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In this only home, Cooley’s satellite eye, located in the faraway reaches of outer space, rediscovers our world from a new perspective with the kind of awe and wonder traditionally reserved for the world’s first explorers. Faces once unfamiliar become those of family and friends as this only home distills all people, all places and all time into one small space: the earth, our planet.
In This Orchard Sound, poet and woodworker John Terpstra takes the reader to an abandoned fruit orchard as it being bulldozed. From the twisted limbs of apple, pear and plum trees to cars dripping fluids far removed from the rain that once fell on the orchard grass, Terpstra asks questions of progress, grace and the complicity of humanity in this short suite of poems. Only the birds answer his questions as he paces the old orchard, armed with his saw, gathering wood for his latest commission. A new cross for a local congregation.
Finalist, Booker Prize and National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted, Dublin Literary Award
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated communities.
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain on Apple Island, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours: a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Lark and their nocturnal brood; and the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree.
Then comes the intrusion of “civilization”: eugenics-minded state officials decide to “cleanse” the island, and a missionary-schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will be left to succumb to institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark.
In prose of transcendent beauty and power, Paul Harding has written a mesmerizing story that explores the hopes, the dreams, and the resilience of those perceived not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, This Place a Stranger is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and unique circumstances in which women travellers find themselves when “going solo.”
For one woman, the allure of a multiday hike on a “congenial trail” becomes as shrouded as the soggy temperate rainforest she was so unprepared for. After thirty-seven years of marriage, another woman prepares for her return trip to Africa: vaccination boosters, nausea pills and lots and lots of condoms. A seventeen-hour journey by car through the Great Lakes region of Ontario leads another to dreamlike reflections on the travels of her Anishinaabe grandmothers and the ever-present “fear, worry” she experiences today. In another story, a woman poignantly searches for what many seek on solo journeys – inspiration, renewal, discovery – by returning to Paris only a few years after the painful dissolution of her marriage. But the grey February, a body in pain and the funeral of Mavis Gallant offer a different insight.
With new work from both emerging and award-winning authors including Yvonne Blomer, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy, Catherine Owen, Karen Lee and more, these stories explore the unexpected blessings and soul-searching that aloneness offers: clarity, liberation, danger, misery, adventure, devastation and joy.
Shortlisted for the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Shortlisted for the Re-Lit Fiction Award.A lush and intricately layered novel of despair, hope and the transformational power of the imagination. Spanning time and territory, This Place Called Absence is populated by four disparate women.”Lydia Kwa’s first novel is a gem.”–Daphne Marlatt, author of Ana Historic
If love is a house, how do we arrange the furniture?
Meditative and magical, a book as complicated as the ways we love, This Poem Is a House is, in the end, about a girl’s story sheltering a boy’s poem, the way a house shelters the lives of the people who live in it.
‘Discovering Ken Sparling’s work changed everything I knew about writing. It made me realize that a novel could and should be just that – novel, that that was the point of writing, of life. Reading his work felt like permission to be myself the way that he was his self. Reading Ken Sparling reminds you that you’re free.’ – Jonathan Goldstein
This Series Has Been Discontinued is an early collection from a prolific journalist, historian, biographer, and poet.
This Side of Bonkers explores the lives of women; mothers, sisters, daughters and reveals and revels in how each woman treads the fine line between normal and maladjusted.An aging stripper explores her childhood with her sister, hoping to find a dark secret to explain why she chose to live her life as she has. A woman tries to recover from a divorce by shutting herself away from the world in a remote cabin, but the world, it seems, has its own agenda for helping her deal with her pain. A lounge singer returns to her home town during a tour and makes an unplanned visit to her best friend from high school, who is locked away in a psychiatric hospital, and she comes away disturbed by their similar emotional states. After her financial shenanigans are uncovered, an advertising executive flees to the woods and becomes the reluctant campfire companion of an escapee from a juvenile detention centre.This Side of Bonkers peels back the emotional lives of characters trying to fight through, or crawl away, from consequences of their actions and the unwelcome changes ahead.
This Side of Light is Carolyn Marie Souaid’s ninth book of poetry. Selected and introduced by Governor General award-winning poet Arleen Pare, this timely volume celebrates the evolution and scope of Souaid’s work over a 25-year period–from the early titles focused on human connectedness and the difficult bridging of worlds, to more recent ones exploring themes of aging, loss, letting go, and the vulnerability of life. Praised for her bold experiments with the long poem, Souaid is known for her evocative imagery, “surprising lyric twists” (Event) and “sudden illuminations on the rim of our consciousness” (Rover Montreal), and has been described by P.K. Page as having a “dark and powerful voice.”
Part mystery, part elegy, This Side of Sad begins with an ending: the violent enigma of a man’s death. Was it an accident, or did James commit suicide? In the shattering aftermath, his widow, Maslen, questions her own capacity for love and undertakes a painful self-inquiry, examining the history of her heart and tracing the fault lines of her own fragile identity. What emerges is a mesmerizing tour of a woman’s complex past, rendered in the associative logic of memory and desire.
