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The Stunted Strong is a new edition of the first book published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, the company that became Goose Lane Editions. Fred Cogswell, its author, was also the company’s founder.
The Stunted Strong is a sixteen-sonnet chapbook. The first and last poems create a context for the fourteen inner sonnets, each of which is a vivid sketch of an inhabitant of a rural community in the St. John River valley. The sequence portrays country people confined by frustration, obsession, and small victories, and it expresses in their characters the illimitable dreams and thwarting limitations of the human condition.
The publication of the second edition of The Stunted Strong marks Goose Lane’s 50th anniversary and commemorates Fred Cogswell’s lifelong devotion to poetry. The text is introduced by Robert Gibbs, Cogswell’s friend, colleague, and fellow poet. Designed and printed by Gaspereau Press, the new edition of The Stunted Strong is a work of art in its own right.
2021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction
2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist
“The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review
“A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media.” — Booklist
Includes an exclusive free soundtrack
Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen.
Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela’s songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.
When a brain tumour takes the life of Becky Livingston’s twenty-three-year-old daughter Rachel, her life makes an unconventional turn. Rachel, an avid traveller, had one wish: to keep exploring the world. So, for twenty-six months Livingston travels—untethered and alone—to Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, India, England, Ireland and North America, coast to coast. In her suitcase: Rachel’s ashes, heavy but compact. As she gradually merges her daughter’s remains with the elements, Livingston learns how to forge a new sense of belonging in an unfamiliar world. Is it reckless for a fifty-three-year-old mother to quit her job and set off overseas with no agenda or timeline? Is such a journey squandering a life, or saving it? The Suitcase and the Jar is a profoundly moving story of a mother’s courage and resilience. It explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: how one finds the strength to reconfigure a new life by necessity. A poignant memoir, The Suitcase and the Jar is the story of a mother’s transformative journey of surrender and belonging.
“An extremely satisfying reading experience.” — Toronto Star
Just before World War II, Violet and her parents visit the legendary Sulphur Springs Hotel. Famed for its curative waters, the spa attracts a diverse crowd. Some desperate for a cure, others for more intangible things.
During her time at the hotel, curious young Violet begins to suspect something devious is going on behind the luxury façade. It’s not until she unwittingly becomes party to a murder that she realizes how desperate people really are.
But it is never too late to make peace with your ghosts. At eighty-four years old, Violet travels back to the hotel, now in ruins, to recover clues to the forgotten murder. Her return brings back memories of her family, a much-missed girlhood friend, and of her own sexual awakening. But what happens when the past brings hurtful truths with it?
1963 – Finn Kenny fled Ottawa after being implicated in an RCMP purge of suspected Communist sympathisers and “homosexuals”, ending up on Vancouver Island working for the Spencerwood Estate alongside devoted caretakers, the Bishops. Theodore Spencer was Finn’s saviour, a barroom companion who offered him a way out of his predicament. But when Spencer dies suddenly, Finn’s life is turned upside down as he’s forced to work with the cold, calculating lady of the house.
Thrown together unexpectedly, Finn, Lady Spencer, and the Bishops are faced with the worst of one another, as they struggle to keep the estate together. Learning more about each other’s lives, they must come to terms with the truth that everyone has secrets buried at the centre of themselves.
In his searching sixth novel, Danial Neil questions the stories we tell of our own lives, the version of ourselves we show to those closest, and the ways in which we are able to find common ground.
Like his attempts to swim over the dark water of the river that lies between him and the object of his affections, twelve-year-old Dougaldo Montmigny struggles against oppression, homophobia and racism to realise his love for Tomahawk Clark, a thirteen-year-old Metis boy, during a summer destined to become a painful lesson on love and desire.Like sailors becalmed on idyllic ships, this story is a subtle revelation of the emotional turmoil that lies beneath a bewitchingly deceptive picture of perfection. The Summer Between is a metaphor for the struggles and rewards of living where origins, tempests and landscape inform our collective soul.In the spirit of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, readers will be moved by the touching circumstances of this innocent narrative.
