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Congress 2025
Take 20% off Congress 2025 titles with the special conference promo code you received at the booth.
All Books in this Collection
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Arabic, between Love and War
$23.00In Arabic, the word for love حب is one letter shorter than the word for war حرب
Here, translators gather to perform an intimate labour, moving words from Arabic into English, or reversing such direction as language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that
open to rubble, or only air.
These poems reverberate in the space between there and here, silence and voice, original and translation, and the polarities of war and love.
“May the poems gathered here – in translation, and in their original voice – spark introspection, remedy, and acts of imagination in between.”
Yasmine Haj, “To Speak with Each Other” (introduction)
George Abraham, Eman Abukhadra, Omar Aljaffal, Norah Alkharashi, Lamia Abbas Amara, Nour Balousha, Samar Diab, Najlaa Osman Eltom, Miled Faiza (& Karen McNeil), Zeena Faulk, Ibrahim Fawzy, Daad Haddad, Yasmine Haj, Mayada Ibrahim, Rana Issa, Mahmoud Khudayyir, Hiba Moustafa, Suneela Mubayi, Mariam Naji, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nashwa Nasreldin, Kamal Nasser, Nofel, Qasim Saudi, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Fadwa Tuqan.
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Back Where I Came From
$29.95In this collection of personal essays, twenty-six writers from across North America share journeys back to their motherlands as visitors. Set against mountainous terrain, tropical beaches, bustling cities, and remote villages, these narratives weave socio-political commentary with writers’ reflections on who they are, where they belong, and what “home” means to them.
The result is a vulnerable, humorous, and insightful exploration of meanings and contradictions, beginning a conversation waiting to be had by the growing population of first- and second-generation Canadians and Americans, who will find themselves within these pages. Navigating the intricacies of hyphenated identities with nuanced stories of heritage and a redefined sense of home, the essays in Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home open a door to places around the globe—and within ourselves.
With contributions by Omar El Akkad, Nadine Araksi, Ofelia Brooks, Esmeralda Cabral, June Chua, Seema Dhawan, Krista Eide, Eufemia Fantetti, Ayesha Habib, Christina Hoag, Mariam Ibrahim, Taslim Jaffer, Vesna Jaksic Lowe, Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon, Omar Mouallem, Dimitri Nasrallah, Lishai Peel, Omar Reyes, Mahta Riazi, Steven Sandor, Angelo Santos, Alison Tedford Seaweed, Makda Teshome, Nhung N. Tran-Davies, Alexandra C. Yeboah, and Hannah Zalaa-Uul.
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Baldwin, Styron, and Me
$22.95An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
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Blockade
$26.00In the early 1990s, ancient temperate rainforests on Vancouver Island became the stage for mass blockades against clearcut logging in Nuučaańuł territory. Until the more recent struggles at Fairy Creek, Clayoquot Sound hosted the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada. National news coverage at the time showed mothers with their babies, grandparents, business people, and many other unlikely activists standing on the logging road or locked to makeshift structures, risking arrest to defend these rare, evolved ecosystems. Christine Lowther was arrested in 1992 for lying across the Clayoquot Arm bridge while MacMillan Bloedel fallers tried to drive to work with their chainsaws. Blockade is her gripping, first-hand account of the joys, struggles, and victories of this historic movement.
Drawing from her daily journals recorded at the time, Lowther recounts the vibrant and tense atmosphere of confronting police and loggers with nonviolent civil disobedience. She vividly describes creative direct actions—themed blockades, lock-downs, nighttime barricade building, occupations of ancient trees and government offices. Blockade contemplates the stark realities of the movement, including threats of police violence and the disturbing collusion between the RCMP and extraction corporations. Despite the powderkeg atmosphere, Lowther found wonder by kayaking the inlets and settling down to life in unceded Tlaoquiaht territory where she still gratefully resides.
