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Congress 2024 Booklist
All Books in this Collection
Showing 41–60 of 67 results
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PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation
$34.95From escape rooms to TikTok to Tim Hortons’s “Roll Up the Rim to Win” to DIY everything, participatory performance is ingrained in the very fabric of our contemporary society. Written in a series of alphabetical, standalone mini essays that activate the reader as a participant who chooses their own path, PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation collects, describes, and analyzes live performances in which the audience become participants in the piece itself.
Jenn Stephenson and Mariah Horner explore the parallels between participatory theatre and the interactive phenomenon where the passive consumer is now engaging with their content. In a world where participation is key to our social interaction, Stephenson and Horner find a unique approach to understanding our relationship with theatre, and by extension, each other.
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Precedented Parroting
$21.95Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
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Realia
$20.00In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Shambolic and precise, these poems are unskinned. Including a mini-essay on the author’s OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement.
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Retreating to Re-Treat
$21.95In 2019, a group of scholar-artists led by Jill Carter stood with their audience in a liminal space at the ‘edge of the woods’—a space between now and then, a space between now and later. Together, they engaged in a survivance intervention: an Indigenous reclamation of territory, using Storyweaving practices rooted in personal connections to the land as a method of restor(y)ing treaty relationships.
Retreating to Re-Treat documents both their artistic offering and creation process, offered in the spirit of knowledge-sharing and enriching scholarship around collaborative practices. By revealing their unique and still-developing method for addressing a fraught and tangled (hi)story, the Collective Encounter invites readers to join them as we mediate those sites of profound experiences and renewal—sites in which the project of conciliation might truly begin.
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Rudy Wiebe
$25.00The anthology, Rudy Wiebe: Essays on His Works, compiled and edited by Bianca Lakoseljac, examines Wiebe’s works and his achievements as an author, editor, professor and mentor who helped shape successful authors and encouraged a passion for Canadian literature. Intriguingly, while Wiebe’s writing has been labeled as “brilliant” and “magnificent,” it has also been seen as “challenging” due in part to his propensity for a rather Faulknerian turn of phrase and his use of multifaceted storymaking approaches, such as intertextual and intratextual dynamics, and the sociopolitical views and religious beliefs they embody. Rudy Wiebe’s literary work raises him to the status of a Canadian literary icon whose fiction and nonfiction are seen as major contributions to Canadian literature, and will continue to be enjoyed for generations to come.
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Seeking Asylum
$21.95Human migration and the right to seek asylum from harm have been constants throughout the history of human existence. But only recently has Canada been forced to confront a global displacement crisis that much of the rest of the planet has long been dealing with.
Seeking Asylum is a plea for empathy. A way of rethinking and reframing the conversation to emphasize both our common humanity and our moral and legal obligations to one another.
The author of the bestselling essay, We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada (LLP 2022), Toula Drimonis traces the history of sanctuary, examines myths about refugees and migrants, and interviews with migration experts, immigration lawyers, refugees, and people working on the ground to provide a nuanced look at the asylum process. One that centres people.
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Tales for Late Night Bonfires
$22.95Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction
These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told ’round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.
G.A. Grisenthwaite’s writing is electric and inimitable, blending meticulous literary style with oral storytelling and coming away with a voice that is entirely his own. Tales for Late Night Bonfires is truly one of a kind, and not to be missed.
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Teeth
$19.95This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.
Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”
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The Big Melt
$19.95The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie ndn utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change. Part memoir, part research project, this collection draws on Riddle’s experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. This book refuses a linear understanding of time in its focus on women in the author’s family, some who have passed and others who are yet to come. The Big Melt is about inheriting a Treaty relationship just as much as it is about breakups, demonstrating that governance is just as much about our interpersonal relationships as it is law and policy. How does one live one’s life in a way that honours inherited responsibilities, a deep love for humour and a commitment to always learning about the tension between a culture that deeply values collectivity and the autonomy of the individual? Perhaps we find these answers in the examination of ourselves, the lands we are from and the relationships we hold.
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The Emptiest Quarter
$22.95The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.
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The Legacy of Louis Riel
$29.95The Legacy of Louis Riel provides an overview of the ideas that guided the leader of the Metis people. Louis Riel was a prolific writer. Based on a comprehensive review of Riel’s writing, the author examines his views on a variety of vital subjects, including the definition of the term Metis; matters of Metis identity; the condition, characteristics, and future of the First Nations; Jewish people his belief in their need for statehood; Islam, as an ally of liberalism and a threat to Christianity and Western civilization; Quebec, as a nation state and protector of the Metis people; French Canadians, as part of the Metis family; the exceptionalism of the United States; the place and role of women; liberalism as the most evil of ideologies; and the imperative need of Metis unity. These relevant and timely topics, some of which have been sidelined or entirely ignored, are sure to stoke considerable controversy in our current social context. In so doing, it is hoped that this study will increase our understanding of Louis Riel, his thought, and his writings, and help create greater cohesion among Metis communities throughout North America at a time when attempts are being made to divide them into Western and Eastern Metis to further weaken and dispossess them. Most importantly, The Legacy of Louis Riel helps answer the critical question: “Why does Louis Riel matter?”
