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The War Criminal
$29.95A psychological thriller about a former member of the SS in contemporary America. Horst Gerhard Schneider was once a young, naïve member of the SS. An obedient and valued novice, Schneider soon found himself promoted and playing chauffeur to Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most infamous Nazi leaders to be found in the pages of history. Now in his 80s, Schneider is still at large, living in anonymous poverty in a North American city. When the desecration of a synagogue rocks his community, the elderly war criminal suspects that a troubled teenaged neighbour may be responsible. Refusing to be silently complicit for a second time, Schneider must confront both the demons of his own youth and the anti-Semitism that still thrives half a century later and half a world away.
Guilt and wisdom, memory and metamorphosis fill this powerful narrative to overflowing.
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The War You Don’t Hate
$22.95In Blaise Ndala’s magnificent second novel, originally published as Sans Capote Ni Kalachnikov in 2017, the paths of a Canadian documentary filmmaker and two former rebel soldiers from the Congo collide in this searing revenge tale about those who profit from the misery of others.
Los Angeles, 2002. Véronique Quesnel accepts the Best Documentary Oscar for “Sona: Rape and Terror in the Heart of Darkness”, basking in the praise of her privileged audience. She has drawn attention to “the center of gravity that is Black tragedy”, which attracted her away from her life in Montreal, and to the harrowing story of Sona, a young woman who escaped sex slavery. But this lauded film has also shone a dangerous spotlight on Véronique herself. In the Great Lakes region of Africa, Master Corporal Red Ant and his cousin Baby Che are stalking the remnants of the Second Congo War – the deadliest conflict since World War II. In search of truth and vengeance, their obsession now has a name.
The original French novel was awarded many honours, such as:
Winner – 2019 Radio-Canada Combats des livres
Winner – 2018 Prix Émergence de l’Association des auteurs et auteures de l’Ontario français
Finalist – 2018 Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire
Special Mention – 2018 Prix Ivoire pour la littérature africaine d’expression francophone
Finalist – 2017 Trillium Book Award
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The Ward
$25.95The story of the growth and destruction of Toronto’s first ‘priority neighbourhood.’
From the 1840s until the Second World War, waves of newcomers who migrated to Toronto – Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American and Chinese, among others – landed in ‘The Ward.’ Crammed with rundown housing and immigrant-owned businesses, this area, bordered by College and Queen, University and Yonge streets, was home to bootleggers, Chinese bachelors, workers from the nearby Eaton’;s garment factories and hard-working peddlers. But the City considered it a slum, and bulldozed the area in the late 1950s to make way for a new civic square.
The Ward finally tells the diverse stories of this extraordinary and resilient neighbourhood through archival photos and contributions from a wide array of voices, including historians, politicians, architects, story-tellers, journalists and descendants of Ward residents. Their perspectives on playgrounds, tuberculosis, sex workers, newsies and even bathing bring The Ward to life and, in the process, raise important questions about how contemporary cities handle immigration, poverty and the geography of difference.
‘The Ward shines a light on one of Toronto’s most historically significant and most forgotten neighbourhoods. Instead of a straight history, the book’s editors opted to present the Ward through multiple short essays, each with its own unique point of view. The result is a fascinating and varied look at an area that once concurrently defined the city and acted as its biggest shame. As a result of the Ward’s eventual razing, there are few artifacts left to teach newer generations about this important part of Toronto’s history. This book helps correct that.’
– 2016 Toronto Book Awards Jury Citation
‘[The Ward] should be of interest to Canadians anywhere, reminding us that we all came from some place else.’
