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Things Are Against Us
$24.95A Toronto Public Library Fall 2021 Pick
An Independent Best Book of 2021
“It’s somehow hard not to be optimistic in the hands of a writer so angry and intelligent.”—Patrick Ness, Guardian
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. As Yeats pointed out, things have a lot to answer for. These satirical essays jauntily tackle the obstinacy, incorrigibility, and recalcitrance of things, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s unimpressive descriptions of the construction of bobsleds and door latches, and the way we try to stand on our own two feet, put our best foot forward, remain footloose and fancy-free, and inevitably put our foot in it. They also cover the first suggestion the internet offers when you look up the word ‘women’ (spoiler: it’s shoes) and other annoyances (some fatal) of male supremacy, the nobility of buttons, and what the rejection of tourists by Jordanian donkeys should mean for global travel (stop!). Ingrid Bergman and Jane Austen come into it somewhere (Helen Gurley Brown was forcibly removed).
Early versions of some of these essays have appeared in international outlets of record, but others are brand-new and ready for your delectation.
Illustrations by Diana Hope.
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Things Not to Do
$22.95Jessica Westhead’s follow-up to And Also Sharks, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2011 and Finalist for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
Things Not to Do is a collection of stories that seeks to examine—through humour, wit, empathy, and honesty—the dark side of ordinary people. We know them; sometimes we are them. A man attends a gathering on the coattails of his new, zealously empowering friend. A woman helps her husband build an escape room to free him from working for a hated boss. A veteran wedding DJ imparts wisdom, and more besides, to a new recruit. The father of a teen pop sensation gathers with his fans in the wake of a controversy. The actions of these characters, for good or ill—and there is light in their lives, as often as there is dark—stem from the same place, and Westhead cuts right to the heart of that place. They aren’t scheming supervillains; they’re folks trying to make the most of what they think they have—even if that sometimes means stepping on someone who doesn’t deserve it.
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Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness
$22.95Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha’s third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it’s like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old (Born, Not Made) to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways (Blasting Molly Rockets), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s wish to protect her sister (Able to Pass) to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank (Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish), these stories pulse with Botha’s signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity (Soulmates) to those who hold on at all costs (Dark and Lilac Fairies). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.
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Things That Fall
$15.95Separated for years due to a secret squabble among their parents, a group of cousins reunite following the death of an uncle. Their mission is to help close up the family cottage for good, but in doing so, they uncover old family photos that include a woman in a wheelchair.
None know who the woman was, but the older cousins have a vague memory of her presence, and of the loud scream they heard the last time they saw her.
As the teens sort through the family’s past and learn its secrets, each learns truths about themselves.
Separated for years due to a secret squabble among their parents, a group of cousins reunites following the death of an uncle. Their mission is to help close up the family cottage for good, but in doing so, they uncover old family photos that include a woman in a wheelchair.
No one knows who the woman is, but they have a vague memory of her presence and the loud scream they heard the last time they saw her.
As the teens sort through the family’s past and learn its secrets, they each learn truths about themselves.
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Things That Go Bump: Plays for Young Adults
$24.95What is theatre doing to reflect the wishes and concerns of young people right now? This exciting collection of recent Canadian TYA plays provides answers. Plays for elementary school age audiences, as well as scripts designed with young adults in mind, are here together in one volume, opening theatrical doors on a wide range of topics from the serious to the hilarious. These scripts are road-tested: toured by professional companies to schools, theatres, libraries, museums and other assorted venues, they have been seen and enjoyed by many young people across Canada. Included are interviews with the writers discussing themes and concerns of their particular play, as well as topics such as the touring experience, the challenges and thrills of writing for specific age groups, and the impulse behind the writer’s work: what is going on in the world that gave spark to the idea?
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Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother
$19.95Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. To get over her mother’s death from ovarian cancer, she launches a passive-aggressive war with her fellow office workers, embarks on a campaign designed to let her ex-husband know she’s over him (which naturally only pushes her teenage daughter farther away), and plots to rid herself of her mother’s overweight cat, all the while consuming heroic quantities of red wine, spiked coffee, and coffin nails. Nobody’s perfect.Situated at the midpoint between booze-soaked mayhem and middle-aged ennui, Things You’ve Inherited from Your Mother is a riotous assemblage of found objects, Choose Your Own Adventure-style in-jokes and useful facts about mice. In her startlingly funny first novel, Hollie Adams takes the conventional wisdom about “likeable” literary heroines and shoves it down an elevator shaft.
