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A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of “Ojibway World,” a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community.
The Berlin Blues concludes Drew Hayden Taylor’s Blues quartet, showcasing contemporary stereotypes of First Nations people, including a fair number that originate from Indigenous communities themselves, to the often outraged delight of his international audiences.
Yet Europeans and other ethnic groups are not exempt from Taylor’s incisive but good-humoured caricatures. Central to the motivation of these German developers are the hugely successful and best-selling adventure novels of the German author Karl May, whose work Adolf Hitler recommended as “good wholesome reading for all ages.” Written in the early twentieth century, they popularized Rousseau’s image of Indigenous peoples as “Noble Savages” among European, and especially German youth, and have led to the creation of Karl May theme parks all over central Europe, where adult tourists can shed their inhibitions and play Cowboys and Indians with a seriousness as ridiculous as it is abandoned. This is identity politics stripped of its politically correct hyper-seriousness and dramatized to its absurd and ultimately hilarious conclusion.
The Berlin Blues premiered in Los Angeles at Native Voices in February 2007, touring to New York (at the Museum of the American Indian), and then to the museum in Washington D.C. the following May, followed by a reading tour in Germany. In Canada it was produced at Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay in January 2008, and then by Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon.
Bunny Best has met her unfortunate end after a mishap at a Gay Days parade. Now her two sons, Kyle and Hamilton, have the task of arranging her funeral and caring for her most beloved companion, a troublesome Italian greyhound named Enzo. In the bustle of obituary-writing, eulogy-giving, and dog-sitting, sibling rivalry quickly reaches its peak and years of buried contentions surface.
The Best Brothers is a bittersweet comedy that explores the many ways in which we grieve and the love we find in unexpected places.
David Arnason has spent a lifetime along the shores of Lake Manitoba near the settlement of New Iceland, or Gimli as it is officially known. A keen observer, not much misses his notice and over his long writing career the lake and the town he grew up in have figured prominently in his work. Letters to New Iceland is a loving reflection of the land that has made him one of Canada’s most loved story tellers. Tracking the course of his early ancestors to New Iceland, Arnason draws a picture of a community tied to the old world and the new. Proud and bold, Arnason’s New Iceland revels in the traditions that both tie the town to its home across the sea and set it apart. From the festivities of islendingadagurinn to the century old general store that is a corner stone of the community, Letters to New Iceland brings the warmth and peace of lake living to bear in a time that appears to be anything but.
See the beauty that Canada has to offer. Walking and hiking is a big Canadian pastime for people wanting exercise and fresh air.
Here, at last, is the essential companion to the eastern part of Canada’s national trail. Profiling 30 separate sections, crossing 6 provinces, and traversing more than 900 km of trail, this guide for the adventurous offers a connoisseur’s sampling of the finest components of eastern Canada’s Trans Canada Trail.
Beginning at Cape Spear and ending on the shores of Lake Huron, Michael Haynes follows the Great Trail through the remote interior of Newfoundland, the coastlines of the Maritimes, the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, and the lakes and farmlands of Southern Ontario, as well as into cities such as Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. With beautiful colour photographs and comprehensive trail notes for each featured section, as well as GPS coordinates, maps, and informative descriptions of points of interest along with way, The Best of The Great Trail, Volume 1 explores the landscapes of eastern Canada in their variegated glory.
What is the longest, most exciting hiking and cycling trail in the world? It can only be The Great Trail. Spanning the entirety of Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans, this improbable route covers 24,000 kilometres.
The Best of The Great Trail is the essential companion to this national trail. In volume 2, Michael Haynes completes his two-book set on The Great Trail, leading hikers and cyclists through thirty “must-see” trails of Western Canada in five provinces.
Beginning in downtown Victoria, Haynes sets off for the forests and coasts of Vancouver Island before heading east into British Columbia’s mountainous interior, the foothills of Alberta, the plains of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the rugged terrain of northern Ontario. Along the way, he explores the imposing Rocky Mountains, the grasslands of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the unforgiving shoreline of Lake Superior, and the urban centres of Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. Illustrated in full colour with detailed maps and sumptuous photographs, The Best of The Great Trail, Volume 2 is a “must have” for both experienced outdoors people and armchair travellers who want to explore the wonders of this phenomenal trail.
Eleanor Wachtel is one of the English-speaking world’s most respected and sought-after interviewers. This book, celebrating her show’s twenty-five year anniversary, presents her conversations with legendary authors like Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro, and J.M. Coetzee, who share their views on process, the writing life, and the hazards of literary fame.
In The Better Part of Heaven Ken Norris deepens and extends both the form and content of his expanding body of work. A poetic journal of a journey through the South Pacific, it builds on both the Japanese and Canadian traditions of the travel poem/text, establishing the earthly journey as a metaphor for both a spiritual and an emotional quest.
Three celebrated books — all of which harbour a twisted ambition to physically alter your imagination — together for the first time.
The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of 16 stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario’s cottage country. Navigating through drunk and dead men, prisons and suicides and mad doctors, these short stories act as a halfway house for literary delinquents.
Pontypool Changes Everything is the terrifying story of a devastating virus. Caught through conversation, once it has you, it leads you into another world where the undead chase you down the streets of the smallest towns and largest cities.
