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A collection of poems, concrete poems and illustrations, The Examined Life unearths the lyricism buried deep in the language and ideas of western philosophy. It tinkers with that lyricism, bends it, crafts it into a multi-shaped, multi-voiced dynamic poetry that succeeds in capturing thought in transit as it crosses both the heart and mind.
Renya, a scientist who studies how people react to fear, flees a troubled marriage to conduct research on the scientists working in the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl. In the eerily silent forests surrounding the research station, she finds more is haunting her than the dangers of radiation exposure. As she gathers data from her colleagues and probes historical records of the Chernobyl disaster, unsettling questions rise to the surface. Who is funding her research? Why are all the scientists’ findings off? And what do those who stalk the ruins of the abandoned city nearby want? In this atmospheric tale, Alexis von Konigslow deftly weaves the struggles of women in science with the impact of politics, both past and present, on people and on the environment. Part ghost story, part literary thriller, The Exclusion Zone is a mesmerizing story that reminds us all to listen to our hearts as well as the earth.
The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais’s only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it tells the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one of their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil and complicity, themes well-known to readers of Blais’s fiction.
The Expo Affair is a narrative memoir of international intrigue and romance that took place in the exotic setting of Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. As a host at the Ontario Pavilion, the author, Geza Tatrallyay, was approached by three Czechoslovak hostesses who wanted to defect to Canada. What follows are his efforts to make their wish come true. Notables such as former Prime Minister Trudeau, External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp and General George Kitching play a role, as do individuals who have since become prominent in Canada as businessmen, artists and ambassadors.
RCMP Inspector Coswell is back. A university professor is murdered and his corpse is revealed to a first year anatomy class in spectacular fashion–nude on a slab alongside shrouded medical cadavers. He begins his investigation with Corporal James, his long time assistant, but is abruptly assigned a new partner, a female officer who arrives under a political cloud. Already depressed by his perceived plunge into senility, Coswell struggles to stifle his own gender biases and work effectively with this woman.
Their list of suspects grows: failed students, a jealous colleague, an intriguing ex-wife and a criminal cartel. Clues emerge that send them all over the city of Vancouver from UBC campus to downtown and its plethora of gourmet restaurants.
In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie.
An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet’s dictum that “daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.
In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream.
“A slight but quick-witted and thoughtful philosophical parable that falls somewhere between Camus and Gaiman’s Sandman universe.” —Kirkus Reviews
“S. D. Chrostowska’s The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future.” —Douglas Glover
Throughout the years, Anne Campbell’s work has remained consistently engaging, her tone steady and trustworthy and her control of imagery precise. There are subtle changes in her presentation of the natural world and slight shifts in the metaphysical approach to space, time, and possibility. But in this retrospective there is no doubt that her strength lies in her ability to capture the transcendence that occurs when nature informs the mind and the commonplace rises to philosophical insight. Though universal in scope, the poems only give up all their richness upon slow and careful readings.
The Fabric of Day is an offering to readers who want to know about emotional and spiritual survival and how a creative person confronts regrets and failures through a medium like poetry. The subject matter is as old as time and as contemporary as any authentic Facebook page or blog, except that the language employed is both beautiful as it is impacting.
Campbell’s poetic style is specific, local, and universal at the same time. Her images are powerful and her language honed to land and sky, horizon to earth. Her ability to illuminate common and intimate natural forces and how they play out against people’s emotions and alter their lives demonstrates great lyric power full of finesse, grace, and passion. Her voice declares its territory with a careful control of rhythm and space on the page and a gentle insistence to expectation on the ear.
A modern-day fable and mythic bildungsroman, The Faerie Devouring tells the story of a young girl raised by her grandmother (a stalwart matriarch and wicked fairy godmother) following her mother’s death during childbirth. The absent mother haunts the story of this girl whose greatest misfortune is to have been born female.
In this critically-acclaimed coming-of-age story by Quebecois author Catherine Lalonde, and translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, questions of what it means to be born female and grow into a woman are explored. The story is rife with song, myth, phantasmagoria, spells, desire, ferocious poetic telling, wild imagination, and unruly language. Lalonde uses the form of a disenchanted and metaphorical fable to recount what it means to find a life force in one’s lineage, even when one is born into “nothing.”
According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, “Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this image and focuses on it. The Fairies Are Thirsty is a daring, passionate and poetic exploration of the role of women through all time. In the play, three women—a housewife, a whore and the Virgin Mary—fight to break out of the stereotyped roles in which they have been imprisoned for centuries. At the end of the play they stand alone, “before themselves,” “renewed,” and ask the audience to imagine a world in which such stereotypes do not exist.
“Everything is new. Everything is strange. Everything is possible.” – Yumi Sakugawa
The Fairy Tale Museum is an alchemical curiosity-cabinet-as-novel that showcases the original, spectacular, grotesque, endearing, and otherworldly. You’ll meet bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, a fortune teller, revolutionary ventriloquists’ dummies, a narcoleptic vampire, Eros and Thanatos, and a host of woodland creatures. A celebration of hybrids, creativity, and transformation, this book is a manifesto against putting ourselves into boxes that limit who we can be and what is possible.
Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.
As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.
At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest in the town, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.
Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free—or else lose everything.
Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope.
With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.