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The Loxleys and Confederation
$19.99Double Award Winning Graphic Novel. 2016 Alberta Book Awards Children’s/YA Book of the Year and Illustrated Book Award Winner. The follow up to the award winning The Loxleys and the War of 1812, this full colour hardcover graphic novel catches up with the Loxley family in 1864 as new economic and military threats from America once again place the Canadas in grave danger.
The story is told as a travelogue, as reporter George Loxley follows attempts to bring the provinces together, joined by his daughter Ruth, and granddaughter Lilian. It is Lilian’s diary entries and her developing love story that threads the history together.
Claude St. Aubin once again brings his artistic mastery to the subject and Pierre Berton Award Winner Mark Zuehlke takes primary writing duties with both the graphic novel script and historical summary. The book contains 65 comic book pages and an illustrated historical summary written in the style of Lilian’s diary entries.
Free study guide available.
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The Marrow Thieves
$16.95Winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award (Young People’s Literature – Text)
Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize
Winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award
Winner of the 2018 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award
Winner of the 2018 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Young Adult Literature
Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden – but what they don’t know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves. -
The Mountain Man of Letters
$22.95Howard O’Hagan was one of the first native-born westerners to make a mark on Canadian literature. The purpose of this collection of essays on the works of O’Hagan, edited by Sergiy Yakovenko, is not only to refresh scholarship on his best known work, Tay John, but also to break the vicious circle of ignoring O’Hagan’s other works—his later novel The School-Marm Tree (1977) and his short stories and sketches, collected in Wilderness Men (1958) and The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station and Other Stories (1963). This volume offers two original articles on The School-Marm Tree, by Renée Hulan and Carl Watts, and Albert Braz’s profound study of O’Hagan’s Wilderness Men. Among the other contributors: Joseph Pivato, D.M.R. Bentley, Kylee-Anne Hingston, Jack Robinson, Sergiy Yakovenko, and something from Howard O’Hagan himself.
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The Seven Nations of Canada 1660-1860
$27.95Wendake, Odanak, Wôlinak, Pointe-du-Lac, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, and Akwesasne are communities located all along the St. Lawrence River valley and its tributaries. They have been home to descendants of the Huron-Wendat, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Iroquois nations. The one point these First Nations have in common is that their ancestors were allies of the French and had converted to Christianity.
Historians have generally ignored these nations that the French administrators described as “domiciled Indians” (“sauvages domiciliés”). Jean-Pierre Sawaya carefully studied how an alliance of such diverse “missions” was created, developed and conducted to become The Federation of Seven Fires or The Seven Nations of Canada.
How did this confederation come about? Who took part and what were their roles? The answers are mined in the massive colonial archives. The Seven Nations of Canada is original research at its best, combining detailed analysis and systematic investigation, that has enabled the author to dispel the tenacious colonial myth about irrational, submissive, and fatalistic Indigenous peoples. Readers will discover forward-looking peoples motivated by a deep desire for independence and solidarity.
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The Shame Trilogy (Shame #1-3)
$32.99When the purest woman on earth allows herself one selfish wish, it is enough to conceive the most evil woman the world has ever known. Collecting Lovern Kindzierski and John Bolton’s acclaimed fantasy series for the first time in hardcover format.
This collection also includes the first ten pages of Hope, the next book in the series, along with John Bolton’s original pencil layouts for the books, an interview with both Lovern and John about the trilogy, and additional background material.
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The Smell of Rain
$22.99Each family has their story, and each one is different, depending on who tells it. Fighting encroaching darkness, Alice chronicles her own story, one of love, loss, and learning how to piece it all back together. These deeply personal entries weave their way through past and present, spinning a kaleidoscopic and increasingly fragmented narrative.
“No matter who we are or what kind of life we lead, we are always alone in the end,” writes Alice.
Both delicate and iridescent, The Smell of Rain is bound to make you think: how will you fare when you see the gossamer thread of life begin to fray?
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The Storm of Progress
$22.95In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what’s going on.
Why is it that what we’ve been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history’s greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?
Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy’s most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.
Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.
Because we have what it takes—because we are good.
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The Thickness of Ice
$27.95The Thickness of Ice is a tender and tragic tale set in the remote sub-arctic tundra, in the small town of Churchill with a transient population on Hudson Bay. The barren icy landscape pervades the characters’ lives and relationships. As the novel opens Wade confesses that he was responsible for the death of his best friend Jack, out on the tundra, three years after meeting him. They had been arguing about a Dene woman, Tess, they were both in love with. Jack’s body was never found, and Wade never admitted to the act. It was assumed that Jack had left abruptly. However, many years later, Wade meets Esther who moves to Churchill to live with him. She hears the story of Jack’s disappearance. For Wade’s sake, she determines to resolve what happened to Jack and bring some closure. For Wade, everything is now threatened.
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The Weight of Ants
$17.95In this absurd and apocalyptic young-adult comedy filled with dazzling wit and wild imagination, two teenaged outsiders at “one of the worst schools in the country” seem to be the only ones who understand or care that the whole world is a mess. Joan responds by attacking everyone around her: Olivier retreats. But when they are forced to run against each other for student council, it unleashes their determination to change: the system, and themselves. Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in French.