– Michael Enright, CBC Sunday Edition
Contents & Contributors
Introduction – John Lorinc
Searching for the Old Ward – Shawn Micallef
No Place Like Home – Howard Akler
Beforethe Ward: Macauleytown – Stephen A. Otto
My Grandmother the Bootlegger – Howard Moscoe
Against All Odds: The Chinese Laundry – Arlene Chan
VJ Day – Arlene Chan
Merle Foster’s Studio: ‘A Spot Of Enchantment’ – Terry Murray
Missionary Work: The Fight for Jewish Souls – Ellen Scheinberg
King of the Ward – Myer Siemiatycki
Where the Rich Went for Vice – Michael Redhill
A Fresh Start: Black Toronto in the 19th Century – Karolyn Smardz Frost
Policing the Lord’s Day – Mariana Valverde
‘The Maniac Chinaman’ – Edward Keenan
Elsie’s Story – Patte Roseban
Lawren Harris’s Ward Period – Jim Burant
‘Fool’s Paradise’: Hastings’ Anti-Slum Crusade – John Lorinc
Strange Brew: The Underground Economy of Blind Pigs – Ellen Scheinberg
The Consulate, the Padroni and the Labourers – Andrea Addario
Excerpt: The Italians in Toronto – Emily P. Weaver
Arthur Goss: Documenting Hardship– Stephen Bulger
Fresh Air: The Fight Against TB – Cathy Crowe
The Stone Yard – Gaetan Heroux
William James: Toronto’s First Photojournalist – Vincenzo Pietropaolo
The Avenue Not Taken – Michael McClelland
Timothy Eaton’s Stern Fortifications – Michael Valpy
Settling In: Central Neighbourhood House – Ratna Omidvar & Ranjit Bhaskar
Toronto’s Girl with the Curls – Ellen Scheinberg
Chinese Caf̩s: Survival and Danger РEllen Scheinberg & Paul Yee
Defiance and Divisions: The Great Eaton’s Strike – Ruth A. Frager
Elizabeth Street: What the City Directories Reveal – Denise Balkissoon
Growing Up on Walton Street – Cynthia MacDougall
Revitalizing George Street: The Ward’s Lessons – Alina Chatterjee & Derek Ballantyne
Taking Care of Business in the Ward &ndash Ellen Scheinberg
‘A Magnificent Dome’: The Great University Avenue Synagogue – Jack Lipinsky
Reading the Ward: The Inevitability of Loss – Kim Storey & James Brown
Toronto’s First Little Italy – John Lorinc
The Elizabeth Street Playground, Revisited – Bruce Kidd
Divided Loyalties – Sandra Shaul
Crowded by Any Measure – John Lorinc
A Peddler and His Cart: TheWard’s Rag Trade – Deena Nathanson
Toronto’s Original Tenement: Wineberg Apartments – Richard Dennis
Excerpt: Tom Thomson’s Diary – Tom Thomson
An Untimely Death – Brian Banks
Paper Pushers – Ellen ScheinbergÂ
The BMR’s Wake-Up Call – Laurie Monsebraaten
Excerpt: Report of the Medical Health Officer … – Charles J. Hastings
Dr. Clarke’s Clinic – Thelma Wheatley
Slum-Free: The Suburban Ideal – Richard Harris
The Glionna Clan and Toronto’s First Little Italy – John E. Zucchi
‘The Hipp’ – Michael Posner
Before Yorkville– John Lorinc
Sex Work and the Ward’s Bachelor Society – Elise Chenier
Public Baths: Schvitzing on Centre Avenue – Ellen Scheinberg
The Health Advocates: McKeown on Hastings – John Lorinc
Remembering Toronto’s First Chinatown – Kristyn Wong-Tam
Tabula Rasa – Mark Kingwell
Unrealized Renewal – J. David Hulchanski
A Short History of the ‘Civic Square’ Expropriation – John Lorinc
Storytelling is Part of the Story – Tatum Taylor
How We Think About What (Little) Survives – Patrick Cummins
Institutional Memory – Scott James & Victor Russell
Alternative Histories – MichaelMcClelland
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The Ward Uncovered
$27.95In early 2015, a team of archaeologists began digging test trenches on a non-descript parking lot next to Toronto City Hall — a site designated to become a major new court house. What they discovered was the rich buried history of an enclave that was part of The Ward — that dense, poor, but vibrant ‘arrival city’ that took shape between the 1840s and the 1950s. Home to waves of immigrants and refugees — Irish, African-Americans, Italians, eastern European Jews, and Chinese — The Ward was stigmatized for decades by Toronto’s politicians and residents, and eventually razed to make way for New City Hall. The archaeologists who excavated the lot, led by co-editor Holly Martelle, discovered almost half a million artifacts — a spectacular collection of household items, tools, toys, shoes, musical instruments, bottles, industrial objects, food scraps, luxury items, and even a pre-contact Indigenous projectile point. Martelle’s team also unearthed the foundations of a nineteenth-century Black church, a Russian synagogue, early-twentieth-century factories, cisterns, privies, wooden drains, and even row houses built by formerly enslaved African Americans. Following on the heels of the immensely popular The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood, which told the stories of some of the people who lived there, The Ward Uncovered digs up the tales of things, using these well-preserved artifacts to tell a different set of stories about life in this long-forgotten and much-maligned neighbourhood.
Contributors include Abbey Flower, Sarah Hood, Ron Williamson, Cheryl Thompson, Peter Popkin, Arlene Chan, Karolyn Smardz Frost, Simon Rogers, Liz Driver, Vid Ingelvics, Bethany Good, Adrienne Chambon, Kathy Grant, Guylaine Petrin, Craig Heron, Tom Porawski, Wayne Reeves, Wenh-In Ng, Ellen Scheinberg, Nicole Brandon, Rosemary Sadlier, Matt Beaudoin, Natasha Henry, and Heather Murray.
