Search results for ""Vehicule Press""

All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been, Joe Fiorito’s second collection, establishes him as the preeminent chronicler of people in extremis. Drawing on the precison and unsentimentality that have become hallmarks of his poetry, Fiorito creates uncompromising mini-narratives about addiction, failed rehabs, incarceration, demeaning jobs, and homelessness; much of it derived from nearly two decades spent as a newspaper columnist covering daily life on Toronto’s streets. In poem after poem, Fiorito’s exact word choices, cold-eyed details, and crisp internal rhymes mete out moments both beautiful and harrowing: “her little finger curls a bit/she cut a tendon when she slit/ her wrist; she’d clenched/ her fist.”

Read more less

Eugenie is trying, and mostly failing, to restore an inherited old farm in New Brunswick while her husband, a master carpenter, is away in Spain. The work involved overwhelms her, so she hires Dean to help bring the farm back to working order. The only problem is that Dean is a deserter from the US Army suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and he happens to be living deep in the backwoods of her property, where he's hiding out from immigration officials. To complicate matters further, Eugenie and Dean fall into a relationship, even as he is tormented by flashbacks, nightmares, and flickering memories of his wartime experiences in Iraq. And then Eugenie’s husband returns.

Read more less

Global Poetry Anthology 2017 is a one-of-a-kind collection of contemporary poems, previously unpublished, gathered from all corners of the English-speaking world. The international editorial board ensures the present volume's cosmopolitan palette and the blind selection process guarantees that selections have been made according to poetic caliber alone. VÉhicule Press's Signal Editions is proud to offer the third volume in the Global Poetry Anthology series—a rich and exciting mix of established and emerging voices.

Read more less

A disturbing tale of identity and deception set in 1950s Toronto. That Rafe Jonason’s life didn’t end when he smashed up his car was something of a miracle; on that everyone agreed. However, the devoted husband and pillar of the community emerges from hospital a very different man. Coarse and intolerant, this new Rafe drinks away his days, showing no interest in returning to work. Worst of all, he doesn’t appear to recognize or so much as remember his loving wife Julie. Tension and suspicion within the couple’s Rosedale mansion grow after it is learned that Rafe wasn’t alone in the car that night. Is it that Julie never truly knew her husband? Or might it be that this man isn’t Rafe Jonason at all? Originally published in 1956 by Doubleday, The Keys of My Prison is one of several suspense novels Wees set in Toronto. This Ricochet Books edition marks its return to print after fifty years.

Read more less

For decades, the Inuit of northern Québec were among the most neglected people in Canada. It took The Battle of James Bay, 1971-1975, for the governments in Québec City and Ottawa to wake up to the disgrace.In this concise, lively account, Zebedee Nungak relates the inside story of how the young Inuit and Cree “Davids” took action when Québec began construction on the giant James Bay hydro project. They fought in court and at the negotiation table for an accord that effectively became Canada’s first land-claims agreement. Nungak’s account is accompanied by his essays on Nunavik history. Together they provide a fascinating insight into a virtually unknown chapter of Canadian history.

Read more less

In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? “I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, “while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.

Read more less

Documenting the development of Montreal’s Jewish community from the 1880s until 1945, this investigation meticulously draws from historic city maps and directories, authentic photographs, brittle newspaper articles, and long-forgotten anniversary publications to track the locations of the city’s early synagogues. The result is a fascinating story that describes and defines the social, religious, and economic aspects of a distinct group of people through the architectural traces of its culture. The decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century are explored, chronicling the Eastern European Jews’ mass migration as they fled poverty and persecution, escaping into the refuge of the famed Canadian city. Depicting the people’s determination to retain their familiar traditions and familial connections, this record shows how their beautiful places of worship also became havens where they could meet, exchange concerns, lend support, and resolve to help those left behind.

Read more less

The first in an intriguing new series of vintage mysteries, this gritty detective tale, originally published in 1951, centers on hard-drinking, hard-working private sleuth Russell Teed. When the biggest bootlegger the city has ever known, John Sark, is murdered, Detective Sergeant Framboise is convinced Sark’s widow is the killer. Knowing there was another former Mrs. Sark with an even better motive, Teed sets out to keep the gorgeous Inez Sark out of jail and find the real culprit. Chasing clues from east to west, Russell does whatever he can to find justice, including shooting up a couple of characters and busting up a drug ring in order to expose the victim’s private life.

Read more less

This is the sequel to My Messy Bedroom: Love and Sex in the 90s . From foreplay to afterplay, "Josey Vogels" satisfies our hunger for information about sex and relationships. Her column, "My Messy Bedroom," is syndicated in several magazines across Canada.

Read more less

Collecting the works of 50 modern Canadian poets, this anthology of verse points to an emerging openness toward form in the nation's poetry. The book includes nearly 200 poems from more than 20 presses and an essay that describes and explains the innovations of form that distinguish the featured writers.

