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All Books
All Books in this Collection
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Why I’m Here
$21.95Fifteen-year-old Gale is desperate to get out of Whitehorse, a fact that is immediately clear to counsellor Helen Cotillard when Gale walks into her office with her reluctant stepmother. It’s 1995, and one counselling agency for kids and families serves all of the Yukon. Gale has been having anxiety attacks, the last one so severe it landed her in the hospital.
Helen soon begins to realize that Gale’s distress at being separated from her little sister Buddie too closely parallels a calamity from her own past. This tragic similarity leaves Helen uneasy about her profession and her ability to help her clients. When Gale does escape back to her home in Cobalt, Ontario, to protect Buddie from their brutal mother, she risks her own future.
Through arresting, compelling images, Jill Frayne shows both the fierce beauty of the Yukon, and the damaged, enduring landscapes of two human hearts.
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Why Isn’t Everybody Dancing
$8.95This renowned story-teller writes of a mystical pilgrimage in search of her daughter, and of the ensuing barrier of grief which becomes a confrontation with the myriad forms of human bondage: love, hate, power-lust, and slavery. In breaking down this wall of grief, Haas finds rare and precious insight waiting at the core of inconsolable loss.
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Why Not?
$19.95Why Not?
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Why We Write
$24.95In this volume, African Canadian novelists and poets discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists; i.e., they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology, and adhere to the notion that their books must delight and instruct. These interviews, therefore, are valuable additions to the creative process of the individual writers. Apart from identifying how the writers’ geographical and social origins have influenced their work, the questions deliberately avoid autobiography. Instead, these writers respond to the exigencies of craft, the manipulations of publishers, the criticism of readers, and the absence of a clearly identifiable market for their works.
Interviewed in this volume: Ayanna Black, Austin Clarke, George Elliott Clarke, Wayde Compton, Afua Cooper, Bernadette Dyer, Cecil Foster, Claire Harris, Lawrence Hill, Nalo Hopkinson, Suzette Mayr, Pamela Mordecai, M NourbeSe Philip, Althea Prince, Robert Sandiford
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Whylah Falls
$21.95Whylah Falls is a mythic community in the heart of Black Nova Scotia, populated with larger-than-life characters: lovers, murderers and muses. George Elliott Clarke’s sensuous narrative sings with the rhythm of blues and gospel, spinning a complex, absorbing tale of unrequited love, earthy wisdom, devouring corruption and racial injustice. This is a rare and beautiful collection of poetry, as much in demand twenty years after its publication as it was when first released. It has inspired an acclaimed CBC-Radio drama, a popular stage play, and a feature film, One Heart Broken Into Song.
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Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
$16.95Book, or laboratory? Reader, or specimen?
Wide slumber for lepidopterists is a poetic fantasia, a disorienting yet compelling dreamscape of butterflies and caterpillars and killing jars, where the waking mind’s prose transforms into the sleeper’s poetry. Each poem unfolds with precision, tracking the stages of sleep and pairing them with the life cycle of Lepidopterae. Insomnia is mirrored in the birth of the egg, narcolepsy in larval hatching. And when the caterpillar starts its final moult, dreams begin, weaving around us as tightly as a cocoon until we are somnambulant, a chrysalis ready to emerge as a moth.
Reading the act of sleep through pupae and moths seems incongruous, but from this unlikely premise comes a darkly erotic text that takes cues from the scientific fascination of Christopher Dewdney, the linguistic experimentation of Gertrude Stein and the aural environments of Björk toexplore science, sexuality and language in equal parts.
Wide slumber for lepidopterists contains luminous illustrations by artist and bookmaker Matt Ceolin, who has managed to capture the spirit of the poems with his beautiful and disturbing treated photographs of butterflies, moths and dessication.
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Widow’s Fire, The
$22.95The Widow’s Fire explores the shadow side of Jane Austen’s final novel Persuasion, disrupting its happy ending and throwing moral certainties off balance. We join the action close to the moment when Austen draws away for the last time and discretely gives an overview of the oncoming marriage between heroine Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. This, it transpires in The Widow’s Fire, is merely the beginning of a journey. Soon dark undercurrents disturb the order and symmetry of Austen’s world. The gothic flavor of the period, usually satirized by Austen, begins to assert itself. Characters far below the notice of Anne, a baronet’s daughter, have agendas of their own. Before long, we enter into the realm of scandal and blackmail. Anne Elliot must come to recognize the subversive power of those who have been hitherto invisible to her — servants, maids and attendants — before she can defend her fiancé from an accusation too dreadful to be named. Captain Wentworth himself must learn the skills of living on land; the code of honour and secrecy which has protected him on deck no longer applies on the streets of Bath.
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Widows, The
$16.95Daring to defy a world that believes old women should not be seen or heard, three women steal a barrel from a travelling show and plan to go over Niagara Falls.
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Wigford Rememberies
$19.95“a great writer” -Daniel Lanois
“one of the finest songwriters on the planet… his lyrics [are] every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined.” -Ron Sexsmith
“a national treasure” -Michael Barclay, Exclaim
“he’s a stone genius” -CBC
“Kyp Harness scrapes at the backdrop of reality to reveal the tired, the broken, the lost and desolate, imbuing their agony with a fine and desperate dignity and allowing the reader to be swept along as well.”
-Mike Blouin, award-winning author of Chase and Haven“Kyp Harness’ prose has a unique flow: word and action, thought and thing are all contiguous and combined in lovely braided sentences. There’s some Joyce splashed around Wigford, a satisfying read. This is a fantastic book, please just read it.” -Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter, finalist for the Trillium Award and author of Pontypool Changes Everything
Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.