Blockade is a celebration of resilience and a powerful account of successful environmental activism. It highlights the continuing threat to old-growth forests, with a nod to Fairy Creek, and commends the June 18, 2024 announcement of 76,000 hectares of new conservancies in Clayoquot (Tlaoquiaht) Sound, nearly doubling the protected temperate rainforest within this iconic region.
Thrilling, evocative, and necessary, Christine Lowther’s Blockade showcases the need to defend remnant intact crucial ecosystems hand in hand with the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral gardens these lands are. It is a rallying cry of hope for all those who stand up for the natural world and a roadmap for future generations of defenders.
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Casey and Diana
$17.95“I swear, I absolutely swear that hope has a sound…” It’s October 1991, and the residents of Casey House, Canada’s first free-standing AIDS hospice, have woken up to the life-changing news that Princess Diana will be paying them a visit. Inspired by incredible true events, Casey and Diana is the story of compassion, kindness, community, and forgiveness in the face of devastating loss.
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Commonwealth
$19.00Commonwealth is a profound lyrical meditation on the pre- and post-colonial migrations of the Lenape population throughout the American Midwest, from the watershed of Weli Sipu (the Ohio River) in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to Indiana and beyond. This is a book that transcribes the languages of rivers, highways, rail lines, and buffalo traces. It seeks—or is pushed toward—destinations that are always over the horizon. It is about the fluidity of space and time, and the tangibility of history. As the Lenape journey ever northward and westward, they both create and are created by a collective body of stories: stories of belonging and exclusion, of freedom and confinement, of aspirations and hard truths. Commonwealth explores the ways landscape and people inform one another, and does so in a way that is as clear as a broad Ohio sky.
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Confluences 3
$24.95The essays in this volume continue the examination, begun in Confluences 1 and continued in Confluences 2, of the exciting new writing that has emerged in Canada in the past few decades. Employing a variety of approaches and addressing the many concerns engaging their author-subjects–memory, history, and concentric identities; the subordination of women; and racism–this new body of writing collectively redefines and challenges the traditional idea of Canadian Literature.
Included in this volume are:
“W H Hudson’s English Argentina and Pablo Urbanyi’s Argentine Canada.” –Hugh Hazelton
“Racial Re/Profiling: The Plays of Andrew Moodie.” –Leslie Sanders
“Dannabang Kuwabong’s Caribbean Blues & Love’s Genealogy and Voices from Kibuli Country.” –Horace Goddard
“Haunting the Human: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetics of Un.” –Kate Siklosi
“Male Monstrosity or Failed Masculinities? Shani Mootoo’s Literary Oeuvre” –Juan M Salomé Villarini
“Pamela Mordecai’s Literary Transcultural Eschatology” –Dannabang Kuwabong
“Witnesses from the Silentiaries: Claire Harris’s Poetics of En(Dis)abling in dipped in shadow” –Dannabang Kuwabong
“Postcolonial Ecologies and Sustainable Living: Reading Jenna Butler’s Nonfiction” –Asma Sayed -
Conversations With a Dead Man
$27.95The second edition of Mark Abley’s acclaimed creative biography, revised and expanded with a new introduction by the author.
When he died in 1947, Duncan Campbell Scott was revered as one of his country’s finest poets and honoured as a devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work as head of the Department of Indian Affairs, he’s widely considered one of history’s worst Canadians. When word of this reaches Scott’s ghost, he returns to the land of the living to ask poet and journalist Mark Abley to clear his name, and in the ensuing research, Abley learns of a man who could somehow write vibrant poems about Indigenous people in one moment, and in another institute policies designed to destroy Indigenous culture and force assimilation.
With intelligence, moral ferocity, and a hunger for truth, Abley delves into Scott’s professional and personal lives while also exploring the hostile government policies—including the residential school system—that damaged and continue to damage the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. By mixing traditional non-fiction with an imagined debate between the author and Scott’s ghost, Conversations with a Dead Man makes it clear that “the villain was a man, and his nation is our nation. Abley’s act of radical empathy makes it harder to turn the page on a chapter of our history we might otherwise slam shut” (Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Maclean’s).