Read more less

Providing day-by-day instructions for novice winemakers, this guide takes the guesswork out of using kits and concentrates for producing high-quality wine at home. Covering everything the hobbyist vintner needs to know about the winemaking process, this informative handbook discusses the different kinds of winemaking kits that are on the market, presents solutions to the most common problems experienced by kit winemakers with tips on how to avoid these pitfalls, and includes a glossary that demystifies winemaking lingo.

Read more less

Infinity Network completes Jim Johnstone’s ambitious trilogy which began with Dog Ear (2014) and continued with The Chemical Life (2017). Central to each volume is the struggle with identity at a time of great social change. Justifiably acclaimed for his exquisite rendering of acute states of mind, Johnstone explores pressing questions about the ubiquity of surveillance and social media, and evokes, with a powerful intelligence, the neurosis of living in a consumerism-obsessed era. Infinity Network not only attempts to capture the changing ideas of personhood, but also tries to create a new kind of verse to track it—a complex, bold, stark style able to give uncanny interiority to our digital dreads. As our lives descend further into disinformation and algorithmic control, Johnstone has emerged as the laureate of, in Keats’s words, truth “proved upon our pulses.”

Read more less

Letters From Montreal documents the experiences of Montrealers past and present, creating a portrait of the storied city unlike any other. Drawn from the celebrated column in Maisonneuve magazine, this anthology features writers documenting a quintessential part of local life. Narrated with the intimacy of journal entries, each letter bridges the playful and profound. In early dispatches, Melissa Bull ditches a boyfriend over pÉtanque in Parc Laurier; Sean Michaels watches Arcade Fire lose Battle of the Bands; Deborah Ostrovsky frets over the sublime sophistication of the Plateau’s French children. More recently, Ziya Jones spends a summer herding sheep through Parc du PÉlican; Eva Crocker performs in a “fake orgasm choir” at the Rialto Theatre; and AndrÉ Picard takes a pause from the pandemic by running up Mount Royal. Edited by Maisonneuve editor in chief Madi Haslam, these letters buzz with a sense of possibility, surprise, and transformation. They remind us that a city can’t quite be defined, that every person inside it interprets it anew. Together, they explore how we make meaning in the place we call home—how our surroundings shape us, and how we shape them in return.

Read more less

In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of our true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, "Africadian" community whose last home was razed in 1970. For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

Read more less

A fusion of biography and history, art and politics, told through the lives branching off one family tree.In Fear the Mirror, Cora SirÉ brings together thirteen stories of moments that have marked the dark intersections within her own history. A feminist mother who fled Estonia. A father who arrived in Canada with nothing but a violin. A Catalan boy whose parent is dying. A love triangle among novelists. Bodies stolen in the night and never found. Blending essay, memoir, and fiction, the MontrÉal author draws on her encounters in Latin America and elsewhere to compose loving and conflicted portraits—of family members, writers, filmmakers, and gravediggers—culminating in the persistent legacies and strange alchemies that haunt the person she sees in the mirror. In this masterful fifth book, SirÉ has written her most urgent, beguiling, and personal work to date.

Read more less

The year Paul turns forty, his friends Wendy and Eve ask him to help them get pregnant. Nothing about the process feels natural to him. But for a gay man of a certain age, making a family still means finding your own way through a world with few ready answers. The eighteen-month journey reveals many insights about Paul’s past and present, from his strained relationship to his father, to his overprotective relationship with his partner Michael, and the many friends around him whom he considers his family.

Read more less

Alongside tales of love, friends and mentors, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection—his first in eight years—explores how being gay rewrites and expands one’s sense of lineage, both inherited and chosen. A book of penetrating self-awareness and humility, marked by powerful image-making, Lost Family: A Memoir is a profound test of poetry’s ability to give coherence to life. It is also a celebration of the sonnet form, that finely made reliquary that permits memory to take shape.

Read more less

The 365 entries reflect such momentous events as the 1970 FLQ crisis and fads like Cabbage Patch Kids and the lambada craze. The striking photographs are drawn from the archives of the Montreal Gazette, one of North America’s longest-publishing daily newspapers. They include iconic images from the Gazette as well as some photographs from the Montreal Herald, the Montreal Star, and the Standard. While the photographs are the focus of this volume, the texts that accompany them tell the story of one of North America’s most fascinating and news-intensive cities. History Through Our Eyes was launched as a daily feature in the Gazette at the beginning of 2019. It quickly became a reader favorite, and remains one of the popular initiatives introduced at that newspaper in the last 40 years.

Read more less

Maxwell Dent studied law at McGill and served in the RCAF and Intelligence M-5 during the Korean War. For a private investigator, he’s as respectable as they come. No wonder then he's summoned to Huntley Ashton's Westmount mansion. A respected captain of industry, the wealthy man knows the PI can be relied upon to be discreet. Ashton’s daughter Helen has fallen into heroin addiction, and the millionaire wants Dent to smash the ring supplying her vice, just as he took down a ring operating in Korea. Set in 1954, the novel captures the dying days of the era in which Montreal had the reputation as one of the world’s great sin cities. The Damned and the Destroyed was originally published in 1962 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Dennis Dobson in the UK; this Ricochet Books edition marks the first print edition in more than five decades.

