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The Red Kelly Story
$29.95The life and times of the eight-time Stanley Cup winner
When Boston coach Lynn Patrick was asked who he’d pick between Rocket Richard or Gordie Howe he answered, “Neither! I’ll take Red Kelly!” The only player to have won eight Stanley Cups without playing for Montreal, Red began his life in hockey on the cedar swamps near Port Dover, Ontario, and went on to win accolades and championships as a Detroit Red Wing and Toronto Maple Leaf.
Go back in time with Red as he reminisces about his childhood: the time he nearly drowned; when he brought St. Michael’s College to three provincial championships; and his jump into a career with the NHL where sportsmanlike conduct won him multiple Lady Byng trophies. While playing with the Leafs, he served as member of parliament in Lester Pearson’s government. After retiring in 1967 as a player, Red coached for a decade in the NHL with Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. This is a fascinating biography of a life well lived — on and off the ice.
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The Red Notebook
$24.95From the theatre of Euripides to the theatre of Montreal’s Main, Michel Tremblay casts some of his most famous and exotic personae, The Duchess, Fine Dumas, Jean-le-Décollé and Babalu, in a whole new light in his new Notebooks. Unlike his Plateau Mount Royal novels, wherein these flamboyant transvestites and their community of social misfits are seen from the perspective of a child destined to discover the defining characteristic of his own otherness as gay, the Notebooks are narrated in the voice of a young woman, and one whose difference is not primarily determined by her sexuality, but by her highly visible physical deformity—Céline Poulin is a midget.
The year is 1967—Expo—and everyone in Montreal is waiting for the great day when they can visit its exotic foreign pavilions. For the characters of The Red Notebook, the second in this trilogy, life in Montreal has shaken off its conservative glumness as a new age arrives. Change is everywhere in the air: politically the Quebec independence movement has been given a major boost by Charles de Gaulle’s famous “Vive le Québec libre!” declaration; and things will never be the same. Céline Poulin, former waitress at the bohemian hangout “Le Sélect,” is now about to start a new job: that of hostess in a bordello just opened by Montreal’s famous Madame, Fine Dumas. Its specialty? All the “girls” in “Le Boudoir” are transvestites. Some are old pals of Céline’s who’ll also be her room-mates after she finally escapes the stifling unhappiness of her family home and moves into their communal boarding house.
Having always maintained that he does not write politics, but fables, Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in solidarity with a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion.
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The Red One
$22.95Nisha, “Azar’s beautiful wife,” lives a life surrounded by all the modern luxuries of a wealthy suburban home in Toronto. Her father is a taxi driver, her mother a conservative religious housewife jealously craving a better material life. Tormented by her childhood memories of serial sexual abuse by a family friend, contemptuous of the lies lived by her circle of fake friends, Nisha is unwilling to have a child by her dominant, patronizing husband. She finds escape in mindless shopping sprees and secretly spirals into an addiction to a drug called the “red powder.” In this state one day she meets the mysterious Red One, an archetypal strong man to whom she’s instantly and dangerously attracted, who promises her release from her pain. But is he real or a figment of her fervid imagination? In a thrilling denouement to the novel she finds the answer.
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The Red Word
$19.95Winner of the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult novel by a powerful new voice
A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry — particularly at Gamma Beta Chi. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. The frat known as GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture — but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.
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The Reddening Path
$18.95Paméla returns to Guatemala to search for her birth mother. Her journey reveals more than she could have imagined; a bloody history of conquest and cultural genocide; a shocking love story; and, woven through it all, the invisible mystery of her own surprising seduction.
The Reddening Path is the story of Paméla who, adopted as an infant by Hannah & Fern, a Toronto lesbian couple, travels to Guatamala to search for her birth mother. Her quest uncovers a tangle of political and romantic intrigue as Paméla discovers her Mayan heritage and learns about the complexities of life in Guatemala. Resonating throughout is an account of Malintzín, the Mayan slave who became Cortes’ mistress. These details of the Spanish conquest weave throughout the narrative, colouring the lives of everyone she encounters in her birthland. Paméla’s journey casts light on the struggle between conqueror and conquered within the Guatemalan people and the spiritual and emotional complexities facing those of mixed blood, a reality which challenges her expectations for an easy resolution to her question of identity.
