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Warriors enters the world of advertising where, even if the product is war, the product can be sold. Two ad men lock themselves in a room to work on a new slogan for The Canadian Armed Forces — the tension of creation is brilliantly and dangerously portrayed as they consider the morality of the war machine.
Was it good for you? It was really good for Aislin!Montreal’s infrastructure is crumbling at a faster rate than any city in North America – and there lurks Aislin amongst the thousands of orange construction cones, sketchbook in hand.And bully Stephen Harper finally has his majority, an event that Aislin will be caricaturing keenly, even after over forty years of watching Canadian Prime Ministers come and go.And then there are those rare quiet days in Canada when Aislin has a world full of events beyond our borders to draw upon.WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU? Is a collection of Aislin’s favourites drawn over the last three years. It is his 45th book. He is aiming for fifty. For more biographical information on Aislin (née Terry Mosher), please visit: www.aislin.com
It’s the 1960s and 21 testosterone-drenched high school graduates are bussed into Washika Bay, a company logging camp where they will work for the summer. Idealistic, confident, and sometimes troubled, the young men meet their matches in tough older bush workers and cope with a devastating forest fire, sand flies, and leeches. Henri Morin is particularly sensitive and, though a hard worker, appears to harbor dark thoughts, and another young man’s moving love story is carefully told. In no other place could the transition from adolescence to adulthood be the same. Through its characters and their experiences, this book has revived an era and inspired new life into a wild and beautiful place.
What happens when we believe in something that isn’t there? What happens when we doubt our own history? We cling to the solidity of physical space. Our abstracted sense of being swells to its limits, presses against its boundary of skin, bumps up against the world. Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes explores the idea that we as humans are undefined, chaotic, that we come to know ourselves through the spaces we inhabit and the people we encounter.
In a town ruled by a shadowy cult, outliers Wasp and Janey nurture a dwindling community of queer resistance. Faced with social isolation and medical barriers, they remain determined to make things work and defend their home. Meanwhile, the Prophet’s daughters grapple with their own sense of home. True-believer Caroline anticipates a lavish future in the cult, but Rachel pushes back at its narrow-minded structures. When birth control is banned and Wasp’s ex-boyfriend Isaac turns up with a suspiciously generous offer, all of their lives are thrown into disarray. Suddenly the clock is ticking, and the cult is closing in. Who can they trust? And who’s in on the game? An electrifying exploration of body autonomy and reproductive rights, Wasp will leave you ready to fight.
WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts—so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, “what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun evening of bizarre, exotic, and hilarious entertainment. Although signified only by one minor character in the play, described by the head librarian as “one of our multicultural patrons” (and, of course, by the rather more obvious acronym of the title itself), this is a play about the elements of our constructed tribal identities: incest, fashion, fetishism, style, populist art, amateur psychobabble, and a fearful, murderous fascination with the other, hovering behind the cupboards over the sink, in the basements of suburbia, and in the filing cabinets of your local travel agent.
Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
?“In the age of increasing surveillance of borders, the border is where every thing significant occurs; map the border and you begin to understand the pulse of a nation,” Asher Ghaffar writes in the introduction to wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music, his debut collection of poetry. In 2003, he was stopped at the Wagah border post, where hundreds gather to watch the spectacle of the aggressive flag-lowering ceremony on both the Indian and Pakistani side.
Deploying the Wagah border literally and metaphorically, Ghaffar movingly describes the affective dimensions of “race” from the position of second-generation Canadian-born Muslim immigrant, deftly interrogating media depictions of the War on Terrorism. As Ghaffar writes: “I saw an ocean between two worlds / where flowers burst like paper rage.”
He also documents, in a series of cascading questions, the multiple ways that he came to understand the aftermath of the July 7th suicide bombings. At times the poetry is productively conflicted between narrative and verse, and the text opens up a fertile space where multiple genres flourish and jest.
In the spirit of anti colonial poets like Aimé Cesaire and Mahmoud Dawish and more recent experimental writers like the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nathalie Stephens, Asher Ghaffar documents a restless and often beautiful search for a rich and complex anti colonial poetics for our times, without falling into comfortable dogmas: “I sought a form for the body in crisis, the body in alliance with the flight of bees. I searched the archive for the voice which would break the density further. I sought the drive that was not the drive for death, but the drive for everlasting life in fervor.”
This story with its shocking expose of social evils, holds a forceful message for both sexes. Its strange mixture of power, tension and torment mark it as a human story that will thrill and grip all readers. Down in the depths of the city, washed by the murky waters of the dock-yards lies Skidrow, a dark den of intrigue and mystery, whose crumbling structures harbour the outcasts of the city.–From the 1950 edition
Hugh Garner’s second novel, Waste No Tears hit drug store and train station spinner racks in July of 1950–then disappeared, never to see print again… until now.
Ignored by some critics, dismissed by others, this ‘Novel about the Abortion Racket’ is the stuff of legend. Garner claimed that it had been written in ten days as part of a struggle to ward off ‘incipient starvation.’ He was paid $400 for his efforts. Dark and disturbing, Waste No Tears is populated by skid row bums, loose women, tight men, shady doctors and one wanton landlady, all moving about a Toronto that is far less than respectable.
First published under the pseudonym ‘Jarvis Warwick’–from Toronto’s Jarvis Street Warwick Hotel, a favourite watering hole of the author –this Ricochet Books edition coincides with the celebration of the Garner centenary.