Wigford Rememberies tells this community’s stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn—”there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze”—or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God’s forgiveness—”‘if I gave my heart to Jesus—right there on my deathbed the minute before I died—he’d forgive everything an I’d go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin’ wrong at all with no difference?’”—Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.
Visceral, reflective and lyrical, Wigford Rememberies is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.
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Wigrum
$14.95It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through more than one hundred everyday objects he has left behind. Wigrum’s bequest is a meticulously catalogued collection of the profoundly ordinary: a camera, some loose teeth, candies and keys, soap, bits of string, hazelnuts, and a handkerchief. Moving through the inventory artifact to artifact, story to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike narrative bricolage determined as much by the objects’ museological presentation as by the tender and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum’s impulse to collect them.
With its traces of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, Daniel Canty’s graphically arresting Wigrum explores the limits of the postmodern novel. Having absorbed the logic of lists and the principles of classification systems, the Wigrumian narrative teeters on the boundary between fact and fiction, on the uncertain edge of the real and the unreal.
Readers venturing into Sebastian Wigrum’s cabinet of curiosities must abide only the following maxim: If I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you. -
Wild and Beautiful is the Night
$22.95Paulette and Danni grew up miles apart — Paulette in Hamilton and Danni in North Toronto — but they might as well have been worlds apart. Paulette’s family emigrated from Jamaica. Danni grew up Jewish in an affluent neighbourhood of Toronto. Now both women find themselves on the streets of Toronto, working in the sex trade.
Paulette is a seasoned prostitute, working to support herself and her addiction. She acts as an unlikely and reluctant mentor and friend to Danni, who is new to the street and whose addiction has set her on a similar path to Paulette. Their paths intersect again and again over the course of a difficult and troubled friendship that sees Paulette begin to pull herself together while Danni manages to survive everything that comes her way. Will her luck run out? Has Paulette learned to make her own luck?
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Wild Apples
$18.95There is a dreamlike quality to many of the stories in this new collection from Wayne Curtis. In Wild Apples, he returns to familiar themes of love and longing, and the push-pull emotions which inevitably accompany any attempt to break free of the ties that bind. Simple pleasures abound in these evocative stories, be it fishing on the river, gathering beans for an evening supper (are they beans or has-beens?), or listening to the jukebox at the local diner.
Curtis mines the shaft of everyday experiences, turning each one into a meditation on human nature. In the title story, an afternoon drive yields fertile ground as a father and son stop to shake down a gnarled crab apple tree for the sweet-sour orbs of autumn. With a seemingly effortless style, he casts his line into the river of the past, reeling in tales of youthful folly, the Christmastime birth of a little sister, and life on the Miramichi River, which could be any river, anywhere. Curtis also shares his insight into well-known friends, including novelist David Adams Richards and Yvon Durelle, the Fighting Fisherman. His contemplation of the life and work of Robert Frost casts a fresh light on the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
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Wild at Heart
$15.00Pacific Cinematheque Monograph Series #2 features Nettie Wild, one of the leading documentarians working in Western Canadian cinema today. Her work and her interests span the globe and also encompass issues of regional interest to the broader Western Canadian/British Columbian community. She is best known for her feature length documentary films, ‘A Place Called Chiapas’ (1998), ‘A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution’ (1989/90), and ‘Blockade’ (1993). ‘A Place Called Chiapas’ won the 1999 Genie Award for Best Canadian Feature Documentary and has played theatrically in over 100 cities in cinemas across North America.
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Wild Daisies in the Sand
$19.95Wild Daisies in the Sand is a series of diary entries beginning in 1941, when the author was imprisoned in concentration camps, first in Petawawa and then Angler, Ontario—a young Japanese Canadian, like many others, deemed dangerous by the Canadian government because of his race.
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Wild East
$16.95For most of us, the name Mongolia conjures up exotic images of wild horsemen, endless grasslands, and nomads — a timeless and mysterious land that is also, in many ways, one that time forgot. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols’ empire stretched across Asia and into the heart of Europe. But over the centuries Mongolia disappeared from the world’s consciousness, overshadowed and dominated by its huge neighbours — first China, which ruled Mongolia for centuries, then Russia, which transformed the feudal nation into the world’s second communist state.
Jill Lawless arrived in Mongolia in the late 1990s to find a country waking from centuries of isolation, at once rediscovering its heritage as a nomadic and Buddhist society and simultaneously discovering the western world.
The result is a land of fascinating, bewildering contrasts: a vast country where nomadic herders graze their sheep and yaks on the steppe, it also has one of the world’s highest literacy levels and a burgeoning high-tech scene. While trendy teenagers rollerblade amid the Soviet apartment blocks of Ulaanbaatar and dance to the latest pop music in nightclubs, and the rich drive Mercedes and surf the Internet, more than half the population still lives in felt tents, scratching out a living in one of the world’s harshest landscapes.
Mongolia, it can be argued, is the archetypal 21st-century nation, a country waking from a tumultuous 20th century in which it was wrenched from feudalism to communism to capitalism, searching for its place in the new millennium.
This is a funny and revealing portrait of a beautiful, troubled country whose fate holds lessons for all of us.
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Wild Madder
$20.00Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.
Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding–through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing–who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks–conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood–the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty.
This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human.
These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible–and cathartic–for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.
“Brenda Leifso writes fearless poetry. Wild Madder turns the domestic inside out, revealing the ‘promise of thunder’ in the familiar. Hers is a generous voice, yet at the same time it is a charged one, calling us into the ‘long-toothed sun’. This is a book of fierce delights.” –Anne Simpson