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Back by popular demand, here is the encore edition of the ultimate guide to Canadian music, featuring the best albums that Canadian musicians ever produced and some new interviews not included in the original hardcover edition. An unprecedented book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums includes the finest albums in Canadian music history chosen by a blue-ribbon panel. The results from 1 to 100 have sparked passionate debate among Canada’s music aficionados.
This book is jam-packed with incredible behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the albums and the history of Canadian music, as told by the musicians themselves. Find out how Gordon Lightfoot helped get Blue Rodeo back to Canada. Learn about the song that connects The Guess Who to The Tragically Hip. Meet Simply Saucer, the band who waited 30 years for its album to become a hit. Connect the dots between Don Messer and Music from Big Pink.
Despite debate about what is and isn’t on the list (or perhaps because of it), The Top 100 Canadian Albums is the essential book on Canadian music — not to be missed!
Shortlisted, Independent Publishers Book Award, Performing Arts
A book that gets to the heart of the matter! Whether you’re a professional musician or an air guitarist, a collector or a true amateur, this book will shake things up!
The Top 100 Canadian Singles — brought to you by Bob Mersereau and Goose Lane Editions, the team that assembled the controversial, much discussed, best-selling volume, The Top 100 Canadian Albums. The Top 100 Canadian Singles will undoubtedly stir the souls, ears, and tongues of music lovers everywhere. And answer the question, for better or for worse.
Once again, Bob Mersereau has assembled a blue ribbon panel of musicians, broadcasters, reviewers, managers, promoters, record-label executives, retailers, roadies, and more to cast their votes in a major, nationwide poll. John Roberts, Canada’s original VJ; Joel Plaskett; Sarah Slean; the late Paul Quarrington; CBC’s Stuart McLean; Sam Roberts; Sophie Durocher; and Eric Trudel all contributed lists — along with hundreds more.
Whose single will make it to the top 10? The top 40? The top 100? Neil or Leonard? Feist or Alanis? k.d. lang or Stompin’ Tom? The Guess Who or Arcade Fire? Gilles Vigneault or k-os? This oversized, full colour book features in-depth interviews with musicians, fascinating facts, musician-penned sidebars, documentary photographs, cover art, and much, much more.
W. B. Yeats meets Gregg Araki at a gay bar.
The Tower is a “translation” of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower—an homage and reinvention of the poet’s greatest work. Whereas Yeats’s book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours.
The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault’s late twenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats’s poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats’s modernist urge, on the other side of a long century.
In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has “never written more exactly and more passionately.” One might imagine she’d conclude the same here. You can’t fault these poems for lacking passion.
Yeats used to talk to ghosts. His wife would let ghosts talk through her. They would talk to Yeats, and he would write down what they say. Another way you could put it is that Yeats talked to his wife. Ghosts are much closer than you think. They like to live in books. So Legault spent some time talking to Yeats’s ghost. Or, Yeats’s ghost talked to him. This is him talking back.
“Through Legault, the opening of Yeats’ words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing” —rob mclennan’s Blog
“If you’ve never cared about poetry, you will after reading these modern-day renderings…” —Maria-Claire
Winner, Commonwealth Book Prize, Canada and Europe, Frye Academy Award, and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Shortlisted, CLA Young Adult Book Award, Red Maple Award, and University of Canberra Book of the Year
Longlisted, IMPAC Dublin Award
Living with a weird brother in a small town can be tough enough. Having a spectacular fall through the ice at a skating party and nearly drowning are grounds for embarrassment. But having a vision and narrating it to the assembled crowd solidifies your status as an outcast.
What Ruby Carson saw during that fateful day was her entire town — buildings and people — floating underwater. Then an orange-tipped surveyor stake turns up in a farmer’s field. Another is found in the cemetery. A man with surveying equipment is spotted eating lunch near Pokiok Falls. The residents of Haverton soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat.
Set in the 1960s, The Town That Drowned evokes the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home. Deftly written in a deceptively unassuming style, Nason’s keen insights into human nature and the depth of human attachment to place make this novel ripple in an amber tension of light and shadow.
A perennial favourite.
“Charming, wry, and believable.” — Quill & Quire
Riel Nason’s novel The Town That Drowned debuted in 2011 to glowing reviews and a flurry of awards, including a Commonwealth Book Prize. Nason’s evocation of the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home made the novel an instant classic. Now in celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Town That Drowned will be released in a special anniversary edition, with an afterword, a fresh design, and an online book club guide.
In the town of Haventon, Ruby Carson’s embarrassing fall through the ice ruins a skating party and prompts an unfortunate vision: her entire town — buildings and people — floating underwater. As orange-tipped surveyor stakes begin to turn up, the residents of Haventon soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat.
The Trailer explores the subtle art of balancing life on the edge of a city–indeed, perched precariously, metaphorically on the fringe of society–not exactly following a script for keeping up with the Joneses. The experiences of love and loss while living on that (not exactly) sharp edge build the foundation in this collection. Stylistically, the poems vary as they dig through the detritus daily to reveal the joy, beauty, and humour within the world of thin tin-walled hope and melamine dreams of a mobile home, of a live lived lagging just a little behind.
“They know the world is dying, but they hope not in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, they’re top dogs and will do anything to stay that way.”
Doig Gray is fifteen when his father is killed in a mining accident, which Doig comes to realize was no accident. Torn from his mother and sister, Doig is sent off to college, his every movement monitored in case he has inherited his dissident father’s unacceptable attitudes . . . or passwords. Doig has nothing but his own sense that there’s something desperately wrong with the world—and a last name that evokes the assumption that he’s destined to be the next traitor-hero.