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The Watchmaker’s Table
$18.95In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son’s discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter’s first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, “All the Train Trips,” displays an uncanny sense of homes and families lost and the casual friendships struck up in conversations in the “bar car.” “Pearly Everlasting” expresses a longing to register the world in the body through the naming of flowers.
Books and the history of poetry shape time for Bartlett, whether in found poems woven from the words of books inherited from ancestors or in the words of great poets that, despite the distance, convey a shared sense of humanity. Wrestling with time as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett speaks both for time’s dominion and for human mutability.
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The Water Beetles
$22.95Winner, 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, 2018 McNally Robinson Book of the Year, and 2018 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2017 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and 2018 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
A National Post Best Book of 2017
A Walter Scott Prize Academy Recommended Historical Novel of 2017
On CBC Books’ list of writers to watch in 2018The Leung family leads a life of secluded luxury in Hong Kong. But in December 1941, the Empire of Japan invades the colony. The family is quickly dragged into a spiral of violence, repression, and starvation. To survive, they entomb themselves and their friends in the Leung mansion. But this is only a temporary reprieve, and the Leungs are forced to send their children away.
The youngest boy, Chung-Man, escapes with some of his siblings, and together they travel deep into the countryside to avoid the Japanese invaders. Thrown into a new world, Chung-Man befriends a young couple who yearn to break free of their rural life. But their friendship ends when the Japanese arrive, and Chung-Man is once again taken captive. Unwittingly and willingly, he enters a new cycle of violence and punishment, until he finally breaks free from his captors and returns to Hong Kong.
Deeply scarred, Chung-Man drifts along respectfully and dutifully, enveloped by the unspoken vestiges of war. It is only as he leaves home once again — this time for university in America — that he finally glimpses a way to keep living with his troubled and divided self.
Written in restrained, yet beautiful and affecting prose, The Water Beetles is an engrossing story of adventure and survival. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of the author’s father, this mesmerizing story captures the horror of war, through the eyes of a child, with unsettling and unerring grace.
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The Watermelon Social
$25.95Elaine McCluskey’s debut collection contains ten comical and aggressively human slices of suburban life. From grocery aisles to strip-mall parking lots to school hallways and waiting rooms, these stories pulse with the bizarre and sometimes annoying trappings of in-between places and the people we encounter there.
In the title story a mother of two observes as the team of supermoms at her children’s school limps through the volunteer event of the season, propped up by Prozac and estrogen supplements. In “Strange Girls” a liberal couple attempts to understand their children, the children attempt to figure out where their parents went astray and everyone shuffles through the last few snows in a long Halifax winter. “Year of the Horse” features a lonely optimist who adds fictional elaborations to the life stories she edits for the obituaries page.
McCluskey is an avid observer of subcultures and demonstrates a feel for the style and micro-dialects they foster. From the “psychotically precious” Sailor Moon girls at a city high school and the last of the hosers, to a weight loss convention and the night crew at a small-town paper, this collection offers up highly specific cross-sections of North American lifestyles.
The stories in The Watermelon Social are as compassionate as they are pointed. When winter leeches into summer and your neighbourhood just doesn’t look like the ones on TV, it’s hard to hit your stride. McCluskey chalks the line that separates comfort and resentment, and locates that core of clichéd dreams and paralyzing insecurity in all of us. With deadpan humour, imaginative comparisons and the odd cosmic leap, The Watermelon Social gambols through the April slush.
“One day, I was in a grocery store with dented cans and day-old bread,” McCluskey says. “Above each cash register was a list of names under the heading Do Not Cash Cheques From These People. I was in line behind a heavy woman in sweatpants and a bulky top. She wanted to get change from her social services cheque, but the clerk told her she had to spend it all. The woman shuffled off and returned with a package of sticky buns. As she paused and caught a laboured breath, I saw the front of her top. ‘I’m Not Fat, I’m Fluffy,’ it declared over the picture of a large, splendid cat. When I started to write my short stories, I focused on the people who are rarely heard from in our society: poor people, fat people, suburban housewives and tormented teens. Occasionally, cats. I believe the Maritimes has its share of voiceless souls, trying to maintain their humor and dignity in a challenging world. As they make their way through life, they leave stories that are curious and amusing, triumphant and absurd.”
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The Wax Child
$24.95From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they have performed unchristian acts, can steal people’s happiness, and can cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.
Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.
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The Way Between Things
$35.00A stunning full-colour art book and the first to explore the career of award-winning visual artist Sandra Meigs
Part philosopher, part filmmaker, performer, writer, tinkerer, prankster, conjurer, naturalist, upholsterer, and teacher, Sandra Meigs has typically been referred to as a painter. But she engages whatever media or form she chooses to probe to the limits of the ideas circulating in her work.