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Thinkin Big
$19.95“They need to think big like I did. If they can see it in their head, they can get there.” Thinkin Big is the story of a kid whose dream was never supposed to come true: the story of a man who won hearts with his gentleness, but whose fearlessness was legendary. It is the biography of a champion once broken by boxing.
As he watched Cassius Clay destroy Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, James Tillis was told by God he would be a professional fighter. Thirty-three years later, James “Quick” Tillis, dubbed the Fightin Cowboy by Muhammad Ali, would record his story in a dimly lit jail cell. He was a young black athlete who’d clung to his alcoholic father and his religious mother, rising to battle seven heavyweight champions.
But this naive heavyweight would be sacrificed by the sport he loved; it would rob him of the women he loved, his dignity, his fortune, and his title. He crawled into the ring 64 times to prove that he could win, but one dirty agent was determined to bleed him dry. Now he tells a story like no fighter before. It’s raw, yet full of humour, told from a legend’s perspective.
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Thinking Forward
$17.95A highly accessible and unorthodox approach to thinking about economics. It subverts the elitist and codified world of academic economics by empowering the reader with the tools needed to conceptualize an economy based on progressive and humane values. It challenges the idea — so prevalent in Western capitalism — that the best we can hope for is capitalism with a happy face. And it challenges us to imagine what could be: a society based on justice, solidarity, and vision.
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Thirst for Justice
$22.95“Fast and fierce” – Kirkus Reviews
For readers of John Grisham and William Deverell comes a political thriller ripped from today’s headlines. Lawyer and environmental activist David R. Boyd writes a riveting thriller about the psychological toll of a humanitarian crisis. Filled with tension and courtroom drama, Thirst for Justice will have you questioning what you believe about right versus wrong.
Michael MacDougall is a talented trauma surgeon whose life in Seattle is slowly unraveling. Frustrated as an ER doctor and with his marriage in trouble, he volunteers with a medical aid charity in the Congo. Disconsolate at the lives he cannot save in the desperate conditions of the region, he is shattered by a roadside confrontation with the mercenary Mai Mai that results in unthinkable losses.
Back home in Seattle, he is haunted by his experiences in Africa and what he sees as society’s failure to provide humanitarian aid to those who most desperately need it. Locked in a downward spiral, he becomes obsessed with making his government listen to him and dreams up an act of terrorism to shock his nation awake.
Activist and lawyer David Boyd’s debut novel is a taut political thriller that begs the question: how far is too far when you’re seeking justice?
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Thirsts
$12.00Thirsts, denied and indulged, overt and so subtle as to be unnoticeable, have a sometimes unexamined power in our lives. The passions we hold for one another. The poems in Thirsts descend from language, whether turns of local phrase to turns at the scrabble board. words and frames obliquely enter and exit the heart from behind convenient foundation hedges.
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Thirteen Minutes
$14.95 -
Thirteen Shades of Black & White
$14.95Steeped in skepticism, the stories in Michael Bryson’s first collection nonetheless radiate a deep hope. An incarcerated juvenile is glad for time to think. A street kid running from an abusive past finds comfort in a warm, safe bed. A cafe waitress contemplates the violent death of a stranger and moves on in her life with renewed vigour.
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Thirty Shadow Birds
$22.95To pursue her dream of building a life free from violence for her son and herself, Yalda flees from her nightmarish past as well as her troubled homeland, Iran. But in her new haven, she realizes that nightmares haunt not only her past, but also her present and future. She does what she can to survive, but all her plans dissolve like the shadows and ghosts that follow her. Having fled from an authoritarian regime, and now living in a North America panic-stricken by global terrorism, Yalda is obsessed with all the forms and aspects of violence. She is estranged from her beloved son, Nader, who trains to become an armed security guard, and this means he is wearing a uniform and carrying weapons, prepared to be violent. She cannot forget that her first love was shot and killed by a young prison guard and that her beloved stepbrother also met a violent death. This family history is a wound that makes guns taboo and Yalda yearns to feel safe in a troubled world. The novel is part memory, part dream, and part present, day-to-day struggles for immigrants living in Toronto and Montreal.