It is 1963, Jean-Yves Soucy is 18 and looking for a summer job. He dreams of being a fire warden scanning the boreal forest from a fire tower. But to his dismay he is sent to an equipment depot somewhere between Val-d’Or and Chibougamau in Northern Quebec. His disappointment vanishes when he learns that the depot is located near a Cree community and that he will have two Cree guides, including a man named William Saganash, and his work will involve canoeing through the lakes and rivers of the region.
On each encounter with the Crees, on each of the long trips across water or through the bush, Jean-Yves expects to see a new world but realizes he?s meeting a different civilization, as different from his own as Chinese civilization. Yet he knows nothing about it. Nor does he understand the nature surrounding them as do his Cree guides, and friends.
Jean-Yves Soucy wrote this story because Romeo Saganash, son of William, insisted: “You have to write that, Jean-Yves. About your relationship with my father and the others, how you saw the village. You got to see the end of an era. ”
He unfortunately passed away before completing it. However, in his poignant Afterword, Romeo Saganash provides a finishing touch to this story of an unlikely meeting of two worlds.
Captivating and heart-wrenching from start to finish
When Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a startling new haircut. After Lenora disappears, everything changes for Emily, and as she deals with her mental devastation she is forced to consider a different future.
Alternating between Emily’s life as a child and her adult life in the city, Watch How We Walk offers a haunting, cutting exploration of “disfellowshipping,” proselytization, and cultural abstinence, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness attitude towards the “worldlings” outside of their faith. Sparse, vivid, suspenseful, and darkly humorous, Jennifer LoveGrove’s debut novel is an emotional and visceral look inside an isolationist religion through the eyes of the unforgettable Emily.
Glory is a troubled teenage inmate who, in her solitary prison cell, is tormented by hallucinations. While she battles the creature in her mind, her adoptive mother Rosellen struggles to remain connected to her daughter, believing that she can sense Glory’s feelings no matter the distance. In the prison halls, Gail, a working-class guard, glides between her conscience and her professional duties, knowing her actions could ultimately lead to a tragic end.
When all the animals are gone, and the world become a desert, where shall hope be found? After the extinctions, a post-human M?tis woman reaches out in hope and encounters a strange and unexpected future.
Billie Featherstone is one of few people to survive “the great extinction” thanks to a genetic mutation carried largely in the Metis population. Her skeleton is charged with Restart – a video game-like element for reanimating. She routinely patrols the biological war-plagued borders of her people’s territory where extinctions abound, deserts spread, and post-humans struggle. Water is a solidly researched novel inspired by the mathematical extrapolation of the length of time a technological civilization can exist. From such thinking, Taylor creates a world of the future based on society’s current environmental indifference.
In Water Confidential, Susan Blacklin (formerly Sue Peterson) revisits the important work of her late ex-husband, Dr. Hans Peterson. Beginning in 1996, Peterson, growing frustrated with his work in government funded research in Saskatchewan, brought attention to the desperate need for equal access to safe drinking water after a health inspector encouraged him to visit the Yellow Quill First Nation. In response to the issue, he developed biological technology for effective water treatment, still in use today.
Peterson and Blacklin joined forces with scientists from around the world to establish the registered national charity, the Safe Drinking Water Foundation. The SDWF developed accredited education programs for schools across Canada, while also educating the general public and Water Treatment Operators from Indigenous communities. Advocacy became a high priority when they discovered a variety of challenges to their mission, including questionable government practices that were blocking the reality of safe drinking water in First Nations communities. As committed activists, it became their life’s work to ensure that access to Peterson’s technology was available to all rural and First Nations communities.
Thirty years later, the majority of First Nations communities in Canada continue to face atrocious health issues as a result of unsafe drinking water. Blacklin, now retired, shares her deep concerns at the indifference, corruption, and lack of due diligence from all levels of government in response to the safe water movement. She echoes the work of the SDWF stating that Canada needs to implement federal drinking water regulations, and that a responsible government should use rather than abuse science when accurately determining Boil Water Advisories and addressing the deplorable state of access to potable water.
In this passionate and timely memoir, Blacklin shares her experiences with fundraising, activism and lobbying work. She reveals the complexities of negotiating between cultures, communities and the provincial and federal government. Blacklin emphasizes that ensuring safe drinking water to each and every First Nations community should be the top priority toward reconciliation with Indigenous people of Canada.
Water Damage
When a self-driving car hits an extra on set and a lawsuit is filed, Andy sets out to bankrupt his own production company by making a movie about his weird and romantic life of infidelity. With his wife Anna, and her best friend, he embarks on a location-scouting trip to Desolation Sound, but the trip takes a disastrous turn when the friend goes missing and they have to call in search and rescue.
Not wanting the search to expose his affair with his wife’s best friend, Andy steals a memory card out of her camera. A memory card with evidence of the affair.
But Andy’s not as discreet as he thinks and the memory card is stolen from him. With the disastrous support of his best friend, Will, Andy makes a series of bad decisions in an attempt to recover it, leading him further from Anna than ever before. Will their marriage finally reach its breaking point?
When a self-driving car hits an extra on set and a lawsuit is filed, Andy sets out to bankrupt his own production company by making a movie about his weird and romantic life of infidelity. With his wife, Anna, and her best friend, he embarks on a location-scouting trip to Desolation Sound, but the trip takes a disastrous turn when the friend goes missing and they have to call in search and rescue. Not wanting the search to expose his affair with his wife?s best friend, Andy steals a memory card out of her camera?a memory card with evidence of the affair. But Andy?s not as discreet as he thinks and the memory card is stolen from him. With the disastrous support of his best friend, Will, Andy makes a series of hilariously bad decisions in an attempt to recover it, leading him further from Anna than ever before. Will their marriage finally reach its breaking point?