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“Caring for Everything” brilliantly fosters the notion that all of us, regardless of our education, social or economic status, can sincerely make a difference and bring joy to others, ourselves, and the community in which we serve.
“Caring for Everything” brilliantly fosters the notion that all of us, regardless of our education, social or economic status, can sincerely make a difference and bring joy to others, ourselves, and the community in which we serve.
This collection assembles all of the known correspondence of Canadian typographer and type designer Carl Dair (191267) concerning the conception, development and reception of his Cartier typeface. The letters span two decades, from Dair’s 195657 studies under the punchcutter P.H. Rädisch at the Enschedé typefoundry in Holland, to the voluminous response to the release of the First Proof of Cartier in 1966 until his sudden death in 1967, including candid criticisms and detailed critiques from some of the twentieth century’s foremost typographic mindsSem Hartz, John Dreyfus, Paul Standard, Beatrice Warde, Hermann Zapf and others.
Together with annotated transcriptions of all of Dair’s surviving “Epistles to the Torontonians,” this collection gathers lively, thoughtful and timely communications to and from typographers, designers, tradesmen and scholars across Canada and the world. An informative and entertaining resource for enthusiasts of typography and history alike.
At first glance a classic tale of immigrants to North America, there is something more to Vittorio Rossi’s autobiographical A Carpenter’s Trilogy than the conflict of a romanticized past confronting the excitement of a brighter future. Carmela’s Table, part two of this chronicle, finds Silvio, the decorated Italian war hero, settled in a new suburb of Montreal with his wife, their three children and his mother, applying for immigrant status in 1957.
Bristling with a cold and violent sense of outrage at the wartime horrors he survived in North Africa; his prison camp experiences in England; a bigamist father who abandoned his young family to emigrate to Chicago; betrayed by his mother who raised him and his sister in the humiliating poverty of their Italian village; it is easy for the audience to empathize with Silvio’s cold-hearted need for retribution, lashing out at everyone and everything around him as the play opens.
While Rossi’s dramatic portraits of Silvio’s manipulative mother, Filomena, his inexplicably loyal wife, Carmela, and their understanding and supportive neighbours, Neva and Dave, are finely drawn variations on what have become pop-culture stereotypes of Italian immigrants, they clearly exist to allow Rossi to peel back the complex layers of Silvio’s psyche—to reveal what drives him to his bi-polar excesses of emotion: the willfully constructed memory, the unassailable sense of honour, the judgmental dismissal of what he perceives are the faults of others, and an intransigent refusal to acknowledge his complicity in the creation of his own problems—all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the play’s final cathartic scenes, however, Silvio is forced to understand that to have consistently chosen not to act on what he has always known has also been a choice—one that now finally threatens to overwhelm and destroy his family.
Written in five sections, these poems/prose pemes lament the inadequacy of words to interpret passion and longing, yet, with an exquisite sense of paradox, do so in language remarkable for its poise and elegance.
Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life is a rich collection of essays, memoirs and interviews, written by literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and by friends, former teachers, and family, and features a piece by Shields herself on what a writing life meant to her.
John and Beatrice
High above the city, Beatrice sits on the 33rd floor of an office tower waiting for the right man to respond to her ad. When John appears, the games begin. But if he wins, what then? A play about the difficulty of connection and the meaning of love.
“John and Beatrice is, quite simply, exquisite: it should be savoured.” —Le Soir, Brussels
Helen’s Necklace
Helen wanders through a Middle Eastern city looking for a lost pearl necklace. In language as shimmering as the strand of pearls itself—its value isn’t what we initially think—Fréchette brings Helen into contact with a series of people, from a friendly taxi driver to a distraught mother and an angrily impassioned man. Helen’s world is irrevocably changed by her search for a trinket.
“A pearl of a play… riveting!” —NOW Magazine, Toronto
A novel about secrets and loss, and mysteries smouldering within mysteries, as the threat of devastating fire looms over a drought-stricken community.
In this blistering summer, the town of Carpenter Creek, and everything south of it to the U.S. border, including Waterton National Park, is in extreme fire danger — as Ray Lemon, editor of a southern Alberta newspaper, knows all too well. His emergency services friend, who Ray has nicknamed The Portent, insists that it’s Ray’s duty to frighten his readers into radical caution. Barbecues, tailpipes, tossed joints, lightning — anything could touch off an inferno.
When Ray was not yet twenty, he inherited the paper from his father after his sudden disappearance — a decades-long absence that became the confounding mystery of Ray’s existence. Now Ray’s oldest friend, Fran, is increasingly angry that he has kept secret the tale of his years in Australia, where he ventured in search of hippie culture soon after his father’s defection. To further complicate matters, the two friends have been called upon to referee a ranch-family feud between the grown children of close friends who both died long before their time. The one thing that is certain is that Ray and Fran are the only two people left on earth capable of sorting it all out.
