ebooks for Everyone Lists

Immigrant Blues

$15.00

Immigrant Blues, an extension and deepening of the famous poems of the siege of Sarajevo translated in Simic’s Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford, 1997), explores the personal and the public devastations of war, especially its effects on the emotions, thoughts and memories of exiled survivors. Simic’s genius is to present this disturbing reality in terms so vigorous and humane that pain is mixed with the solace and pleasure of great art.

Open the doors, the guests are coming
some of them burned by the sun, some of them pale
but every one with suitcases made of human skin.
If you look carefully at the handles, fragile as birds’ spines,
you will find your own fingerprints, your mother’s tears,
your grandpa’s sweat.
The rain just started. The world is grey.

from “Open the Door”

“The brilliance of these poems lies in their detail, their lack of rhetoric, and their passion.” — Helen Dunmore, reviewing Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Observer

“Goran Simic has written with tact and restraint in daunting and provocative conditions. The fact that his terrifying testimony seems more whispered than screamed is part of its power.” — Denis O’Driscoll, on Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Times Literary Supplement

In Search of Pure Lust

By: Lisa Weil

$22.95

Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal for LGBT Non- Fiction; Finalist, 2019 International Book Awards for LGBTQ – Non-Fiction; Finalist, 2018 Foreword INDIES Award for LGBT Adult Nonfiction; Finalist, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Awards for LGBTQ Non-Fiction)

In Search of Pure Lust documents an important chapter in lesbian history that is already being distorted and erased, a time when lesbians were reinventing everything from the ground up. Along with violence against women around the globe, lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s were motivated by growing militarism, rampant development, species loss, and living systems in decline. For many, this was the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years — patriarchy.

This is a long overdue and unvarnished insider’s account of those times. The memoir, centered in the Northeast U.S. and then later in Quebec, combines a personal story with the story of a political movement. The book is full of celebration, but also depicts the shadow side of the lesbian movement, taking the reader into the bitter squabbles that divided women, both personally and politically. On a deeper level, the memoir charts a long and difficult quest for love. Over and over, the narrator dives headlong into rapturous passions that either fizzle out or come to brutal and ugly endings.

In the mid-’80s, when a friend invites her to a Zen retreat, she as desperate enough to say yes. A period of difficult self-examination ensues and, over a period of years, she begins to learn an altogether different approach to desire. The last section of the memoir traces the fallout from that collision between hot-blooded lesbian desire and spacious, temperate Zen mind. What the search for pure lust uncovers, in the end, is something that looks a lot like love.

In Spirit

By: Tara Beagan

$17.95

Twelve-year-old Molly was riding her new bicycle on a deserted road when a man in a truck pulled up next to her, saying he was lost. He asked if she could get in and help him back to the highway, and said he could bring her back to her bike after. Molly declined, out of interest for her own safety. The next things Molly remembers are dirt, branches, trees, pain, and darkness.

Molly is now a spirit.

Mustering up some courage, she pieces together her short life for herself and her family while she reassembles her bicycle—the same one that was found thrown into the trees on the side of the road. Juxtaposed with flashes of news, sounds, and videos, Molly’s chilling tale becomes more and more vivid, challenging humanity not to forget her presence and importance.

In an intimate, loving approach to the tragic subject of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the acclaimed author of Dreary and Izzy shines a light on the haunting tale of a preteen’s last moments.

In the Black

By: B. Denham Jolly

$29.95

Winner of the 2017 Toronto Book AwardA remarkable memoir about achieving prosperity in the face of relentless prejudiceIn the Black traces B. Denham Jolly’s personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination. He arrived from Jamaica to attend university in the mid-1950s and worked as a high school teacher before going into the nursing and retirement-home business. Though he was ultimately successful in his business ventures, Jolly faced both overt and covert discrimination, which led him into social activism. The need for a stronger voice for the Black community fuelled Jolly’s 12-year battle to get a licence for a Black-owned radio station in Toronto. At its launch in 2001, Flow 93.5 became the model for urban music stations across the country, helping to launch the careers of artists like Drake.Jolly chronicles not only his own journey; he tells the story of a generation of activists who worked to reshape the country into a more open and just society. While celebrating these successes, In the Black also measures the distance Canada still has to travel before we reach our stated ideals of equality.

In the Key of Decay

By: Em Dial

$21.95

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.

