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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.
When nineteen-year-old runaway Verity Darkwood, flat broke and devastated by guilt, takes refuge in a bar to escape the unwanted attention of a stranger, she doesn’t expect to meet Gareth Winter, let alone become business partners with him. They discover that they each possess the ability to interact with the world “beyond the veil” and, with the help of Horace Greeley III, editor of the fantastical online journal The Echo, Verity and Gareth spend the next two years on the road, helping the earthbound spirits who haunt their clients to cross over, or exorcising the demons that plague them. But when they stumble upon a series of unsolved child abductions spanning decades which are eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Verity’s younger sister, they embark on a pursuit that will take them across Canada in their quest to find The Seventh Devil, the dangerous and mysterious figure who may be behind it all.
The Seventh Shot is a recounting of two grisly Ontario murders some thirty years on, and the remarkable efforts of police detectives to unravel the senseless brutality of these crimes.
The author and one-time classmate of the killer, haunted by the grisly crimes and some demons of her own, sets about shedding light on the dogged determination of Ontario Police Detectives to bring a killer cop to justice, involving a little luck, and a whole lot of talent.
Drawing on faded archival copies, hours of interviews and first hand accounts, This one time journalist follows the life of Ronald Glen West, once referred to as’ The 22 Calibre Killer’, from birth to time spent on the range with the likes of Bernardo and Williams, with whom, among many other coincidences, he has more than crimes in common.
Besides the 1970 murders of two young mothers in the Oak Ridges Moraine, Burke addresses the yet unsolved Blind River killings at a roadside rest stop in 1991 for which West has long been suspected.
One cannot read The Seventh Shot without comparing the parallels of the Golden State Killer: both cops, long undetected and ultimately charged through the science of DNA. The Seventh Shot is my story of pursuing the remarkable apprehension of a perpetrator of two horrible crimes from a long cold case, a man whom I just happened to know. I think too that it is unique in revealing the remarkable number of parallels and links in the lives of many involved.
When the purest woman on earth allows herself one selfish wish, it is enough to conceive the most evil woman the world has ever known. Collecting Lovern Kindzierski and John Bolton’s acclaimed fantasy series for the first time in hardcover format.
This collection also includes the first ten pages of Hope, the next book in the series, along with John Bolton’s original pencil layouts for the books, an interview with both Lovern and John about the trilogy, and additional background material.
In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, Braidie struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.
Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.
Use poker strategy to become a better decision maker
In high-stakes poker, you need patience and aggression — qualities that translate to the world of business. In The Shark and the Fish, Charley Swayne applies winning poker strategies to decision-making and leadership.
Learn how to:
In this unique strategy book, Charley Swayne teaches you how to be the shark at the boardroom table, not the fish.
Steve Reinke is one of the most intriguing artists we’ve got; his scope is enormous, his imagination absolutely singular. His video art — The Hundred Videos, Anthology of American Folk Song, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss — practically define the genre.
Reinke tells us, in ‘Kitchener–Berlin,’ his appreciation of Philip Hoffman’s film of that title, that experimental video is centred around voice — a decidedly peculiar and literary notion. It makes good sense, then, that this experimental video artist is also an accomplished prose writer.
Collected herein are Reinke’s best recent prose pieces. Hybrids of criticism, fiction and personal essay, these pieces all engage — by pillaging, by honouring, by scrutinizing, by cannibalizing — an other’s work: the films of Frank Cole, the videos of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, the photos of Douglas Ischar, the writings of Dr.Paul Brouardel and the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, to name just a few.
Funny, absurd and tartly poignant, these texts document the process and reach of an artistic mind at the height of its powers.
A heartbreaking arrival in a new country. Thrust too early into adulthood. Will he survive Canada’s turbulent streets?
Toronto, 1882. Joseph Conlon has never felt more alone. Parentless after his mother dies on the voyage from Ireland, the frightened eight-year-old witnesses his sister’s abduction and is abandoned at the train station. But once he’s placed in a Catholic orphanage, Joseph discovers a gift for drawing and friends that begin to fill the hole in his heart.
Falling for a mercurial girl acrobat, his desire to win her affection drives him to find her after she runs off for a life on the stage. And as he leaves the institution and grows to manhood, the young immigrant endures dangerous work, anti-Irish bigotry, and lying about his faith to survive… only to have his longing for family lead to tragedy.
Will Joseph ever reach the place where he belongs?
In this poignant and lyrical story, author Robin Blackburn McBride follows one boy’s emotional and colorful journey. Deftly depicting a compelling era while exploring the intensely personal challenges of the human experience, McBride’s inspirational tale of hope and courage will touch you deeply.
The Shining Fragments is a meticulously researched and rendered historical family saga. If you like complex characters, richly authentic settings, and stories of resilience, then you’ll love Robin Blackburn McBride’s immersive novel.
Buy The Shining Fragments to witness the strength of the human spirit today!
“Tales about orphans left to find their way in the New World are many, but few are as engaging as this story.” -Historical Novel Society North America, Editors’ Choice
The Shining Material is about saying I. Disrupt, interrupt, challenge I? How boring. How violent. Better/instead/also cradle-interrogate I; to a steaming, exfoliating shining, hold I: the curve at the top of I, the curve at the base of I, the long shaft I oh I. Sigh: I, you get a lot of shit, so in The Shining Material, the poet speaks you meekly, hoarsely, disobediently: witness Aisha Sasha John braid self-portrature, ekphrasis, and her own brand of psalm to produce an experience much like falling down the stairs and it helping.