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The Thought from Outside explores the work of Montreal avant-garde artist John Heward. James D. Campbell investigates his abstract practice of the last several decades and argues that he is one of the few artists of his generation to broach significant issues of being and knowing in the framework of a gestural abstraction. The text discusses both the artist’s painting and sculpture and shows that this artist has habitually eschewed traditional ways of making and thinking about art. Campbell shows that, in Heward’s suggestive paintings of the glance, the sheer presence of the mark heralds a return to what is perhaps the most basic source of all painting: the primordial need to express what is in mind to say through the medium of the hand.
Suzanne Leblanc’s The Thought House of Philippa transposes a theory of individuality into a stunningly reflective, sensuous and frank philosophical novel. Setting the chapters in the various rooms of the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna, Leblanc’s novel lays out P.’s intensely emotional and intellectually acute way of seeing the world and her place in it. Prompted by early isolation, P. moves towards the Great World of others and Nature, alienated from the everyday, yet devoted to a deeper connection, in an exploration that is profound and moving. Ideas crucial to Wittgenstein’s work—limit, freedom, interior and exterior, self and world—echo and shift in Leblanc’s precise, incantatory prose, propelled through the architecture. The distinct voices of the novel’s four sections act as musical movements, constructed from repetition, variation and development of language, in alternating keys of austerity and splendour. The effect—a pure expression of the passion of clear thought, the adventure of solitude, and the beauty of uncompromising encounter—is utterly riveting. A sui generis experimental novel not to be missed.
The Three Count highlights the triumphs and tragedies Jimmy Korderas experienced over his storied career as a WWE ref, from humble beginnings with Jack Tunney in Toronto to being a part of the main event at WrestleMania. For the first time, Korderas talks about the harrowing experience of being in the ring during Owen Hart’s accident and about the horrific effects of the Chris Benoit tragedy — the most difficult moments of his life in wrestling.
The book also includes untold stories from inside and outside the ring, highlighting the bonds Korderas formed with WWE superstars like Eddie Guerrero, Edge, John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Christian, and Chris Jericho.
A fun read from a man who doesn’t have an axe to grind, but who wants to inspire wrestling fans and prove that dreams do come true, The Three Count shows that there’s much more to the entertainment industry than scandals and dirty laundry.
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Henrik Nordmark is a bald, middle-aged security guard with few friends and no romantic possibilities. Tired of being the weed sprouting out of the wallflower, generic in his generality, Henrik has an epiphany. He will have one moment of inimitable distinction, even if it kills him.
Henrik first sets out to experience the throes of addiction, then to become virtuous, and barring this to be known as a public menace. Inevitably he resolves to find true love and fails miserably. Along his journey, Henrik inadvertently becomes the target of a team of elderly assassins — one blind, one deaf, and the other mute.
Henrik’s counterpart is Roland, a young office worker who, thinking he’s won the lottery, dumps his girlfriend and casts aside his friends. He addresses an email to the company where he works: “Dear Heartless Bastards …” Soon Roland’s entire world — the fictional one he’d built up in his mind — comes crashing down to painful reality.
Henrik’s and Roland’s lives intertwine with that of a young couple, the aptly named Bonnie and Clyde, two formerly star-crossed lovers who have grown to loathe each other. Bonnie and Clyde now have homicidal intent in their hearts, but do they have the cleverness or proficiency to pull off their respective crimes?
The characters’ lives all come together in a crescendo in which Henrik realizes his true purpose on earth.
Giller Prize-winner Lynn Coady’s unforgettable Christmas story “The Three Marys,” is adapted from her award-winning debut novel, Strange Heaven, published in 1993. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions’s 60th anniversary, it is also a part of the six@sixty collection.
2017 Foreword INDIES Finalist (Historical, Adult Fiction).
1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The RCMP are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.
Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian newspaper allowed to keep publishing during the war, narrates The Three Pleasures. The story is told through three main characters in the Japanese community: Watanabe Etsuo, Morii Etsuji and Etsu Kaga, the Three Pleasures. Etsu in Japanese means “pleasure”; the term is well-suited to these three. Morii Etsuji, the Black Dragon boss, controls the kind of pleasure men pay for: gambling, drink and prostitution the pleasures of the flesh.
Watanabe Etsuo, Secretary of the Steveston Fishermen’s Association, makes a deal with the devil to save his loved ones. In the end, he suffers for it and never regains the pleasures of family. And there is Etsu Kaga, a Ganbariya of the Yamato Damashii Group, a real Emperor worshipper. His obsession becomes destructive to himself and all involved with him. He enjoys the pleasure of patriotism until that patriotism becomes a curse.
The Three Pleasures is an intimate and passionate novel concerning an unsightly and painful period in Canada’s history.
“Terry Watada’s literary tour de force, The Three Pleasures, lifts the Japanese Canadian internment experience beyond passive victimization by giving life to a host of historical figures heroes, villians and tragic characters in a fascinating yet little-known resistance movement within the camps. An absolute page-turner and worthy read.” (jim wong-chu)
Middle-aged Jane Barken discovers a lump in her left breast, the second in five years. She is depressed, her marriage is falling apart, and her singing career is faltering. Recuperating at her Willow Island cottage after a lumpectomy, she decides to embark on a canoe trip around the island. She discovers a section of the island no one has ever seen, and what she finds there is horrifying.