Indian Arm

By: Hiro Kanagawa

$17.95

Rita and Alfred Allmers live in an isolated family cabin on native leasehold land overlooking Indian Arm, a still untamed glacial fjord just north of Vancouver, BC. With Alfred—a formerly promising novelist—now struggling with his latest work, Rita has been tasked with caring for their adopted son Wolfie, a sensitive First Nations teen who has been designated as “special needs” for much of his life. Rita’s resentments and frustrations are further embittered by her younger half-sister, Asta, a constant reminder of the innocence, idealism, and sexual allure Rita once had and yearns for again. The fragile impasse of their lives is torn asunder by the appearance of Janice, the surviving member of the Indigenous family who leased the land to Rita and Asta’s reclusive and mysterious father over fifty years ago. With the lease now expired, they are all engulfed by the secrets and contradictions of their lives and of the land itself—in both the past and the present—and their stories are drawn inexorably toward an unspeakable tragedy.

In this modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, award-winning author Hiro Kanagawa explores the uneasy intersection of privilege and birthright.

Indiana Pulcinella

By: Garry Ryan

$18.95

After saving the Calgary Stampede from a potential terror attack in Glycerine, Detectives Lane and Li find themselves on the hunt yet again, this time following a pair of gruesome killers whose perfectly composed crime scenes match those of an inmate put away by Calgary Police years earlier. As more people come into the line of fire, Lane must team up with some unlikely new allies in order to crack the case.

Meanwhile, with the birth of a new nephew, the happily chaotic Lane household must deal with the taciturn detective’s estranged, fundamentalist family and their efforts to interfere in raising the child.

Indigenous Resistance and Development in Winnipeg: 1960-2000

$24.00

Tracing through Indigenous institutional development in Winnipeg, and providing a unique perspective on the history of Indigenous housing development, education, and economic development, Indigenous Resistance and Development in Winnipeg 1960-2000 explores Indigenous resistance in Winnipeg through the work of various Winnipeg institutions, including The Indian and Métis Friendship Centre, Children of the Earth and Niji Mahkwa schools, The Indigenous Women?s Collective of Manitoba: Dibenimisowin (We Own Ourselves), the Ma Maw Wi Chi Itata Centre, The Native Women?s Transition Centre, and Two Spirited People of Manitoba, among others. Taking on a rich historical grounding and encompassing a new generation of Indigenous organizing, this is the first book that explores Winnipeg history exclusively through the impactful development and resistance work of Indigenous organizations. Contributors include Nicole Lamy, Shauna MacKinnon, Kathy Mallett, Lawrie Deane, Lynne Fernandez, Doris Young, Annetta Armstrong, Josie Hill, John Loxley, Chantal Fiola, and Albert McLeod.

Inquiries

By: Michelle Porter

$19.95

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD**

**LONGLISTED FOR THE MIRAMICHI READER’S ‘THE VERY BEST!’ BOOK AWARD**

In poems that risk the comingling of anger and elegy, poetry and documentation, humour and the dark spectre of poverty, Michelle Porter’s Inquiries oscillates at its edges, and amplifies the presence of human strength as it keeps company with our enigmatic and ever-present nemeses. This is a startling debut where the line between reality and reality television blurs, where a simple trip to the grocery store unifies mother and daughter in struggle, and where an economics of iniquity proves the existence of love as equality. With wit, poise, raw emotion, and versatility, Inquiries announces the emergence of an impressive new talent.

Insistent Garden, The

By: Rosie Chard

$19.95

Winner of the 2014 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Prizes!
Finalist for Best Book Cover / Jacket Design at the 2014 Alberta Book Design Awards!

Edith Stoker’s father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall–a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black.

It is 1969, and far away, preparations are being made for man to walk upon the moon. Meanwhile, in the Stokers’ shabby home in the East Midlands, Edith remains a virtual prisoner, with occasional visits from her grotesque and demanding Aunt Vivian serving as the only break in the routine.

But when shy, sheltered Edith begins to quietly cultivate a garden in the shadow of her father’s wall, she sets in motion events that might gain her independence… and bring her face to face with the mysterious Edward Black.

Rosie Chard’s followup to her award-winning debut Seal Intestine Raincoat is an engrossing, often mordantly funny portrait of a young woman who miraculously finds her own pathway to freedom within the most stifling of environs.

IsThisAnOlogy?

By: Amanda Dorothy Jean Bulman, Ruth Lawrence

$19.95

IsThisAnOlogy? is a journey of discovery! Andie interviews different “ologists” and learns all about different types of science.

IsThisAnOlogy? explores big jobs, big science, and the biggest questions. Learn about fossils, bird migration, beekeeping, the science behind making food delicious, and the chemistry involved in cheese making. IsThisAnOlogy? features illustrations, interviews, comics, photographs, charts, recipes, and experiments you can try at home. Science can be a fun hands-on activity!