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The Redemption of Galen Pike
$23.95From remote Australian settlements to the snows of Siberia, from Colorado to Cumbria, restless teenagers, middle-aged civil servants, and Quaker spinsters traverse expanses of solitude to reveal the secrets of the human heart.
Encountering domestic abuse, marital strife, murder, and a myriad of other challenges, Carys Davies’ characters are set on journeys that surprise at every turn. Written with raw and rigorous prose, charged throughout by a prickly wit, the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike remind us how little we know of the lives of others.
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The Refrigerator Memory
$15.95The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness.
With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. You’ll find the hopelessly misunderstood Love the Clown (never goes out without his red wig) and Noni, a forlorn young man who can’t stop crying.
But while sadness plays a starring role, the true hero of the collection is the imagination; its transformative powers warm widows and drunken gods and designated mourners.
You won’t forget The Refrigerator Memory: the icebox cometh to warm your heart.
‘Bramer’s “Our Prosthesis�* … [is] wonderfully succinct, while still managing to convey entire lives floating beneath its surface.’ – Lee Gowan
‘[Bramer writes] poems with resonant grief, fragile glass and desperate love, carved carefully and spare out of cold, dark objects, achieving small, remarkable poems.’ – rob mclennan
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The Refugee Hotel
$17.95Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirre’s uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouver’s skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for Aguirre to understand and come to terms with her family’s experience as refugees and exiles: “The few times we spoke about it to other people, we were accused of being pathological liars and being crazy,” she says of those years. “We learned never to talk about what was happening in Chile. From the moment when I told some classmates very matter-of-factly in grade two that my stepfather and some of my family members had just come out of a concentration camp that was the national soccer stadium, I was Crazy Carmen.”
Laid bare in the ?ctionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths the victims and survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivor—even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future.
Set in a run-down hotel in 1974, only months after the start of the infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees struggle, at times haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if ?eeing their homeland means they have abandoned their friends and responsibilities or not.
More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver after Pinochet’s coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre’s attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.
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The Relativistic Empire
$18.00Samuel Andreyev inhabits several worlds: he is bilingual and lives in France; he is an internationally-known composer; and he is a writer whose material is the bric-a-brac of everyday speech and rhetoric, forged into a poetry of obsessive perfectionism.
Part mental autobiography, part ode to a new, radically mobile consciousness—The Relativistic Empire combines the diagrammatic elegance of the comic strip with the complexity and elusiveness of symbolism.
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The Relevance of Islamic Identity in Canada
$24.95This volume examines, from diverse perspectives, what it means to be a Muslim in Canada. Is it a public or a private identity, and as an identity is it compatible with a secular democracy such as Canada? What relation does it bear to historical, cultural, and ethnic identities? Is a total agnostic or an atheist a Muslim? Is a person who disavows being a Muslim still a Muslim? How do Muslims cope with anti-Muslim bigotry, especially when it goes “official”? What alterations in social and religious practice and what re-thinking of interpretation can one expect in its evolution?
These vital questions of faith, culture, and identity are addressed by prominent members of the Canadian cultural and intellectual community.
Contributors include: Mohamed Alibhai (Vancouver; scholar, former editor Islam in America) Mayank Bhatt (journalist and author, Toronto) Amira Elghawaby (Communications Director, National Council of Canadian Muslims, Ottawa) Safia Fazlul (novelist, The Harem, Toronto) Ihsaan Gardee (Executive Director, National Council of Canadian Muslims, Ottawa) Karim H Karim (Carleton University, Ottawa) Monia Mazigh (author, Mirrors and Mirages, Ottawa) Ameen Merchant (novelist, The Silent Raga, Vancouver) Narendra Pachkhede (cultural commentator, Toronto) Asma Sayed (MacEwan University, Edmonton) Haroon Siddiqui (emeritus editor, The Toronto Star) Zainub Verjee (visual artist, Toronto).
