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Congress 2024 Booklist
All Books in this Collection
Showing 21–40 of 67 results
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First Few Feet in a World of Wolves, The
$24.95The First Few Feet in a World of Wolves chronicles the fictionalization of the year the author spent teaching in Aupaluk (a remote Inuit community on the Ungava Coast of Nunavik). The second outlines, and explores, the history of oppression experienced by the more than five hundred Indigenous nations across northern Turtle Island at the hands of the Canadian government since the Royal Proclamation.
Told through the voice of Nomad, who finds himself very much at odds with the land itself. Nomad slowly learns how to reconnect with his fractured history as he embraces and is embraced by the Elders and his own students. Told is crisp, spare prose, this debut novel brings forward a powerful new indigenous voice to the literary landscape.
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First Voices
$39.95Understanding the ways, experiences, and voices of Indigenous women requires the reader to start with the self. Who are you and where do you fit into an Indigenous world? In many Indigenous traditions, governance starts with the self. We then fit into clans, families, communities and nations. Understanding yourself is always balanced by understanding your relationships. Primary among Indigenous relationships is our relations to the natural world. Territory is equally an important concept. This Aboriginal women’s studies reader is organized under the above themes. It is intended to assist readers in learning about the great diversity across Aboriginal nations in Canada, but also the diversity of women within those nations. The articles chosen represent many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced in Canada. These include struggles with the Canadian criminal justice system, with inclusion in self-government and constitutional reform, issues of membership in bands and matrimonial real property. Many of the articles are framed around the quest for equality.
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Flyway
$18.00This Meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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G
$21.95G is a sound. Phonetically, it is represented as [?]and corresponds to ? in the Arabic alphabeta guttural resonance shared between Afrikaans and Persian. Hinging on this mutual fricative sonically prominent in their respective languages, and a playful inclusion of homonyms across English, Afrikaans, and Persian, Klara du Plessis and Khashayar Kess Mohammadi composed G collaboratively in a shared Google document, an act of hospitality into their languages. Amplifying common etymologies, but centering communication beyond the delimitation of verbal systems, this work stages a conceptual project of human interconnection through the metaphors of tongue, speech, and poetry as sound. G builds on both poets? earlier translingual and translation work, including du Plessis? award-winning Ekke and Mohammadis Me, You, Then Snow.
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Gaman – Perseverance
$29.95This revealing memoir by the former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians describes the long journey towards resolution for the historic injustice that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II. Gaman – Perseverance details the intense negotiations that took place in the 1980s between the Government of Canada and the NAJC – negotiations which finally resulted in the historic Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement of September 1988 and the acknowledgment by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that Canada had wronged its own citizens.
Art Miki vividly recollects his past experiences and family history, revealing the beliefs and attitudes that shaped his life’s journey as a youth in British Columbia, an educator in Manitoba, and a community leader across Canada. He shares personal reflections on the Japanese Canadian Redress Campaign and the many endeavours and challenges that followed. He details his involvement with Indigenous communities and the dispute that would lead to the historic Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, his foray into politics during the 1990s, and his role as a Canadian citizenship judge. Gaman – Perseverance provides a unique, intimate glimpse into Miki’s involvement with the Japanese community and the projects that embody meaningful historical preservation.
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Glint of Light, The
$32.95“This naturalistic novel follows a Black environmental scientist [Mark Smith]. The story is shaped by several cataclysmic events, which suit the novel’s backdrop, in which the Presidency of Barack Obama corresponds with a rise in white nationalism, though climate crisis and racially charged incidents.” – The New Yorker
Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother’s painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother’s funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country’s civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it.
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Herd, The
$15.95Culture, science, and commerce collide when twin white buffalo calves are born on a First Nations ranch in Saskatchewan. Are they the sign of the prophecy or the results of genetic manipulation? As crowds of pilgrims gather to witness what they hope is a miracle in action, the reserve’s veterinarian, Dr. Vanessa Brokenhorn, must do all that she can to protect her research and the twin calves.