It Is Solved By Walking

By: Catherine Banks

$16.95

When Margaret learns of the death of her former husband, she recalls their earliest days together as Ph.D. candidates, beginning a journey through her past. Told through the sensations of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful sexual memories from before, after and during their marriage. Stevens, a guiding voice in her head for twenty-five years, cajoles Margaret into unearthing the reasons she never became the poet, scholar, wife or mother she thought she would be. Bold and poetic, It is Solved by Walking is an intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.

Joni Mitchell

By: Malka Marom

$32.95

When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom had the opportunity to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she was eager to reconnect with the performer she’d first met late one night in 1966 at a Yorkville coffeehouse. More conversations followed over the next four decades of friendship, and it was only after Joni and Malka completed their most recent recorded interview, in 2012, that Malka discovered the heart of their discussions: the creative process.

In Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, Joni and Malka follow this thread through seven decades of life and art, discussing the influence of Joni’s childhood, love and loss, playing dives and huge festivals, acclaim and criticism, poverty and affluence, glamorous triumphs and tragic mistakes . . .

This riveting narrative, told in interviews, lyrics, paintings, and photographs, is shared in the hope of illuminating a timeless body of work and inspiring others.

Journal

By: Marie Uguay

Journal

Just Beneath My Skin

By: Darren Greer

Kill Me Now

By: Brad Fraser

$17.95

When Joey enters puberty, his father Jake finds himself in a morally ambiguous position. Joey is severely disabled, but he still has the same sexual desires as any seventeen-year-old boy, only he can’t do anything to relieve the tension. Jake is a widower whose life is devoted to his son, but when he suddenly develops a serious medical condition, he becomes the one to rely on the people around him, including his sister Twyla, his friend Robyn, and Joey’s best friend Rowdy. As Jake’s condition worsens, an ethical dilemma troubles the household as everyone is forced to consider the possibility of saying goodbye.

Kimmy and Mike

By: Dave Paddon

$12.95

Dave Paddon and Lily Snowden-Fine team up in this hilarious tall tale about a brother and sister who set out to find some fish for their father?s supper. The fish aren?t biting, so Kimmy and Mike head off to see if they?ll have luck on the other side of the ocean. En route they encounter a hurricane, a giant squid, pirates, a merman, an iceberg and much more. Theirs is a round-the-world adventure with plenty of fun. But it?s still up to their mother to find something for the pot.

Paddon?s playful rhymes resonate with Newfoundland dialect; Snowden-Fine?s illustrations are a marvelous match.

Lac/Athabasca

By: Len Falkenstein

$17.95

Stories are carried like cargo on trains from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast in this cautionary tale of what happens when we’re haunted by the hunger for the ever-greater development and exploitation of natural resources.

A nineteenth-century fur trader and his Métis guide are harrowingly pursued by an unseen monster on the Athabasca River. Two freshwater biologists in present-day Fort McMurray investigate pollution downstream from the oil sands, until one becomes obsessed with his discovery of a centuries-old skeleton. A young man comes to work in the Alberta oil sands, but is driven home after discovering the body of a missing co-worker. The residents of a small town unite in grief after an entirely preventable disaster. Stories intersect and echo, connecting the dots between voraciousness and victimhood, beasts without and beasts within, and ravaged landscapes and ruined souls.

lady in the red dress

By: David Yee

$16.95

The turmoil in Max’s life was set in motion by Sylvia, an elusive figure who enters his life and charges Max with the task of finding Tommy Jade, a Chinese immigrant from the 1920s. Dragged further into the history of the Chinese-Canadian struggle for redress and into the lives of those involved, Max discovers that not only is his life in danger, but also his son’s. A modern-day noir that draws from both Haruki Murakami and Frank Miller, lady in the red dress is a darkly comic story about the skeletons in our closets and the consequences of our inactions told by one of Canada’s most-promising young playwrights.

Lake of Two Mountains

By: Arleen Paré

$20.00

A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory

Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.

flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing in

sky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In”

Browse by Category

All Books in this Collection

Immigrant Blues

In Search of Pure Lust

In Spirit

In the Black

In the Key of Decay

Indian Arm

Indiana Pulcinella

Indigenous Resistance and Development in Winnipeg: 1960-2000

Inquiries

Insistent Garden, The

IsThisAnOlogy?

It Is Solved By Walking

Joni Mitchell

Journal

Just Beneath My Skin

Kill Me Now

Kimmy and Mike

Lac/Athabasca

lady in the red dress

Lake of Two Mountains