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Duty, Honour & Izzat
$34.99Why are certain histories covered, discussed and inquired about, while others remain hidden? Going beyond the old tropes of colonised histories, this book presents the Indo-Canadian community’s pioneer experience within the events leading to the ejection of the Komagata Maru from Canadian waters in July 1914 and the subsequent outbreak of the Great War in August 1914. A great book to introduce Canadian youth to a more inclusive look at our history.
Presented as a historical scrapbook with beautifully realised, photo-realistic artwork. Framing the history is a graphic novel story about a teenage boy, in Surrey BC, caught up in drug gangs. He rethinks his choices after his 95 year old great-grandfather comes to visit the family in Canada. His stories of their past, and seeing him reunited with a Canadian soldier his great grandfather saved during WW2, opens up a different path to live his life.
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Einstein on Israel and Zionism – New Enriched Edition
$29.95Einstein on Israel and Zionism focuses on correcting a widely accepted story that Einstein was a major supporter, a “champion,” of the State of Israel, a story told and retold primarily in the mainstream media.
Einstein was a secular Jew, but he had mixed feelings about Zionism. Though he supported the goal of a Jewish “homeland” within Palestine, he never wavered from arguing forcefully for equal rights and equal power for the Arabs, whom he called “kinfolk” of the Jews. His nationalism had no room for any kind of aggressiveness or chauvinism. For him, the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, or the perpetuation of a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism.
Some material spanning the years from 1919 to 1955 had never been translated or published. Fred Jerome presents it objectively and puts some of the obscure references into context.
Had Einstein’s foresight and warnings been heeded, the death and destruction we are witnessing today might not have occurred. Today they can help reach a peaceful solution.
Fred Jerome’s article “The 1948 Killing of UN Mediator Count Bernadotte? reveals how, why, and by whom the UN peacemaker sent by the Security Council to ?promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation in Palestine? was assassinated.
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Embedded
$26.00When Catherine Lang’s niece and Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang was killed while embedded with Canadian troops near Kandahar City, Afghanistan, in 2009, her world shifted.
In the aftermath, Lang and her family experienced the rigour of military ceremony. As she pieced together fragments from Michelle’s last days, Lang connected with the loved ones of soldiers who died alongside Michelle. She met with those injured by the roadside bomb, including the lone civilian woman talking to Michelle at the time of the blast, discovering in her and others a steely resilience to carry on and a more intimate understanding of the meaning of sacrifice. Suddenly thrust close to this aspect of Canadian society, Lang began to question previously held black-and-white views about military engagement, and she turned to writing as a way to understand the impact on her and her family, and to ensure that Michelle lived on in memory.
Wrestling with the unfathomable consequence of war, she travels across Canada to learn about Michelle through the eyes of her colleagues and friends. This process brings Lang to Saskatchewan, where she had lived as a child—a homecoming that reveals much to Catherine about Michelle, and about herself. Brought together by a shared love of journalism, a career she left behind, and dedication to press freedom and to the rights of Afghan women and girls, Lang is led back to writing through her search for Michelle, and back to Michelle through the language of love and loss.
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Eyes Have Seen
$24.95At the age of fifteen, Fred Anderson left home and was sucked into the maelstrom of the U.S. southern civil rights movement. He became active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organization, working with some of the well-known leaders including John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer and more. As the movement voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and support for liberation movements in Africa and other Third World countries, including Palestine, the FBI targeted it, while military draft boards systemically and disproportionately inducted social activists and poor Blacks, including Fred Anderson. When he refused to go to war, he chose ‘Flight to Canada,’ where he became Clifford Gaston, the name he went by until the amnesty granted draft dodgers in 1977.
Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal is a memoir about embracing the racial and tyrannical crosswinds of Hattiesburg and the south of the 1960’s and riding the tailwinds of SNCC, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War activism and reimagining the underground railroad to Canada.
From the author: “Little did I know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom Summer and my personal fate would collide with my ancestral struggles and hurl me into the narrative of runaway fugitives seeking exile in Canada.”