Lesley Choyce’s novella The Summer of Apartment X is a beach book for grownups who remember how they got that way. Fred Winger and his two buddies, Richard and Brian, intend to take the beach resort town by storm. It’s the fateful summer between high school and university, early 1970s version. Equipped with two barely mobile cars and a seized-up MG motor, around which Richard wants to build an entire sports car, they plan to rent a suave apartment, get cool jobs, meet girls, and lose their virginity. Dream and reality diverge immediately.
307 1/2 Hibiscus Street is an old triplex subdivided for summer tenants into a self-contained ghetto. The only window in Apartment X is in the kitchenette, and the entrance is through the outdoor shower used by the entire building. The friends find work: Brian cleans the parking lot and grill of a grease-encrusted burger joint, and Richard preens himself on his lofty — though brief — position as a lifeguard. Fred replaces the drunken usher at the Queen Theatre, where monsters slavering over shrieking blondes and Annette Funicello’s bursting brassiere entertain necking teens and “pervs” too timid to patronize real porn flicks. Fred’s feelings for his chameleon girlfriend lurch from love to lust to horror, depending on whether she’s demurely selling movie tickets, acting out erotic fantasies about saving the world on the back seat of a school bus, or sharing the shower with Brian.
The Summer of Apartment X lurks in everyone’s past: the first foray beyond the view of elders, the first attempt at self-support, the shocking recognition that adulthood involves more than sand, sex, and cars. Lesley Choyce recreates this exhilarating terror in the Technicolor of a B-movie poster, nostalgia undercut at every turn by ebullient humour.
The Sun Will Shine chronicles Laura Cotesta’s decade long battle with a rare form of cancer, from childhood to adolescence, in her own words. Taken from her journals, essays and school assignments, Laura reflects on being diagnosed with a rare spinal cord tumour and demonstrates that even through adversity one can embrace both life and death and find peace. Proceeds of the sale of books will go to support pediatric cancer care in Northern Ontario.
The Sun the Wind the Summer Field shows the wit, intellect, and skill with words and rhyme for which Alfred G. Bailey is famous. This collection gathers together a half-century of poems. Some are the works of a young, strong voice applying the poetics of T.S. Eliot to the Canadian ethos, while others give voice to old age, undiminished in power and enriched by experience.
Some of the poems in The Sun the Wind the Summer Field have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Cormorant, and Wild East, but most have never been published before.
In The Sunday Book, Michael Trussler uses memoir to excavate and explore a range of inner lives, all lived at different speeds. With essays touching on the meaning of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century to confronting the complexities of being a parent in the Anthropocene, Trusslers interconnected essays are united by his lived experience with a rare learning disability. The Sunday Book freshly engages with fundamental existential problems such as free will and contingency, all the while providing an original take on our contemporary moment.
A motley crew of characters deftly woven into a brilliant mashup of the spy novel and the art-world parody.
We know how Simone met the man who will become, for a time, her fourth husband. We know what she does (artist), her friends (a veritable menagerie), her habits (frustrated homebody). What remains to learn are the things she still doesn’t fully understand herself, like her role in the affair of the Port Merveille diamond. The Supreme Orchestra is many things at once: a geopolitical thriller, an art-world exposé, a digressive social study, a mischievous parody.
A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet’s, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don’t always hold up as well as they promise.
With a supple, meditative approach, Erin Knight explores the complexity of beauty in this first collection by an astonishing new talent. The Sweet Fuels also reflects on the notion of orientation — whether in terms of magnetic north or street signs, the entrails of an animal or the vowels in a name — as a task of translation.
Of the more than four dozen poems in the book, some are written in English, others are rendered from Spanish. Still others perform a high-wire act — written in English, converted to Spanish, and then back into English. The practise of translation allows for a direction that does not try to reorder or simplify the world, but rather emphasizes the promise of continuous engagement with our points of reference.
Cosmopolitan and curious seventeen-year-old Chrysler Wong suffers from a debilitating fear brought on by belief in a family curse. Three of her siblings have died after turning eighteen and venturing beyond the borders of their tiny rural Alberta town, and the fourth, her favourite, has recently left and is incommunicado. Is she destined to share their fate – or worse, doomed to live a circumscribed life?