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I Am Full
$19.95Dan Yashinsky’s son Jacob died tragically in a car accident at the age of 26. Dan, Jacob and Jacob’s best friend Effie were driving back to Toronto after a magical trip to Montreal when Dan fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. Dan and Effie survived, but Jacob did not. When the unimaginable happens–a parent is still somehow here but their child is gone–all that’s left are stories. In the process of grieving his son, Dan realized that he was now Jacob’s storykeeper, and I Am Full is Jacob’s story.
Jacob’s death is the least interesting thing about him. How he lived, the kind of man he became, is what matters most. All his life, Jacob had struggled with Prader-Willi Syndrome, but rather than let it defeat him, he became an advocate for people suffering from PWS as well as people coping with various other disabilities. He was a jewelry-maker, a photographer, a songwriter, a TPS crossing guard, and an avid fisherman. Six months after Jacob’s death, Dan began to gather and create the texts that make up this chronicle, all the while guided by Jacob’s imagined voice. The events in I Am Full are drawn from many periods of Jacob’s life. Much of it–poems, sayings, speeches, letters, notes–are in Jacob’s own words and the rest is told in his imagined voice narrating things that Dan saw him do or hear him talk about. Jacob’s voice has been captured and carried in this unique book, which goes beyond the terrible grief of losing a child to preserving and sharing his story.
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Knife on Snow
$18.00What portents must you divine when a knife falls from the sky into your snow covered yard? With Knife on Snow, Alice Major employs history, myth, and science to understand a world ablaze.
From the bitumen hills of Fort McMurray to the barren reaches of Iceland, Knife on Snow shows us an earth bathed in dragon’s breath, and like the Norse gods bound to their fate, we stand transfixed by the reaping of our actions, both driver /and passenger— part-cause / part-witness of earth’s unwinding.
As you would expect in Alice Major’s expert hands this unwinding yields to an evolution , a discovery, an acceptance of struggles end and the possibility of a tomorrow unknown. All from a Knife on Snow.
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Land of Many Shores
$24.95Seeing through the eyes of others brings new perspective on the place we call home.
In Land of Many Shores, writers share their perspectives about life in Newfoundland and Labrador from often- neglected viewpoints. In this collection, Indigenous people, cultural minorities, 2SLGBTQ+ people, people living with mental or physical disabilities, workers in the sex industry, people from a variety of faiths, people who have experienced incarceration, and other marginalized and under-represented voices are brought to the forefront, with personal, poignant, celebratory, and critical visions of the land we live on.
Land of Many Shores is a collection of pieces that paints a vibrant picture of a province most of us don’t know as well as we think we do. The variety of experience against the backdrop of Newfoundland and Labrador broadens readers’ perspectives on Canada’s youngest province, helping us reimagine both who we are today and who we have the potential to become.
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Let It All Fall
$26.95Incorporating elements of creative nonfiction and oral history, Let It All Fall: Underground Music and the Culture of Rebellion in Newfoundland, 1977–95 is a collection of interview-based first-person monologues that describe the experiences of a generation of independent musicians, artists, and activists.
Beginning in the late 1970s, a new raw sound began to emerge from the basements and garages of St. John’s which, by the mid-’90s, had grown into a vibrant community. With few resources, dozens of bands produced a staggering amount of music.
Let It All Fall traces how underground youth culture challenged social and economic inequity, as well as cultural norms, during one of the most turbulent times in Newfoundland history. -
Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way
$35.00Eight years in the making, Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way is a community oral history of Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, the first case in Canada to result in a declaration of Aboriginal Rights and Title to a specific piece of land. Told from the perspective of the Plaintiff, Chief Roger William, joined by fifty Xeni Gwet’ins, Tŝilhqot’ins, and allies, this book encompasses ancient stories of creation, modern stories of genocide through smallpox and residential school, and stories of resistance including the Tŝilhqot’in War, direct actions against logging and mining, and the twenty-five-year battle in Canadian courts to win recognition of what Tŝilhqot’ins never gave up and have always known. “We are the land,” as Chief Roger says. After the violence of colonialism, he understands the court case as “bringing our sight back.” This book witnesses the power of that vision, its continuity with the Tŝilhqot’in world before the arrival of colonizers two centuries ago, and its potential for a future of freedom and self-determination for the Tŝilhqot’in People.