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Fat Studies in Canada
$59.95Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field re-envisions what it means to be fat in the colonial project known as Canada, exploring the unique ways that fat studies theorists, academics, artists, and activists are troubling and thickening existing fat studies literature.
Weaving together academic articles and alternative forms of narration, including visual art and poetry, this edited collection captures multi-dimensional experiences of being fat in Canada. Together, the chapters explore the subject of fat oppression as it acts upon individuals and collectives, unpacking how fat bodies at various intersections of gender, sexuality, racialization, disability, neurodivergence, and other axes of embodiment have been understood, both historically and within contemporary Canada.
Taking a critical approach to dominant framings of fatness, particularly those linked to an “obesity epidemic,” Fat Studies in Canada aims to interrogate and dismantle systemic fat oppression by (re)centering and (re)valuing fat voices and epistemologies. Ultimately, the volume introduces new ways of celebrating fatness and fat life in Northern Turtle Island.
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Food for the Journey
$24.95In this inspiring memoir rich with the flavours of other cultures, the author journeys by bike, on foot, by bus, plane, and train in her quest to understand the lives of the people she meets.
You know you’re not on a typical turista tour when you read, “We stopped for a mid-day lunch of piranha and hiked to a lagoon.” This writer’s explorations are unpredictable, sometimes perilous, often amusing, and always fascinating. While Elizabeth J. Haynes is an outsider — in the Philippines as a volunteer working with disabled children, at a pig killing in a remote Indonesian village, or even at a family wedding in rural North Carolina — she offers a compassionate view of those around her.
Insights and revelations emerge from stories Haynes tells about the vagaries of the human heart. Cycling with her sister in Cuba, she hopes her sister will find the strength to leave a difficult relationship. On a working trip in Armenia, she recalls a lost love; in Cambodia, in an encounter with a little girl, she faces the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge regime. Like many first-world travellers, she is pained by the want and suffering she witnesses and is moved by the generosity she receives.
As Elizabeth Haynes writes, “No one travels alone. No one journeys without help.” And sometimes help comes in the form of food — Southern grits with pancakes, Armenian eggplant stuffed with walnuts and pomegranate, grilled guinea pig in Peru — nourishment for the soul of the traveller. This travel memoir is a sumptuous meal with many courses, savoury and sweet.
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Forever Young
$17.95In a Jewish ghetto at the height of the Second World War, a group of youths organize what will become known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Izzy, Eden, Joshua and Christian are young socialist revolutionaries from different backgrounds who are trapped in a room under hopeless circumstances. Their task is clear: they must form a new military organization against the Nazis and convince their elders that the Ghetto must fight. The cadre of brilliant, brave and often hilarious characters express their passions and desires as fiercely as they fight for their right to exist in the face of annihilation. This story of youth, revolution, and betrayal in Poland, 1943, is written for today, with a clear message about how to fight for the changes we need.
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Hello
$34.99In two novellas and seven shorter stories, award-winning author David Carpenter addresses the theme of human frailties in his distinctively empathetic style.
A disabled widower seeks comfort in memory by getting in touch with his younger self. An old drunk, assisted by his own delusions, lays his ghosts to rest. A young child escapes her oppressive family by ministering to the needs of a monster in distress. A social reject acquires a new look and becomes consumed with the need for revenge against his early tormentors. A former social worker encourages a friendship with a paroled criminal. A cleaning woman in strained circumstances, determined to support herself and her child, feels compelled to make extreme choices.
Some of Carpenter’s characters face the frailties that come with old age, loneliness chief among them. Others become vulnerable to their own compulsions and set in motion moral dilemmas. Many of these loners reach for their phones to send or receive a message that might deliver them from their isolation, but even though they hear “Hello” from the person they reach out to, there is no guarantee of deliverance.
These are tales told by a master of language, an author who uses words with skill, sureness, and grace. While his characters may not find what they’re looking for, readers of these compelling pieces of short fiction surely will.