A gifted storyteller reminiscent of Alice Munro or Joan Didion, Karen Smythe finds poetic complexity in the seeming trivialities of the ordinary. Meditative, philosophical, and confessional, This Side of Sad is a provocative and piercing novel that explores the disintegration of a marriage; the enduring colloquy between the living and the dead; and the meaning we find within the random architecture of despair and joy.
A collection of essays on women and aging from Canadian legend Sharon Butala.
“What I didn’t have a clue about was that I was soon to be old, or what being old would mean to my dreams and desires. While dreading old age with every fibre, I was at the same time in full denial that it would ever happen to me, and so, was shocked down to the soles of my feet when it did.”
In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she’s grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic—and lettuce. And she tells her story with the tremendous skill and beauty of a writer who has masterfully honed her craft over the course of her storied four-decade career.
Butala gives us a book to be cherished—an elegant and expansive look at the complexities and desires of aging and the aged, standing in stark contrast to the stereotyped, simplistic portrayals of the elderly in our culture. This Strange Visible Air is a true gift.
A rare glimpse into an artist’s mind, his toolbox, and the world of film animation
The Sweater is one of the most beloved animated films of all time. Based on Roch Carrier’s short story, also known as “The Hockey Sweater,” the film recounts the most horrifying moment of the author’s childhood. Sheldon Cohen adapted the story into animation and created a film that is as much about childhood emotions and the desire to fit in, as it is about hockey, the clash of cultures, and a harkening to bygone times.
Now 30 years later, Sheldon delves into his notebooks, photographs, and memories to recreate the process he undertook to make The Sweater. He takes the reader on a journey back to Ste.-Justine, showing all of the places and people that inspired him. He also delves into his other films, book illustrations, and paintings over his 40-year career, and along the way he gives us rich insights into the creative process.
Steve Dangle’s incredible odyssey, from self-starting Leafs lover to sports-media star
How do you turn ranting about hockey into a career? Steve “Dangle” Glynn is a YouTuber, podcaster, and sports personality from Toronto, who managed to turn a 16-second online rant about the Maple Leafs into a career in sports media. From video blogging in his parents’ house at 19 to yelling on televisions across Canada at 28, Dangle has been involved with some of the most important sports companies in the country.
In between tales of Steve’s adventures, both online and off, This Team Is Ruining My Life is also a kind of how-to (or how-not-to) guide: in an ever-evolving media landscape, sometimes you have to get creative to find the job you want. This is Steve Dangle and his accidentally on purpose journey through sports media so far.
Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poems is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, “A Lost Book,” to later, most recent sequences.
These are love poems in the sense that in the meeting of our minds and bodies, we are actually tied to the earth, and how, with its turns and tremors, the world displays us, its lovers, dispassionately in all our tenuous and fleeting splendour: in the pull of desire, the ecstasy of union, the angst of loss and identity, the deterioration of recognition and affection.
A studied master of her craft, Marlatt weaves her motifs of departures and arrivals, the recurrence of wounds and loss, and the delight in what surrounds us and how we are drawn to reconnect with it time and again in an astonishing variety of notation, ranging from the prose poem to the spare image afloat on the glaring sea of the page.
This Unlikely Soil, the sophomore collection from Lambda Literary Award finalist Andrea Routley, is a quintet of linked novellas exploring the failures of kindness and connection among a rural west-coast community of queer women. Funny, incisive and at turns heart-breaking, these stories assert a powerful new voice in contemporary Canadian fiction.
In “Appropriate Behaviour,” Freddie, suffering from a brain injury, seeks resolution with a neighbour after his dog bites her, but a lifetime of mixed messages yields disastrous results. “Damage” explores classist exploitations within many relationships and asks what our responsibilities are in saying no. In “Guided Walk,” Miriam’s latest clumsy infatuation pushes her to change her life, to finally “come out” on a guided walk with her cousin. When her cousin beats her to it, Miriam descends into pettiness before finding her way out of the woods. In “Midden,” Naomi, recently split from Rita and apathetically venturing into online dating, sifts through the remains of past relationships after Rita accuses her of “emotional abuse.” The quintet concludes with “This Unlikely Soil,” a finalist for the 2020 Malahat Review Novella Prize, in which Elana, following the sudden death of her mother, attempts to manufacture a meaningful relationship with a former partner’s teenaged son.
A bear with a hemorrhoid, a berried-up Dungeness crab, a perimeter of slugs… this dense coastal landscape does not simply mirror the characters’ lives but shapes them. While characters often embody painful histories and cringe-worthy decision-making skills, the stories are full of humour and love.
These poems are an alternative take on the genre of detective fiction. In them we have an assortment of clues and the task of sorting out the essential from the superfluous; the real from the imagined; the inside from the out. In spite of all the ‘evidence’, there is no familiar sense of direction.