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Medium
$20.00From award-winning writer Johanna Skibsrud, Medium shares the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history.
Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie: Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.
These deeply resonant and performative poems use language as a bridge across experience, sensibility, and time. Each exploration begins with a brief vignette inspired by the “vidas” that once began manuscripts of the troubadours. Both vidas and poems provide lyrical reinterpretations of real and imagined elements in the lives of scholars, scientists, computer engineers, mystics, entrepreneurs, artists, nurses, and other leaders.
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Mischief in High Places
$22.95Mischief in High Places examines the spectacular career and personal life of the man who, in 1919, first became elected prime minister of Newfoundland.
The political successes of Sir Richard Squires’ career are overshadowed by a legacy of scandal and deceit that paved the way for Newfoundland’s loss of democracy in 1933.
Perhaps best known for slipping out of the Colonial Building during the 1932 riot, Squires had survived three corruption-ridden terms in office in the final decades of responsible government while living a high-flying lifestyle with his wife, Helena.
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Misty Lake
$16.95Misty Lake tells the story of a young Metis journalist from Winnipeg who travels to a Dene reserve in Northern Manitoba to conduct an interview with a former residential school student. What Mary imparts in her interview will change Patty’s life profoundly, allowing the journalist to make the connections to her own troubled life in the city. Patty knows that her Metis grandmother went to residential school when she was a girl. But Patty hasn’t understood until now that she’s inherited the traumatic legacy of residential school that was passed down to her mother from her grandmother. With this new understanding, Patty embarks on a healing journey. It will take her to the Dene fishing camp at Misty Lake, a place of healing, where, with Mary, she will learn that healing begins when you can talk about your life.
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Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes
$23.00Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.
Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.
Ultimately, these deeply moving, graceful essays force us to consider how close we are to death, even in the most average of moments, and how beauty is a necessary celebration amidst the chaos of being alive.
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Moving Upstream
$24.95Drawing on her Ojibwa roots and storytelling, Barnes shares stories that take the heart on the path to the past, nostalgic though it may be, wherein lies discovery, memories, and rhythms that ease the soul. Touching, tender but never overwrought, Barnes’ poetry brings wonder to the spirit of nature and provides a sense of connection to the things most often overlooked.
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My Love in Stitches
$20.00Frankie is young monster who’s life often feels like it’s about to unravel– she can’t even count on getting through a softball game with all her limbs still attached! When she meets Momo, a girl who– despite being made of squishy, pink slime– is as sharp as she is cute, Frankie wants nothing more than to get closer to her. In order to do that however, Frankie now finds herself having to thread the needle around a new job, a scheming skeleton and the world’s hairiest ex-girlfriend drama. Join Frankie in a world full of monsters, magic and (hopefully!) love, as she tries her best to set the seams on an exciting new life!
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our place
$17.95our place by Kanika Ambrose is a new work set in a fictional Caribbean restaurant, Jerk Pork Castle in Scarborough, where newcomers Andrea and Niesha work in exchange for cash under the table. As the two women scrape out a life in Canada, leaving their children in their Caribbean homelands, they must also navigate their status as undocumented workers. This funny, keenly observant script unveils the lives of these undocumented Caribbean workers who go to desperate lengths to get Canadian citizenship for the betterment of their children–a moving, timely story of those rendered invisible in a “welcoming” Canada.
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Pinching Zwieback
$24.95These loosely linked stories read like a novel. Lives are given form by the past but undergo change as the world reshapes beliefs and circumstances. Focusing on recurrent, related characters with a common reality: small town Mennonite life, this powerful collection connects us to the author’s own background and experiences.