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J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer’s spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world’s first weapon of mass destruction? and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably.
Yaffle the seagull is fed up with the rain, drizzle, and fog in his home province of Newfoundland. He dreams of flying down south to the sunshine, but saddens at the thought of leaving all that he loves behind. So, one day Yaffle comes up with a surprising plan he thinks will solve his dilemma!
Meyer Jacobs wants grandchildren, but God has conspired against him. Meyer has had a stroke and lost the use of one hand, so the entire world must suffer with him, including his pro-Palestinian son, his Serbian caregiver, and his absent, lesbian daughter. Entrenched in his opinions, Meyer knows how everything should be regardless of what everyone else thinks. Beset by guilt, however, he lights Yahrzeit candles in memory of his late wife and is secretly sending money to Israel to plant a forest for her. Meanwhile, his son’s marriage is collapsing, his caregiver is giving him tsuris, his missing daughter shows up with only a bus ticket, and a boy scout is on the loose in his building. Sooner or later, something’s going to crack and when it does, Meyer will find that life has a few surprises left in store. Alex Poch-Goldin’s moving, funny, and brilliant play explores conflict in the family against a backdrop of global conflict. With peace as the ultimate destination, there’s a long journey to get there.
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From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.
But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.
“Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger’s revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers.” – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners
“Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it’s Berger’s best book yet.” – Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind
“Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster.” – Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings
Daniel Coleman is looking to find a home. After a childhood that left him feeling placeless, he ended up in Hamilton, Ontario, one of Canada’s most polluted cities at the time. Yardwork is his attempt to put down roots in a place he never expected to be. Coleman decided he wanted to truly know and belong to a small piece of land, his patch of garden on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, to deeply understand its ecology, landscape and history. Starting with the creation myths and geology, moving through the settler era and up to the present, Coleman pours his considerable talents into learning, and sharing, as much of the story of the land as possible. Most books on ecology focus either on protecting the wilderness or analyzing a toxic dump. Most books on gardens focus on plant health or landscape design. Most books on Indigenous-settler relations focus on politics or social inequities. Yardwork meditates on the sedimentary layers of ecological, cultural and political stories that make up Hamilton, the escarpment city at the Head of the Lake. Along the way Coleman strives to build a new awareness of the place where he lives as sacred land.
YAW marks a sharp departure in tone and structure from Dani Couture’s previous two acclaimed poetry collections. An almost singular narrative runs through these quiet, powerful poems, a narrative that seeks to examine how far we must go to answer the questions closest to us, how we grieve, and how to make sense of what and who remains. YAW is a spare but abundant book, a seamless gathering of investigative poems that can be seen as one side of a conversation Ñ or perhaps, a plea for answers to the unanswerable.
Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson’s poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that “The dead burn through us/ the not yet born.”
“What a wonderful book this is! Henderson tells the old story how dear ones die, and new lives come to be. In a world that’s dense, opaque, yet lit with random hints of something being uttered. The result is a marvel of passionate, glancing eloquence. I wanted it never to end.” –Dennis Lee
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving “meditation on the possibility of translation.” Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Jernigan explores the connection between hymn and poem, recalling the spare beauty of Marilynne Robinson’s novels or the poems of Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is “an offering of words to music,” made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving meditation on the possibility of translation. Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Luke Hathaway explores the connection between hymn and poem. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is an offering of words to music, made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.
Nominated, Journey Prize, 2018: “Yellow Watch”
Long-listed, The Fiddlehead’s Fiction Contest, 2017: “Yellow Watch”
Runner-up, UofT Magazine Writing Contest, 2015: “A Pilgrimage to Atalaia”
First Prize Winner, Toronto Star Short Story Contest, 2015: “A Dragonfly Dashed by My Face”
First Prize Winner, The Malahat Review Open Season Short-Fiction Writing Contest, 2013: “The Butterfly First”
This gripping collection takes us into the lives of Portuguese immigrants as they arrive in Toronto. Beginning in tiny Amendoeiro across the Tagus from Lisbon, it describes lives of abject poverty under the fascist thumb of Antonio Salazar. The men are often out of work from the local cork factory, and the women collect scraps to eat, while the dreaded secret police remain ever watchful for hints of unrest. Men disappear. It is a life of abuse, cruelty, and superstition, observed by the girl Milita, who calmly takes her beatings from her mother but misses nothing. These Portuguese stories are easily reminiscent of early Saramago.
Finding a fur trader?s journal is unusual. Finding a trader?s journal in French is even rarer. Finding a journal in French and written on birchbark is unprecedented. The Yellowknife Journal was kept by Jean Steinbruck, a soldier of German descent who was likely sent to the colonies by a prince as part payment of a debt. Steinbruck accompa nied Alexander McKenzie to the Arctic ocean before working as a fur trader for the North West Company in the Great Slave Lake area. As required by the Company, he kept a journal of his daily trafficking with the natives around his post. In the hard winter of 1802-03, he ran out of paper and was forced to use the birchbark sheets used for patching canoes to keep his daily entries. Historians and collectors have heard of traders resorting to birchbark sheets when they had no paper at their post, but as it was customary for traders to keep a rough journal and then rewrite a fair copy to send in to the company, no other examples of these birchbark journals have survived. In private hands for almost two hundred years, the journal has surfaced thanks to Henry de Lotbiniere Harwood’s passion for Canadiana and his own family’s history. A descendant of the Seigneurs of Vaudreuil and Rigaud, de Lotbiniere Harwood uncovered, preserved and passed on the journal to his children. This unique Canadian artifact has been published as a full-colour facsimile, with accompanying transcription and English translation and a lively and accessible introduction by Harry Duckworth, a noted expert in this field.
Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil have just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. But as Tanis moves deeper towards uncovering the secrets of the Tanner family who originally inhabited their home – and the cause of the mysterious stains on the attic floor – Neil is pulled into a drama of his own, as two aboriginal teenagers from his school have gone missing and he is being looked to as a suspect. Taking its title from the Old English nursery rhyme “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, Yes, and Back Again examines the personal journeys required to bridge the distances between individuals, cultures, and generations in an atmosphere marked by class and racial divisions.