Read more less

People don’t leave the Point, even if they move far away. Or at least that’s how it seems to journalist Kathy Dobson. Growing up in the 1970s in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal, she sees how people get trapped in the neighborhood. In this sequel to the highly praised With a Closed Fist, Dobson shares her journey of trying to escape from what was once described as the toughest neighborhood in Canada. Kathy and her five sisters, raised by their single mother, deal with slum landlords, “pervy uncles,” and their father—a mostly absent police officer who does occasional work on the side for the local mob. As Kathy grows up and starts attending college outside the Point, she has to learn how to survive in a new environment where problems aren’t solved by a good punch to the head.

Read more less

A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Translating Nelligan’s “essential” poems, along with a sharp introduction contextualizing his legacy as one of the “first poets to write openly about suicide, neurosis, and psychological breakdown,” Marc di Saverio has given us a rivetingly fresh version of Nelligan for a new generation.

Read more less

This is the latest updated book from "Canada’s housing guru" about how design affects our daily livesThis illuminating collection of 22 essays expounds upon the points where design touches life. The essays discuss the big and small things that make us appreciate, or become disconnected from, our homes and neighborhoods. Drawing on his experiences as an architect, planner, world traveler, and educator, Avi Friedman delves into issues such as the North American obsession with monster homes, the impact of scale on the feeling of comfort in our communities, environmental concerns such as deforestation, innovative recycling methods in building materials, the booming do-it-yourself industry, the decline of craftsmanship, and the role of good design in bringing families together. Written with Friedman’s trademark flair, A View from the Porch offers a compelling vision of the influence of design in our everyday lives from one of the world’s most innovative thinkers. With new material, this is a completely revised edition of Room for Thought, originally published in 2005.

Read more less

Set in Montreal, New Tab spans a year in the life of a 26-year-old video game designer as he attempts to reset his life. Touching on modern social anxieties, the novel explores our obsession with social media while chronicling with humor his thoughts on Facebook chats, Concordia University, bilingualism, good parties, bad parties, a backyard cinema, running a possibly illegal DIY venue, and the disillusion, boredom, self-destruction of daily life. Written in a simple yet bold and astonishing style, New Tab is a profoundly intimate tale of self-reinvention and ambiguous relationships.

Read more less

A hard-boiled detective mystery originally published in 1952, this novel follows the adventures and investigations of hard-drinking, seasoned private detective Russell Teed through the streets of Montreal and New York City. When a gorgeous redhead with lovely green eyes offers a wad of cash and a plane ticket to Montreal to help in an investigation, Russell takes the case. It isn’t long, however, before a run in with a razor blade, a slug in his shoulder, and the knowledge that three tough customers gunning for him all make Russell rue his decision. This fast-paced plot from a master of pulp fiction makes for an ideal read for mystery fans.

Read more less

With 60 restaurants featured, this handbook to Montreal restaurants provides a complete guide to locales where food lovers of all types can bring their own potables. From French and African foods to South American and Greek cuisine, this compendium reflects the diversity and quality of a city where good food is respected—and expected—and proves indispensable for budget-minded natives and visitors alike.

Read more less

Whether on a third-floor balcony or a back deck, to produce food or decoration, this handbook makes container gardening easy. Penned by a notable expert in the field, it explains the differences between container and ground-level gardening in detail and offers solutions to common problems. Based solely on organic principles and techniques, this unique reference is suitable for all levels of gardening expertise.

Read more less

Acknowledging how today’s wine sales and consumption are far outpacing those of beer and spirits, this examination addresses questions commonly asked by the novice and experienced oenophile alike. Using short anecdotes with a dash of humor to present intriguing facts about wine, this consideration also debunks many popular myths such as why one shouldn’t disturb fermenting wine during a full moon and the popular causes for headaches after partaking in red wine. Authoritative and entertaining, this guide covers winemaking, wine service, styles, faults, frauds, and even the “wine-speak” of the art’s scientific terminology. Recognizing that wine drinkers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and knowledgeable, this study also evaluates the beverage's impact on health, making it a must-have for all connoisseurs.

Read more less

Blackmail and murder in Old Quebec!Quebec City crime reporter Mary Roberts is about to leave her desk for the day when she receives word that a woman has been struck down in the centre of town. The victim is Renée Brancourt. A former pin-up, she'd once been a big star, treading the boards at the Coméie-Française, until her lover, Robert Marchand, plunged over Montmorency Falls. René e's inability to accept his death led her to be institutionalized. Now on her deathbed at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, the faded vedette tells Mary that Robert's death was no accident. She points an accusing finger at Albert Frédéric, the most respected lawyer in the city, thus setting the young reporter on a trail that will ultimately imperil her own life.Whispering City began as a 1947 Canadian feature shot in both English and French (La Forteresse). Predating Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess by six years, it is the earliest film noir set in Canada. In his novelization, Horace Brown improves upon the

Read more less