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Celebrating 50 years of a master craftsman
Arts and crafts help define a culture; they reflect people’s values, beliefs, and the things they hold dear. Artistic Glass: One Studio and Fifty Years of Stained Glass is the first of its kind: a full-color large format art book contextualizing the history of stained glass in Canada and showcasing the life and work of Josef Aigner, an artist and master craftsman whose 50-year career has had a lasting impact on the Canadian art landscape.
Written and photographed by the artist’s daughter, Cloe Aigner, Artistic Glass presents a visually stunning showcase and unique insight into the world of stained glass. Celebrating the mastery, innovation, and skill underlying the art form, Artistic Glass illustrates the diverse use of age-old and contemporary techniques behind the projects and reveals the processes of the artist, lifting the veil from this ancient craft. One of Canada’s most pervasive public forms of art, stained glass is a tradition worth acknowledgment and celebration.
Celebrating 50 years of a master craftsman
Arts and crafts help define a culture; they reflect people’s values, beliefs, and the things they hold dear. Artistic Glass: One Studio and Fifty Years of Stained Glass is the first of its kind: a full-color large format art book contextualizing the history of stained glass in Canada and showcasing the life and work of Josef Aigner, an artist and master craftsman whose 50-year career has had a lasting impact on the Canadian art landscape.
Written and photographed by the artist’s daughter, Cloe Aigner, Artistic Glass presents a visually stunning showcase and unique insight into the world of stained glass. Celebrating the mastery, innovation, and skill underlying the art form, Artistic Glass illustrates the diverse use of age-old and contemporary techniques behind the projects and reveals the processes of the artist, lifting the veil from this ancient craft. One of Canada’s most pervasive public forms of art, stained glass is a tradition worth acknowledgment and celebration.
Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald’s portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.
One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender.
Karl Marx replaced Paul Claudel in Gagnon’s intellectual pantheon. Psychoanalysis gave rise to the desire to write, and her first works poured out in a torrent. She describes the friendships that played such a large part in her life and the feminist battles of the time with all their hopes and disappointments. At the same time she casts a sharp eye on contemporary Quebec society, tracing the emergence of a distinct Canadian literature.
This is an account of a life well lived, told with candour, wisdom, and an inextinguishable sense of wonder.
This volume includes work beginning with bpNichol’s visual poetry (progressing from the use of individual letters, to words, to distinct shapes on the page), moving through his sound poetry (in its written form) for one voice only, to poems which combine visual and traditional lyric qualities (leading to an excerpt from The Martyrology), and concluding with a selection of prose writings, a short play, translations, found poems and collaborations.
A teenaged refugee chases stardom but finds her purpose in Canada’s abortion-rights movement. Fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup, sixteen-year-old Paulina and her older brother Ernesto settle in Toronto. While Ernesto dreams of a glorious homecoming, Paulina embraces her liberation from the conventional life expected of her back home. Yet despite landing her first big role on a popular children’s cartoon, and her first girlfriend, she cannot escape survivor’s guilt. Haunted by the death of a childhood friend, she joins the underground struggle for reproductive freedom. But when a fellow exile pleads for her help terminating a pregnancy, Paulina’s public and private selves threaten to collide.
In these poems, Yvonne Blomer explores birds and their taming through language?the Blackbird as human soul, the Pelican as atonement, the Ostrich as cowardice, and the Raven as trickster, the nearest bird to God. She touches on mythology, biblical texts, and science to ask if poetry comes as close to damaging the wild things of the world as Audubon did in his collecting of birds to create the paintings. Mimesis, Plato argues, damages the soul, but Blomer asks: what does it do to the other creatures of the world?
Poetry collection As Is is a study in place, the town of Hamilton Ontario, considering what it means to be connected to or attempt a connection to place as a settler. Many of the poems function as counter-histories, reading the local history and extracting details that get glossed over elsewhere: the first public building being a prison, the public hangings, the botched first treaty. Other poems are situated in the present, the personal, and look at how these founding errors ring through into the present, for both the individual and the community. As Is searches for alternative frames for defining a local identity: expanding the sense of time to include the prehistoric, the fossil record of mammoth and wapiti in the area, and expanding the sense of place to consider the treaty boundary as a possible framework for understanding the region. Unusually for a book of poetry, it attempts reckoning with actual historical record.