Meigs’s work has been presented across Canada, the U.S., and Europe; it is represented in major public and corporate collections; and, among many accolades, she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2015 and the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2015.
The book tracks how Meigs herself understands her art and her career, a story told through 17 major projects that best demonstrate her preoccupations; four essays written by Meigs and accompanied by sketches original to the book; as well as long-term research and investigations. The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs samples a prolific and extraordinary artistic oeuvre.
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The Weather Inside
$21.95It’s summer in Toronto, and the snow and ice are relentless. Too bad no one but Avery can see it.
Avery Gauthier can’t get far enough away from her past: the death of her beloved father, the abuse she suffered as a teen, and the religion that tore her parents apart. A reality-refugee, she’s managed to keep the chaos of her former life at bay… until now.
When her husband returns to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, her estranged mother wants back in, and the snow (invisible to everyone but Avery) piles up and up and up, Avery is forced to face her greatest fears. She looks to the outside for help, to her mysterious superintendent and the comforts of a local weatherman, only to realize that the solutions lie where the problem does: within.
A twisted, darkly funny and redemptive tale, The Weather Inside will leave you wondering where the line is drawn between what’s real and what’s imagined, and why Armageddon isn’t always the end of the world.
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The Wedding House
$12.95Ranging from eloquent insights into rural family life reminiscent of David Adams Richards, to a devil-may-care independence and impish wit, Smith’s first book of poetry is a fresh, energetic look at love, family, and the places where they intersect.
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The Weekend Healer
$16.95On a Friday morning in a “frighteningly well-groomed living room” in Scarborough, Lindalou, 31, is packing up to return to Cape Breton after visiting her mother, Betina, for the first time in five years. Mother and daughter have a turbulent relationship, exchanging refrains of put-downs as a way of avoiding speaking and listening to each other. Lindalou’s 16-year-old son, Curtis, is as much a brother to her: “We grew up together,” she says. When Curtis steps out for a pack of cigarettes and does not return, the young mother fears the worst.
Curtis’ disappearance is the catalyst for a harrowing weekend of hysteria and emotional upheaval. Lindalou’s blistering, smart-mouthed anger wears down to a paralytic terror, while Betina’s blinkered sense of reality, like the plastic cover on her sofa, is ripped away.
The Weekend Healer asks us to question the nature of family, of that much-proffered placebo— “traditional family values”, and of what mothering and fathering are all about.
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The Weeping Chair
$18.95Donald Ward’s stories in The Weeping Chair are confidently layered with unexpected situations and characters whose faith in themselves provides the strength to confront whatever weird or challenging experience befalls them.
While Ward’s style is steeped in the traditional storytelling structures of Flannery O’Connor and P.G. Wodehouse, his highly imaginative settings and eccentric character profiles push the stories’ energies into contemporary spheres of literary entertainment.
His thematic pursuits usually deal with the human willingness to carry on in the face of an often hostile and baffling universe, where nothing is as it first appears and that is clearly evident in this collection.The Weeping Chair employs ideas that are both impossible and unexpected to serve as platforms for the edgy humour always lurking in the human condition and beyond: a race of superior chickens investigate their earthly origins, a badger shares his fears with a monk, a nasty grandmother’s false teeth take on symbolic power, and a female dwarf from the 17th century pursues an octogenarian at Starbucks – all serve as prime examples.
With Ward’s stories you can always expect the unexpected and be assured that his intentions are not frivolous. -
The Weight of Ants
$17.95In this absurd and apocalyptic young-adult comedy filled with dazzling wit and wild imagination, two teenaged outsiders at “one of the worst schools in the country” seem to be the only ones who understand or care that the whole world is a mess. Joan responds by attacking everyone around her: Olivier retreats. But when they are forced to run against each other for student council, it unleashes their determination to change: the system, and themselves. Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in French.
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The Weight of Snow
$19.95A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?
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The Weight of Survival
$20.00Nestled in a small logging town near Lake Cowichan is an old elementary school. The child of immigrants from post-war Italy attends this school among the population of mostly white, anglo-saxon families. She does not speak English.
Her family is one of four who emigrated from southern Italy, to this small forested community. There are other families, from India, who share a kinship of ‘other’ with the Italian families. What happens when your voice, your food, your home is different? How do you know how to be queer when there is no language or place for it? How do you remember a time not spoken of, but passed on through the smell of walnut blossoms in the spring, grapes in the fall? In The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello chronicles this upbringing of otherness, of being shaped by two very different communities, of blending identities into one, and what is left behind in the process.