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The Repoetic
$20.00A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Repoetique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Unconventional and otherwise inconceivable relationships thrive in this unreal space, where hot tub (s)cum, The Tinder-Poem, comes to life to date a mercurial living-meme, the Chose-Coke Poser: sometimes Goblin, sometimes aristocratic variant of the Femboy Hooters meme. The whorld at once a food-tray fastness, a clotted pocket mirror propping open a mouth, and a bloody buffet for twenty befanged criminals seeking refuge from the law. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem’s voice asking “does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?” The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled; for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson’s unending boyhood. The cerebral, no-chill, scab-picking, contours flush to contours queertopia, the nemesis to cartopia, straight-time and straight-rhyme alike. The Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato?s no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, The Repoetic‘s an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can’t couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise the Poem annoys.
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The Republic of Nothing
$19.99Winner, Dartmouth Book Award
Shortlisted, Atlantic Booksellers Choice AwardA small Canadian island declares its independence to the world and benign anarchy reigns. A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island’s inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement.
Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms?
In this new readers’ guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce’s novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.
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The Rest is Silence
$22.95Winner, H.R. (Bill) Percy Novel Prize
Finalist, Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Finalist, Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award
Finalist, Ottawa Book AwardIn the backwoods of Nova Scotia, a man has decided to withdraw from the world and live off the land. Meanwhile, news reports begin to trickle in of a global catastrophe. Someone has released a genetically modified strain of bacteria that devours plastic. The world will never again be the same.
In this masterfully atmospheric novel, both apocalyptic in scope and intimate in setting, Scott Fotheringham cracks opens Pandora’s box to let loose a trail of chilling consequences.
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The Restoration
$18.95The Restoration
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The Revolving City
$18.00Finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award
The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them is a vibrant and diverse collection from a who’s who of the west coast poetry scene.
The poems assembled here range from the lyric to the experimental and address the theme of disconnection in an urban environment from a variety of positions, concerns, and cultural perspectives. The collection also includes short reflections on the poems, written by the poets themselves, providing readers with an intimate insight into the inspiration and meaning behind the poems.
The Revolving City anthology evolved out of the Lunch Poems reading series, a stimulating exchange of poetic ideas and cadence held the third Wednesday of every month in public space at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.
The Revolving City seeks to build community, extend poetry to new audiences, and reflect the rich diversity of the poetry scene both local and distant.
Edited by much-lauded writer and director of the Writer’s Studio, Wayde Compton, and award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar.
Contributors:
Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli.
Praise for The Revolving City:
“In these fiercely competitive and egotistical times, what a relief when established poets stand alongside and support emerging ones. The poems – passionate, com-passionate and critical at once, investigating, as Meredith Quartermain puts it, ‘the physical, the historical, the cultural and the linguistic grounds’ of the city – are deepened by each poet’s reflection on their own work. Here are the cultural voices of Canada’s today and tomorrow. Listen. You will be hearing more.” (Kate Braid, author of Turning Left to the Ladies and Rough Grounds Revisited)
“Plato said poets are the people least likely to be able to say anything enlightening about the craft. He was a curmudgeon for thinking that, but not entirely wrong, because good poems derive less from the intellect than from the solar plexus, the bone marrow, or what Yeats called ‘the rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’ It’s so hard to write a good poem that poets leap at the chance to talk about what they were trying to achieve, or how it came to pass; and these ruminations are always more personal and often more engaging than the poems themselves. The Revolving City celebrates this wonderful dichotomy and, at times, blessedly defies it.” (Gary Geddes, author of What Does a House Want? and editor of 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics)
“The Revolving City not only manages to emphasize the importance of breaking social divides, but it also reveals the inherently effective power poetry has in expressing issues of societal significance.” (The Ubyssey)
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The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh
$15.95The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this work—from the seventeenth century platonist mystics to what his companions on the poetry trail were writing at last night’s soirée, a crowd of voices, asides, references, allusions and whispers is constantly pushing and expanding his line forward. marvellously self-taught in the school of poets, mclennan’s work is refreshingly free of pretence and category. The impressive and exhaustive range of poets and writers with whom he has learned is simply there, in his work-present, in the current text, not absent in some far, or even near, distant past. This is the work of a young man who has paid his dues and done his homework. There is also a kind of subtle humour here, born of the care with which mclennan keeps his lines clear of the dead-ends of self-consciousness, allowing the language to free itself from the page, and to be heard as well as read.