The Traitor’s Son is a science fiction novel about a colony world where everything that could go wrong already has. Stuck on the wrong world at the wrong site, with the wrong leaders, the colony is doomed to extinction unless immediate steps are taken to correct—everything. But 500 years of hiding from the reality of their situation has created an unchallengeable status quo—and the Accident Squad, determined to ensure it remains that way.
The Traitor’s Son is a fast-paced SF adventure in the best tradition of Duncan’s Hero, West of January, and Eocene Station.
In 1887, at the tender age of eighteen, Tappan Adney embarked on his first trip to New Brunswick. He had plans to enrol at Columbia University in the fall, primed for a meteoric rise in academia — but fate intervened. He fell under the spell of the New Brunswick wilderness and the local Maliseet people.
Nothing escaped his curiosity. Adney embarked on hunting, fishing, and camping trips, recording his wilderness adventures in journals through evocative sketches and memorable prose, including the detail of a caribou hunt decades before their extinction in this area of the country.
Years later, Tappan Adney went on to become a celebrated journalist, photographer, and ethnologist. His models of aboriginal canoes, now in many museum collections, helped save the birchbark canoe from oblivion.
This new, revised edition of the original volume of The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney is a welcome companion to the recently published second volume of Tappan Adney’s journals. This edition features a few corrections, the inclusion of recently discovered photographs, and a more relaxed design to match the second volume for reading ease.
Setting out to visit his friends in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and with all intentions to return to the United States to attend Columbia University in the fall, Tappan Adney, at the age of 18, embarked on a trip that would ultimately set the course of his life. Tappan Adney’s writings, illustrations, and photographs were published in Harper’s Magazine.
This follow-up journal to 2010’s first volume, takes us back to a time when wildness was still something easily accessible and wildlife abundant. These experiences, seen through the eyes of a young man from the city and illustrated with his own sketches, photographs, and remarkably accurate maps, bring readers into this world, allowing them to walk and canoe the roads and rivers with him.
The first volume showed us a remarkable young man who fell under the spell of the 19th century New Brunswick wilderness and the Maliseet people. Now, in this second volume of Adney’s journals, we meet a man still passionate but wiser, transformed from enthusiastic hunter to reflective woodsman and decades ahead of his time in foreseeing the need for environmental protection. Recounted in the dialect of the day with the added flair of Adney’s inimitable humour, and augmented by maps, sketches, and photographs, these journals provide an authentic glimpse into the world before the turn of the 20th century.
“Robert Edison Sandiford is a natty, dread philosophe, one whose eyes pierce the soul and whose ears hear the heartbeats of the human condition.Born and raised a Montralais Bajan Canuck, he combines urbane sophistication and deadpan wit to produce miraculous soulful realism.With the panache of Austin Clarke and the passion of a calypsonian, Sandiford articulates truths that become more truthful because they flow from his indignant and indelible intelligence.” — George Elliott Clarke, Poet and professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto
The Trespassers unfolds over the course of a few weeks in a town in the middle of nowhere—not small enough to be a quaint place or large enough to be in any way an interesting one. They once had a sawmill here, which was a going concern before it was shut down in a labour dispute, and it now crowns a sort of half-town, gutted of its reason for being.
Fifteen-year-old Lowell is no average teenager—and his grandfather, Hardy, is no conventional role model. Whether urging the boy to pilfer peaches from an abandoned orchard, arranging for his sexual initiation with the town’s sole remaining prostitute, or teaching him the importance of gambling, Hardy is the despair of Lowell’s born-again mother, Cash. But how far into forbidden territory has Lowell actually ventured?
An unapologetic anarchist, Hardy may once have owned the abandoned orchard at the heart of the town where he and Lowell spend much of their time trespassing, discussing capitalism and the finer points of the Ten Commandments, as if ethics were nothing more than a game of poker where we win or lose not because of what’s in the hand we’ve been dealt, but because of how we play it with what’s in our heads.
Torn between his grandfather’s atheism and his mother’s Christian fundamentalism, Lowell begins to understand that things are not what they seem in what is left of this town. When inspector Milton shows up to investigate a mysterious murder, Lowell’s skills at shaping the truth to protect both himself and those he cares about are put to the ultimate test: shall he plea bargain, or stick to the truth as he understands it? As Hardy once pointed out to him, “There’s something in between lying and not lying. It’s called a story.”
Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modern business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in the increasingly obscure process.
Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmer’s face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroner’s inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshall’s murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless “boy” who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and locals were shocked to imagine that Stroebel could have killed the man who had treated him like family.
But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BC’s political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice.
When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.
“When I was thirteen I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at the time, and neither one of us ever saw him—he used a paper bag to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have seen him anyway; a gun was held to the backs of our heads and if we turned around he’d kill us. He only had one bullet left, he said, so he’d have to chop up my cousin while I watched, then shoot me. By the time the attack was over and we were left lying in the mud, we were both different people.
I had wanted to write a play about this experience for years; propelled by my anger at how often rape was portrayed in a titillating, shocking, gratuitous way on screen or stage. Rapists were evil and the victims were only that: victims.
But, how would I stage it? How would I tell the story? Why would I tell this story? After a decade of chewing over these questions, the image of a young tree lying on its side came to me. A man was chopping an axe through its centre. A girl in a harness spun out of control above him. The sound of their breathing filled the space. The seed for The Trigger was planted.
The Trigger is for the 170 victims of the Paper Bag Rapist, their families, the communities affected by this predator, and every human being who has ever been sexually violated and lives with that experience in their core, which comes to the surface in intimate relationships, because, let’s face it, when one is raped, there is physical intimacy with the attacker. The Trigger deals with the ripples of this kind of violation.”
Cast of 5 women.