Acclaimed novelist and beloved raconteur Fred Stenson has written a contemporary novel about the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell those we love or want to love — and the gap between these versions of who we are, where lives take flight or flounder. Set in the stunningly beautiful countryside where the plains meet the Rockies, where the oil industry operates uneasily beside sprawling ranch land, and where a mean dry wind can set the whole world ablaze.
Worlds collide when a naïve young heiress takes a tumble for a bootlegger with a murderous temper and his business partner falls in love with Montreal, the way Americans are prone to do. One world war has ended and a second is in the wings. In the space between, the neon-powered city on the St. Lawrence is notorious for its lavish nightlife, obsessive gambling and evident corruption. Controlling the action from behind the scenes is a large and mysterious figure called the Carpenter. He is the city’s fixer, mediator and manipulator. He is the boss of the night, le caïd de la nuit. In this cinematic and genre-bending novel, George Fetherling both honours the roots of serious noir fiction while also pushing its boundaries.
I have to put out of my mind what is happening to the trees of the forest in order to do what I do, writes John Terpstra at the opening of this memoir, because his lifelong creative pursuits of carpentry, furniture building and writing books—occupations consumptive of lumber and paper—necessitate a certain amount of sylvan destruction. With his episodic prose style and dogged curiosity, Terpstra considers the many facets of his complex relationship with trees and timber, all while recounting the story of his evolution as a craftsperson. In weighing the similarities and differences between carpentry and creative writing and the bittersweetness of his transition into retirement, Terpstra discovers that the trees have a canopy of lessons to teach us about being.
A fresh group of writers, critics, booksellers, poets and novelists to heap scorn and vilification on Canadian icons such as Margaret Atwood, stuffy academics, feminist poets, Elspeth Cameron, contemporary literary theory, and The Canada Council. Contributors include Hugh Hood, Louis Dudek, William Hoffer, Brian Fawcett, Robin Skelton, Maggie Helwig, and Winslow L.D. Howard (who?). Vitriol, humour, and cynicism march together against the shibboleths of Canadian culture. All edited by John Metcalf, Canada’s pre-eminent curmudgeon.
A fresh group of writers, critics, booksellers, poets and novelists to heap scorn and vilification on Canadian icons such as Margaret Atwood, stuffy academics, feminist poets, Elspeth Cameron, contemporary literary theory, and The Canada Council. Contributors include Hugh Hood, Louis Dudek, William Hoffer, Brian Fawcett, Robin Skelton, Maggie Helwig, and Winslow L.D. Howard (who?). Vitriol, humour, and cynicism march together against the shibboleths of Canadian culture. All edited by John Metcalf, Canada’s pre-eminent curmudgeon.
John Brady McDonald has lived in Kistahpinanihk, an area that includes Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, for nearly all his life. A member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and a descendent of Metis leader Jim Brady, John Brady has worked to move carefully between these two nations – to learn their stories, honour their traditions and reclaim their languages, all of which were nearly lost to him. In this wide-ranging collection the author looks at everything from the city of Prince Albert to his experience of residential school, to northern firefighting, to his time in the United Kingdom, where he “discovered” and “claimed” the island for the First People of the Americas. These are essays filled with history, much careful observation and some hard-learned lessons about racism, about recovery, about the ongoing tragedies facing Indigenous peoples. With honesty, a poet’s turn of phrase and a bit of sly humour, John Brady pulls us deep into the life he has lived in Kistahpinanihk and asks us to consider what life could be like in a New North Territory.
It’s not where you’re going but how you get there …
Everyone’s got a good story to tell about cars: a funny fender-bender, a bad cab ride, awkward amorous acrobatics. But the stories we tell about cars tell even more about ourselves. You’ll see what we mean in Cars.
George Bowering, one of Canada’s Grand Prix writers, and Ryan Knighton, a young writer just entering the race, realized that they could tellthe stories of their lives and friendship through the automobiles that have driven them.
Now, these aren’t your ordinary boys-and-cars stories. There’s no drag racing or cruising for chicks. In fact, George likes to drive pretty slowly, and Ryan, who is now blind, doesn’t drive at all. But they take turns in the literary driver’s seat, bantering and fender-nudging so their stories curve and tangle like a BC highway, until what emerges is a poignant, hilarious conversation.
Boiling fish in the radiator, jousting with a forklift, cabbing with Doris Lessing: in one hundred panels (that’s fifty each), George and Ryan tell the tales of their friendship, families, friends and loves – all illuminated by the dashboard light. Cars is an auto biography that’ll chauffeur you through the intersection of the lives of two of Canada’s most exciting writers.