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David French’s brilliant translation of The Seagull, in collaboration with Russian scholar, Donna Orwin, is at one and the same time a revitalization of a Russian theatre classic, and French’s personal tribute to one of the greatest playwrights of all time.
Cast of 5 women and 8 men.
In this comic Cold War novel, Canadian restaurateur Emmet Argentine is trapped in Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, under the tyranny of two equally formidable forces: the Soviet Union, and his staunchly socialist mother.
Raised in the kitchens of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, Emmet’s got a talent for hospitality that catches the attention of a high-ranking architect, who hires him to helm a magnificent new restaurant. Under Emmet’s direction, the Seaside Café Metropolis, though located neither by the sea nor in a major metropolitan area, attracts a colourful cast of bohemian artists, writers, and philosophers, including a visit from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — all while kgb operatives listen in from the basement via microphones in the bread baskets.
Through guile, wit, and charm, Emmet, his staff, and other restaurant regulars strive to make rich lives for themselves in the heart of the repressive Soviet regime, drawing warmth from good food, good humour, and even better company.
Winner of the 40th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest!
If faced with reincarnation, would you want to come back as a dog, an eagle, a plant? Most poison ivy is reincarnated ivy. You can see the complexity of second lives, the intrepid narrator-detective declares. For those yet reincarnated, devotion can become muddled. And as the characters in The Second Detective learn, you can’t fight the universe and regret is terrible company.
The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests. Aging beauty Lilah walks into the narrator’s office with a photo of Babe Ruth, a story about a sketchy reincarnation plan, and the hope of finding her husband Glen. Despite misgivings, the narrator takes on her case and soon the two are galloping headfirst into gorgons, contraband blood and villainous brothers, with a sideways trip to the zoo.
There are two things you need to know: Every action is a choice that tells you something more, unless it means nothing at all.
Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel.
A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand.
Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society.
With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature.
Anne Frank has survived the war, and at age 25, she’s ready to start a new chapter in New York City. Eager to publish a memoir of her time in hiding, Anne is sure it will launch her career as a writer. But when the only interested publisher suggests drastic rewrites, Anne is unsure of what to do. Everyone around her seems to be able to move on and recover from the war, but her inability to make her voice heard forces Anne to question the meaning of her new life. Why did she survive, if not to share stories?
An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.
Long after his death, Glenn Gould still lures new listeners to his piano, connecting with them on a haunting, personal level. “He feels and you feel,” says young New York writer Nicole Spectre. “I can feel his pain and joy — it touches me. He speaks directly to me.”
But when he was known as the world’s greatest pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, just who was Gould playing for? His audience? Himself? His demanding mother? All are likely true, but he was also richly inspired by — and bared his soul at the keyboard to — a secret society of women, the girlfriends who stirred his hard-to-fetch emotions: Franny Batchen, Verna Sandercock, Cornelia Foss, Roxolana Roslak, and Monica Gaylord.
Of the eighteen books and nineteen documentaries by or about the most compelling virtuoso of the twentieth century, none have contained details about Gould’s many love affairs and how they affected his life, his music, and his filmmaking. Until now, biographers have tried to explain what came out of the music box, not the engine that drove it. The vault to his private life has remained locked since his untimely death in 1982 because of his obsessions with privacy and controlling his image, the loyalty of his carefully chosen friends and lovers, and the choice that biographers made to focus safely on his music and eccentricities.
The Secret Life of Glenn Gould will be the first true exposé of Gould, who until now has been assumed to be asexual, lonely, and egocentric, by examining his love and soul-mate relationships. His music was twelve-tonal and his documentaries “contrapuntal” — both were filled with overlapping voices — and so was his private life.
Every child who has ever visited the Peter Pan statue in Bowring Park, St. John’s, swears it is magic. They know that the mice, squirrels, rabbits, and fairies are never in the same place as the last time they visited. Some say they’ve seen Peter wink at them, and others believe they’ve heard the soft whispering sounds of a flute. Are the stories true? Is the Peter Pan statue really magic? Or are the tales just childhood fantasies? The Secret of Bowring Park is a story of magic, a celebration of eternal childhood, and a heartwarming tale of the bond between sisters.Join sisters Elizabeth and Natalie on their adventure at the Peter Pan statue and learn the real secret of Bowing Park.
Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetics of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names they give themselves.
Shelter
The rubber plant in the hospital cafeteria is waiting for rain. Palms up beneath a sky of fluorescent lights, its leaves are broad enough to be roof, temporary shelter, shade to small creatures caught in the open. The hiker, for instance, who has made a fire with wet twigs and hunkers down to wait it out under his wide blue tarpaulin.
“A perfect representation of how focusing on people, story, and emotion can bring magic to the stage.” —Theatre in London
Maggie has spent a lifetime keeping painful memories at bay and her inquisitive journalist daughter, Gwynn, at arm’s length. When a gathering is organized for survivors of the residential school Maggie attended, Gwynn wants to produce a documentary and share her mother’s story. Maggie, however, would rather leave the past where it belongs and learn to forgive and forget. Over steaming cups of tea and fresh bannock, they embark on a healing journey to bridge the distance between them, uncovering long-buried truths through laughter, compassion, and the enduring bond between mother and daughter.
Rosanna Deerchild’s The Secret to Good Tea is a rich blend of spirited comedy and powerful testimony that explores the responsibility of caretaking stories and their impacts that ripple across generations. Warm, nourishing, and with just the right amount of sweetness, this big-hearted play reminds us that sharing our stories can be the best kind of medicine.
Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn’t support women struggling to have children
In pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups – where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation – leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.
In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage – her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Longlisted for the 2025 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
With echoes of Zora Neale Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the first weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
“A provocative, multi-faceted gem. Full of fierce anti-colonial rage and
subtle artistry, addressing what it means to be a migrant in today’s
fractured Britain.”—2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize Judges’ Citation
Iulia Militaru’s poems combine different types of speech, from medical and philosophy textbook to “newspeak,” witness accounts, police reports, obituaries, and other written forms. Militaru turns on their head concepts about what we know and accept as poetry, truth, historical facts, philosophy, and language. A fierce feminist who explores the degrees by which speech and the performative act affect our relationship with the Other, Militaru creates unsettling idea collages that force us to examine the discourses throughout history and look at the world with unflinching eyes. The result is a text that draws surprising conclusions, points out absurd realities, and laughs in the face of norms—a dazzling, courageous tour de force.
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The Semiconducting Dictionary: Our Strindberg is a playful original re-visioning of the life of notorious misogynist and modern drama master August Strindberg, mixing prose and poetry of various forms from different historical periods including straightforward lyric, found poetry, haibun, list poems, magic spells, and alchemical recipes to construct a portrait and to tell a story.
August Strindberg is a hotly debated figure, a master of the Modern theatre and a contemporary of Ibsen; the influence of Strindberg’s work continues to this day. However, in contemporary times his often outrageous misanthropy and misogyny (he claimed that women were demons) have been variously apologized for as poetic licence, self-portrait, critical posture, or simply mistaken (how could he be a misogynist when there were so many women in his life?). Caple contributes to the apologist literature surrounding him by pretending that he was actually a woman playwright living as a man and his supposed hatred either part of the disguise or else self-loathing. By embracing Strindberg, Caple is able to highlight the excessive beauty of human complications and to represent a world at the end of the enlightenment, as the magic of the church gave way to the magic of the sciences.
Spanning three continents and the ten years leading up to the close of the nineteenth century, The Serpent?s Veil follows the personal journeys? of Constance Stubbington and Ank Maguire who grapple with what haunts them: the impact of colonialism, the death of family members, and the intuitive gifts that shape them.
Constance, a bold woman who severs her father?s rigid ideas with a sharp tongue, is thrown from a horse and wakes in Guy?s Hospital in London, England. The hospital staff is tight?lipped about her father?s whereabouts and the medical implications of her accident. It is here that she meets Ank Maguire and the two discover that they share a connection with the spiritual world, an intuition that is both a gift and a curse.
Through a series of flashbacks, dreams, and up?to?the minute storytelling we travel from the bogs of Ireland, to the streets of Victoria, BC through the Raj lands of India, and to the grimy world of London?s Southwark district. The Serpent?s Veil is a spellbinding tale of action and mystery where people are born and die, mystical revelations dominate and consciousness is transformed, but above all, spirit lives.