Caroline is seven years old when her family flees Pinochet’s regime, leaving Chile for Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1986. She fears Santa won’t find them on the plane but wakes to find a new doll at her side, her mother preserving the holiday even amidst persecution and turmoil. This symbol of care is repeated throughout their relocation as her parents work tirelessly to provide the family with a new vision of the future.
Once in Canada, Caroline accompanies her parents as they clean banks at night. She experiences racist microaggressions at school, discovers Québécois popular culture, and explores her love of reading and writing in French. Slowly, the Andean peaks disappear from Caroline’s drawings and a fracture between her parents’ identity and her own begins to grow.
This expansive coming-of-age autobiographical novel probes the plurality of identity, elucidating the interwoven complexities of immigrating to a new country. As the Andes Disappeared tenderly reflects the journey of millions and is a beautiful ode to family commitment and the importance of home—however layered that may be.
Vector Sorn–intellectual and athletic prodigy–witnesses the tragic death of his mother when he is just fourteen years old. For the next four years, he does his best to maintain a sense of purpose, and at eighteen sets his sights on Quest University. The night before he departs, his grandparents give him his mother’s journal, a tome filled with daily entries dating back to her own youth. When he finally brings himself to read it, a decades-old secret is revealed and Vector vows vengeance. But not before he meets Valerie Argent, a dauntingly beautiful flight attendant with whom Vector embarks on an unconventional, life-changing journey. Though the current may endeavour to pull Vector under, Valerie is there to provide the buoy that saves him.
In As Though The Gods Love Us, Goh brings a lifetime of love, despair and passion to his work with the skill of a master craftsman. Amidst some of the world’s most exotic locales, he uses graceful and lyrical language to understand his world and to bring us closer to ourselves and each other. From Vancouver neighbourhoods to the tropical darkness of a night in Bali, Goh’s sensibility touches both people and landscapes, ranging in tone from the epic and political to the intimate and personal. Hailed as “one of Asia’s finest living poets” (Asia Magazine), Goh Poh Seng published his first Canadian book of poetry, The Girl from Ermita: Selected Poems in 1998. As Though the Gods Love Us collects Goh’s recent writings since his immigration to Canada. Honest and thoughtful, this is a collection that reflects Goh’s experiences as a peripatetic physician who has become intimate with many of the world’s cultures, most recently British Columbia’s.
On a cold December day in a northern countryside, a strange woman appears on the doorstep of the farmhouse Hugh Mercer is renting, warning him that a local named Elizabeth Goode is about to vanish under mysterious circumstances. Despite her ominous pleas for help, the former NYPD detective remains too preoccupied with the past he’s trying to escape back home in America and his affair with local police officer Alice Morrow. So, he simply dismisses the woman’s dire prediction.
But soon this strange woman’s desperate concerns become reality – and Mercer begins to realize that there is more to the seemingly ordinary Alice and the easy-going northern town she’s from. As Mercer and Alice work together to unravel this crime, they discover the dark history of all those involved and the desperation of those seeking revenge when forgiveness is not possible.
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize • Winner of the 2021 Kate O’Brien Award • Winner of the 2021 Dalkey Emerging Writer Award
Sinead Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret. No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie. But she can’t go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. And Sinead needs them both.
As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland; about women’s stories and women’s struggles; about seizing the moment to be free. Wildly funny, desperately tragic, inventive and irrepressible, As You Were introduces a brilliant voice in Irish fiction with a book that is absolutely of our times.
SUMMER, 1974 — Six teenaged boys died and fifty-four were injured in an explosion on a Canadian Forces Base in Valcartier, Quebec. A live grenade inadvertently made its way into a box of dud ammunition, and its pin was pulled during a lecture on explosives safety. One hundred and forty boys survived, each isolated in their trauma, yet expected to carry on with their lives.
Thirty-four years later, Gerry Fostaty, who was an 18-year-old sergeant that summer and one of the first on the scene after the explosion, received an unexpected email from his former sergeant-major, triggering a journey into memory, a quest for a true picture of what had happened on that day. In As You Were, Fostaty pieces together the story of how a series of preventable mistakes led to tragedy.
The only full account of an event that received minor attention at the time, As You Were is the story of a normal day turned horrific, how duty, responsibility, and honour make ordinary people take extraordinary measures, and how an embarrassed military did their best to ignore this devastating incident.