Elora Dixon is a vibrant, middle-aged lawyer and disability-rights activist who has never walked a step in her life. A neuromuscular disease left her with a curved spine and a reliance on around-the-clock care. Nonetheless, she is an inexorable force when chance pits her against the notorious Julian Summer, who is in town promoting his internationally bestselling book. Julian is a fervent supporter of euthanasia, and Elora is the counter-argument—a living rebuke to parents who want the option of euthanizing a disabled newborn. So it comes as a shock, especially to Elora, when the two find themselves acutely attracted to one another. Will she learn to negotiate her feelings and her convictions, or will Julian’s beliefs begin to colour her own?
Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria.
One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband’s missing heart. In fact, she’s so insistent that she replaces Charlie’s heart with a bomb. He has twenty-four hours to find Twiggy Miller’s heart – and its meaning – or his own will explode.
Tender and brutal, optimistic and despairing, this modern fable by the author of the cult hit All My Friends Are Superheroes takes a fresh look at what it means to fall into, and out of, love.
From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with the rekindled fire of innocent passion, constrained by their gathered clouds of experience. In this isolated and primeval land, a performance of ancient aboriginal ritual and drama draws the lovers into the elemental world of “the dream time,” the still point around which their relationship begins to turn. This is an exquisite love story unlike any other, written in retrospect with a lovely, clear heart, and in the full light of day.
Edinburgh in 1902, a historic city on the precipice of modern progress, is not an easy place for an inquisitive orphan, and twelve-year-old Malcolm McKenzie knows he’s lucky to have an apprenticeship with the local clockmaker, Jack Alexander. When Jack is found dead inside a locked clocktower, Malcolm’s life begins to unravel. Even worse, Jack’s son and Malcolm’s best friend, Peter, is stricken with a mysterious and life-threatening illness.
Malcolm is sure that both the truth behind Jack’s untimely death and the map to a miracle cure for Peter lie inside a seemingly broken watch Jack had been unable to fix. As the clock ticks away on Peter’s life, Malcolm and fellow orphan and pickpocket Maddie must outrun and outsmart those who want the cure to remain hidden as they race through the streets and clocktowers of Edinburgh to solve the puzzle of the watch before it’s too late.
In The Time of Her Life, David Helwig draws us into the world of a woman of character. Indeed how Helwig tells the tale is as absorbing as the tale itself as we follow Jean from small-town Ontario to a privileged life as la contesse de Serviède in wartime France to genteel poverty in Montreal, adapting her actions and values to survive in the world around her.
At fifteen, Jean is ready to slip into the secret life of adults; already she enjoys the attention of a cross-border whiskey smuggler. When he is shot by other smugglers, she rows out to him. Close to shore, she admits to herself that he is dead. Setting the course of her life, she sidesteps explanation by rolling the body overboard and sneaking home. Soon, she accepts a movie cameraman’s impulsive proposition and heads for New York disguised as a boy. Being beautiful, being looked at becomes Jean’s métier. In New York, working as nude model, she learns the value of her youth and beauty and what sex can buy her if she uses it judiciously. In Hollywood, silent-film stardom is soon hers. Asked to make a movie in France, she says Yes, as always. She says Yes again to a much-older count, has a son, and lives as a Paris aristocrat until her life is devastated by World War II. Her husband dead and her apartment commandeered, she huddles at the family’s country home with her child until the war is over. Trading on her title, Jean opens a gallery, and, in the postwar confusion about ownership, she carefully sells a parcel of Picassos left with her by a missing Russian Jewish designer. But peace is transitory. She loses her son to the war in Indochina, her lover to family duties, her womb to a hysterectomy.
Stricken with restlessness, she sells the gallery, moves to Montreal, and starts a new career in films and commercials. In old age, she measures out her last days in her Montreal apartment, her resilience undimmed by history and human folly.
In The Time of Her Life David Helwig has created a highly entertaining and provocative work. This is an inspired exploration of time and memory skillfully crafted by a veteran Canadian writer.
A kinetic new poetry collection that sings our astonishment and our fear at how life makes and unmakes us through every love and every grief.
These poems are at once plangent and wise, fired by exacting observation of the changes that mark the natural world—the diminishing woods, the surging birdsong in spring–as well as each stage of human life. The poet struggles to understand what her experiences mean, even as a sudden turn—a mother’s illness, a father’s death—sweeps her in an entirely different direction.
Philips writes of “this borrowed ground,” our trespass on the earth none of us can own. In every movement of these poems as they flow over rough ground and smooth, there’s the thrill of discovery, and the echoing notes of what we can’t know, the mystery of changes yet to come.
Seduced by Slim’s stories of the privations of a cross-country trek that ended in the violence of an historic riot and tales of Depression-era work camps, Edie MacDonald has followed him from mine to mine, where he finds work and she cares for their son, Belly, in the thin shelter of canvas tents. Until now.
Edie has left Slim behind, passed out in an unheated apartment on the coldest day of the year. Boarding a train with Belly, she travels westward. When the train struggles through a snowstorm and possible calamity, the lens shifts between Belly’s perspective and Edie’s. Only then does Edie broach a crucial question. Should she leave Belly with his grandmother and strike off on her own? Or should she return to Slim, despite his boozy wanderings?
Vivid and evocative, with rich, convincing characters, The Time We All Went Marching is an episodic novel of storytelling, memory, and imagination — about a time in history rarely explored in fiction. Arley McNeney inhabits her characters with breathtaking conviction, reaching deep into the vulnerable solitude of individual perception while seamlessly holding her readers breathless. Mark her. Watch.
From acclaimed writer Jennifer LoveGrove comes an electric poetry collection exploring female sexual desire, contemporary dating, misogyny, and middle age that reflects and embodies our social media-saturated times.
Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.
Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Centering strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.