In Caesarea, everybody’s embarrassed and nobody is mentioning the mess. Caesarea, you see, is the town that can’t get to sleep at night. Only Burgess demands answers to the really big question: Who’s been sleeping in your bed?
Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, an “Anna-lexique,” in which the darkness and the light of her idealized being have shaded his language, even as her ubiquitous image has crowded out his own identity.
Desperate to escape his unrequited love for Anna, Christophe flees to the Island of Women off the coast of Mexico. There, he sacrifices his former self and begins his transformation from a man possessed to a man confused.
The Bicycle Eater is a comic, surrealist novel of metamorphosis unleashed by hopeless desire, a riotous, colourful burlesque where nothing and no one remain what they seem.
The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie ndn utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change. Part memoir, part research project, this collection draws on Riddle’s experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. This book refuses a linear understanding of time in its focus on women in the author’s family, some who have passed and others who are yet to come. The Big Melt is about inheriting a Treaty relationship just as much as it is about breakups, demonstrating that governance is just as much about our interpersonal relationships as it is law and policy. How does one live one’s life in a way that honours inherited responsibilities, a deep love for humour and a commitment to always learning about the tension between a culture that deeply values collectivity and the autonomy of the individual? Perhaps we find these answers in the examination of ourselves, the lands we are from and the relationships we hold.
The Bigamist tells the story of a woman torn between her husband and her lover—and about her transition to a new life in a city teeming with multiple identities. Tension mounts as she risks offending everyone in her conservative immigrant community if she chooses to leave her husband.
The comings and goings between these two men reveal couples torn not only by conflicting loves and loyalties, but also by the chasm separating their present in Montreal from the past they’ve left behind.
Rosa Pryznyk’s harrowing escape from the Great War to America left her knowing that she was ordained for an extraordinary life. She didn’t, though, see the aching beauty of it, nor did she see the wretchedness or hardship that would continually dog her fate. But Sam Gentles saw all of Rosa’s life completely because he invented her for his novel. And Herb Thedal, the film director of Sam’s script, also saw Rosa precisely and with purpose. But can they shape their own chaotic lives with such resolution and comparable acts of faith? Though ambitious in its structure, and unconventional in its plot, Michael Kenyon’s novel is rewarding, resourceful story telling.
The Quebec-chartered “Nomad” chapter of the Hells Angels had two specific goals: to monopolize the Quebec drug trade; and to expand that trade across other parts of Canada. Their war against rival dealer gangs escalated to a boiling point, taking the lives of dozens of gangsters and innocent people as it played itself out openly on Montreal’s streets.
Little did the Nomads know that at the height of achieving their goals, they would also be months away from a lengthy police investigation to shut them down. The trials that followed revealed seven years of conflict and murder initiated by Maurice “Mom” Boucher, the man who was at the epicentre of this war.
One criminal trial in particular turned out to be one of the longest in Canadian history. It meant convincing a jury to accept the notion that a biker gang works on the same principle as a pirate ship — even the cook knows what their common goal is.
The “biker trials” brought out informants on both sides of the conflict, who, for a variety of reasons had turned on the gangs they had previously sworn loyalty to. Their testimonies revealed the arrogance of the Nomads in their pursuit of a monopoly over Quebec’s illegal drug trade. Now, Cherry reveals the inside story of the biker culture and the biker trials.
In The Birth of Reason Louis Dudek establishes the link between ancient pre-Socratic Atomism and modern quantum mechanics. In characteristically unencumbered terms, Dudek shows how this revolutionary philosophy, the invention of thinkers from Ioanian Greek trading cities, has been consistently misrepresented and resisted. Atomism nevertheless marks the transition from primitive mythological thinking (mythos) to the abstract, concept-based rationality (logos) that informs our modern approach to an ultimately unknowable reality.
This essay “is a kind of summation of myself – gnothi seaut’Äîn…. I am neither a materialist nor a theist, really, nor am I altogether an agnostic. As I say in [the] essay, ‘the ultimate reality is unknowable,’ but I am sure that if it were knowable it would satisfy both the materialist and the theist, and much more that we cannot imagine.”
“If anyone could make the Ionian skeptics palatable to a generation raised on music and television, it’s Louis Dudek.” – The Ottawa Citizen
“…the highlight is … 39 fragments from the pre-Socratics that Dudek astutely describes as reading ‘like a philosophical poem.’” – The Montreal Gazette
“…includes the thesis that the scientific conception of the universe … is the most advanced stage of religious evolution.” – Canadian Book Review Annual
In 1917, the Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge in northern France, and a myth grew that Canada — as a nation — was born on its slopes. But the cost was tremendous: 10,000 Canadians were killed, wounded, or went missing in the three-day battle. Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Robert Borden assembled a “Union Government” to support conscription and called an election on the issue. Canada split along ethnic lines: English Canadians supported conscription; French Canadians rejected it. By year end, Canada teetered on the brink of civil war.
As Andrew Theobald reveals, New Brunswickers were not spared the bitter divisiveness of the larger national debate. Determined to win the election, federal politicians fanned the flames of ethnic tension, pitting English against French and Irish Catholics against Protestants. In the end, the Conscription Crisis of 1917 fractured the ethnic harmony of New Brunswick, leaving a lasting and tragic legacy.
The Bitter Harvest of War is Volume 11 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.