and set images into motion in the service of a public manipulation of perception as effectively as Muybridge himself used them in the revision of his own private mythology.
On the first weekend in October, Nova Scotia artists and artisans throw open their studio doors, and locals and tourists alike, Studio Rally maps in hand, hit the highways and byways to pay a few calls. In 1992, Adriane Abbott, a Halifax textile artist, and Beverly McClare, a Grand Pré basketmaker, developed Studio Rally to help art and craft makers to sell their works. Since then it has been an exciting year-round part of Nova Scotia cultural life.
In Studio Rally: Art and Craft of Nova Scotia, Robin Metcalfe takes his own journey through the art and craft landscape of Nova Scotia, introducing 52 of the province’s artists and craftspeople and their highly professional yet dramatically different works. He recounts his visits to artists as varied as folk carvers Bradford and Ransford Naugler, painter Alan Bateman, and ceramicist Zoppo’s silk-weaving cabin-studio in Cape Breton. Colour portraits of the people and their works by Julian Beveridge, David Duncan Livingston, and other expert art photographers make Studio Rally a sumptuous overview of a cultural scene that’s as full of beauty and surprise as the natural world.
Award–winning novelist William Deverell is back with a new Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller.
Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict. Realistic and riveting, Stung is a propulsive legal thriller by a beloved author at the height of his powers.
Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: ‘gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole.’ Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs into the family car and vanishes, Eugenia doubles in age overnight, butremains the dark and diminutive creature who earned the nickname ‘Stunt.’
Eugenia devotes herself to finding Sheb. She writes to the man she believes to be Sheb’s father: I.I. Finbar Me The Three, a retired tightrope walker. Waiting for Finbar’s response, she retreats to Toronto Island, where she meets Samuel Station, a barefoot voluptuary, world traveller and ring-maker.
When Finbar does write back, Eugenia wonders if she will find what she is looking for – or something else entirely. Studded with postcards from outer space, twins, levitation, the explosion of a shoulder-pad factory, and some accomplished taxidermy, Stunt is part dirge, part cowboy poetry and part love letter to the wilder corners of Toronto and of ourselves.
“Claudia Dey’s debut novel is like a snowflake, utterly unique, compellingly intricate and sparkle-riven, sharp as broken crystal and just as dazzling. Stunt is daring, poignant, full of abandon and abandonment, wistful and funny. Brilliant.” – Lisa Moore, author of This is How We Love
“Dey’s … prose [is] a wondrous compression of poetry, her carnival of characters drawn in gripping detail, and the riot of fantastical yet gritty imagery all shot through with a keen and relentless sadness. The sheer density of the imagery and vivid characterizations makes you slow down to enjoy every sentence. You want to read this novel carefully; you want to read it again.” – The Globe and Mail
“Stunt is mesmerizing, rewarding, and breathtaking. Dey never lets up.” – Quill & Quire
Stupid Crimes grows like a map of East Vancouver, and stretches from Little Italy to Chinatown. Using Barry Delta, parole officer, as an entreé to this world of the shady, the blue collar, and the deeply bruised, Dennis E. Bolen has increased the range of consciousness and language at play.
“Sibum’s poems are not everyone’s cup of tea … instead of breathing air they inhale the exhaust of apocalyptic times.”
– Books in Canada
Sub Divo is a screed against the cultural impotence of modernity, and the decline of American empire. Personal, epistolary, corrosive, vented with Sibum’s classical spleen and explosive prosody, this collection teems with emperors, historians, presidents, politicians, musicians, composers, trollops, poets, gods. Few poets could pair such a flirtatious and colloquial style with such allusive breadth.