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They Don`t Wanna Wait
The dramatic story of nine-year-old Evelyn’s survival through the determination and bravery of her mother and grandmother as they hid in the dense forests of Belarus.
Evelyn is a cherished only child in a loving Jewish family in a small shtetl in Eastern Poland. With rich detail of rituals and food, she evokes her early childhood. But this idyll is shattered by the eruption of World War II, thrusting Evelyn and her family into a brutal eight-year struggle for survival.
Fleeing to Zhetel, Belarus, Evelyn’s father is rounded up and murdered leaving Evelyn, her mother, and grandmother to navigate the escalating horrors of the Holocaust on their own. Together they endured brutal ghetto liquidations, a terrifying week hidden beneath a kitchen floor and two relentless years in the unforgiving forests of Belarus battling starvation, illness, bitter cold and the ever-present shadow of capture.
This powerful, moving memoir is a testament to the indomitable will and profound courage of women, without whom Evelyn would not have survived to bear witness for all victims of the Holocaust.
In sparkling, clear prose, understated yet unflinching, Open Season probes deep into the fissures of caste, class, religion, and gender in our world. Located mostly in India and Canada, the stories describe a world of global flows where a woman returns to India after her two daughters are killed in a school shooting in the US; in the title story a Muslim young man is lynched in an Indian town on the false charges that his fridge contains beef; “Light as a Butterfly” draws our attention to the ongoing degradation of the environment; in “All Cut Up,” set in a suburb of Toronto, seven-year-old Zoya is heroically protected by her mother Zarina from her community’s demand that she be circumcised. The stories speak of a world familiar and yet all too elusive, of a gentler, mellower, more hopeful time; they explore the charms and constraints of life in a small town and question assumptions and beliefs and dreams.
Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking.
For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women – in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.
“Some peoples call you misisahk. It means horsefly. You fly with the horses . . . you’re small, with a big bite.”
Raised on a ranch in Saskatchewan’s rugged Thickwood Hills, where the prairie transitions to forest, Willomena Swift, home from playing for the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, finds a precious foal killed by a rogue stallion.
The stallion’s owner, once Willo’s baseball coach, now chairs the committee heading up the new cooperative pasture-a pasture that is set to swallow her family lease, where she grew up, learned to love and understand horses, and dreamed of returning to raise them.
Facing numerous challenges with both the stallion and his owner, Willo remembers her past years playing professional baseball as she struggles to realize her dreams in the present.
Amid romance and tragedy, Willo must find a way to stand on her own and assert her rightful place in her beloved Thickwood.
Births mark beginnings, while funerals toll in endings. Yet there resides so much in-between drama in the timeline of an extended family: moments of intense joy, times of heart-wrenching grief, and the day-to-day plodding of ups and downs that color the struggle with loss in all of human existence. In a series of linked short stories that superbly capture the emotions her characters’ experience, the author deftly chronicles the personal episodes that transform the lives of five Italian-American cousins during the final years before the death of one of the family patriarchs.
You remember the tragedy. But how do you begin to live again?
One morning in the 1990s in Kosovo, the Albanian population of Gjakova find their front doors marked with a white cross. Fearful for their lives, the Albanians in one neighbourhood hide their women and children inside a basement. In a few days, however, Serbian forces wearing wolf masks arrive accompanied by tanks, demolishing houses and killing people. The occupants of the basement are found and shot down in cold blood. Ten-year-old Ermal, shielded by his dead mother, remains alive. So does his father Adem. But his three sisters are also dead. Days later all traces of the killings are erased.
Eight years later, as a young man living with his father in Mississauga, Ontario, Ermal is still haunted by those events. And he dreams of revenge.
Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky
Rapt, musical, passionately engaged, the poems in Thin Moon Psalm move towards their own inner stillness, while also bearing witness to the power of relatedness to family, lovers, and the prairie landscape itself. Many of them are poems of remembrance and deep grieving, recalling in etched details the rigours and joys of life on a prairie farm, and those iconic moments which are alive with the unspoken moments between father and daughter, mother and child, sister and sister, lover and lover, poet and friend. Especially they take on the burden of what is lost, knowing “There is always a room we will never return to” and “we return only through loss: the place where we began.”
“In Thin Moon Psalm Sheri Benning performs an uncanny trick: she uses words as a means of hearing as well as saying things. As we read her graceful generous poems we join with her in drinking the world in its darkness and loveliness and nameless potencies.” — John Steffler
Jessica 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.
Separated 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.
What 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?
Shortlisted 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.