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Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences
$18.95For the past several years, Jan Zwicky has been developing a definition and working examples of the word “lyric.” Her writing has taken the shape of poetry and philosophy, neither necessarily confined to the traditions of those genres. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is the latest in this ongoing focus, previously explored in collections like Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998) and in her philosophic works, including Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau Press, 2003).
The songs in this collection are odes, addresses and apostrophes, to household fixtures, human emotions, shades of light, seasons, stretches of land, departures, sounds and solitude. Working with the most associative details, Zwicky has whittled encounters with her subjects down to their integral and resounding notes. A single light shining from a house in the winter is the bathtub’s call to its tired owner. Dew on the grass is the long note of calm in a hurried departure. Every presence contains absence, every pause embodies continuation, every house has “one chink open to the wind.” These are songs to the negative space around solid shapes. Wild grape, nuthatch and August are in part defined by the time around their existence. Bath, laundry and grate have a life both for and beyond their owner, and it is upon these tensions that the poet’s fondness develops.
Zwicky’s musical sensibilities give these poems their resolve. The precise lilt of her verse amounts to a resonating frequency for each of her subjects, with the O of each address sounding the driving note. In music Zwicky has captured the energy and suddenness of realizations like homecoming, departure, familiarity and alienation. Her songs walk the tightrope between thinking and being, steadying and strengthening the act of imagination that maintains contact between past, present and future.
The seven studies in this collection signal a slower tempo, a downshift into the clipped stillness of memory. Summer months, garden gate, childhood house and silent afternoons are summoned to the surface for a look. These give way to six silences: three-line moments of pause or hush that request careful entrance and exit. Like still lifes or haikus, these silences suspend time within time. Basil springs motionless, grass ripens, pollen settles. As with the absences contained in her songs, Zwicky’s silences embody the tenuous balance between thought and experience.
Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is a vital addition to a remarkable body of work. Zwicky’s lyricism proves to the senses what lies within the parameters set by her prose.
The trade edition of this book is a 5 x 8-inch, smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.
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Thirty-two Degrees
$18.9532 Degrees is an anthology of prose, poetry, and drama edited by Raymond Beauchemin, ìdistinguishedî (in the words of Elizabeth Spenser) ìby talents which have been nurtured into significant growth, and [featuring] … a variety of styles, each of which rings clear and true.î For Clark Blaise, both the new and established writers in this collection are ìon the road, turning heads, leaving foreign models in the dust.î
The author list of 32 Degrees (simultaneously post graduates of Montrealís Concordia University writing program) includes nationally recognised writers such as Nino Ricci, allowing the reader a glimpse into the early world of his extraordinary novel, Lives of the Saints, as well as less familiar, but no less talented writers like Nova Scotian David McGimpsey meditating on the legendary and dismal death of country music great, Hank Williams.
Also present? Torontoís April Bulmer, who writes a taut lyric, subtle with the details of her Ontario milieu. Fellow Ontarian Richard Harrison examines the new evolving attitudes of his generation of men and women. Out of the Mennonite community of Southern Manitoba, Grant Loewen invents the character ëBrickí, whom Robert Kroetsch has identified as a ìnew championî in a novel which is ìa computer game for the end of the millenium.î Clowns and real magicians inhabit the rodeo, stetson, and sawdust world of Saskatchewan in the magic-realist realm of Dan McBain. Other pieces in the anthology are by Pacific Coast resident Mark Cochrane, the accomplished Elizabeth Harvor, Ray Smith, Robert Majzels, Sharon Sparling, and Stephen Henighan.
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this
$20.00
Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s third poetry collection is interested in how language can and cannot grapple with the problem of how we experience and relate to the present moment, and how language both explains the problem but also provides a false sense of comprehension. Through experimental poetry, challenging texts, and philosophical matters, this is interested in the politics of aesthetics and in aesthetics as politics, and attempts to tackle the problems and ethics of putting extra-linguistic elements into language. As Weaver writes: “Language is, at its heart, this-ness, something too immediate to ever be understandable.