Search results for ""House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada""

Winner, 2019 Taste Canada Award — Single-Subject Cookbooks, SilverAn Eat Northi Best Cookbook of the YearA Now Magazine Best Cookbook of the YearEverything you’ve ever wanted to know about seafood — what to look for at the fish counter, how to ensure what you’re buying has been responsibly farmed, and what to do with it when you get it home — by one of the food industry’s most-beloved and respected authorities on all things fish.John Bil, one of the food industry’s most beloved and respected authorities on all things fish, gives seafood lovers the knowledge and confidence they need to make smart decisions about the fish they consume. Why does halibut cost what it does? Were those wild spot prawns responsibly sourced? How do you clean a squid? And what’s the best way to prepare those live cherrystone clams when you get them home? Ship to Shore: Straight Talk from the Seafood Counter features over fifty delicious recipes accompanied by elegant, full-colour photography that will have you lining up at your local fish counter.

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Brilliant and still-timely analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life from Canada’s most influential philosophers, reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Potter.Originally published in 1969, Technology and Empire offers a brilliant analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life. The author of Lament for a Nation, George Grant has been recognized as one of Canada’s most significant thinkers. In this sweeping essay collection, he reflects on the extent to which technology has shaped our modern culture.

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The twenty-first semi-annual Munk Debate pits award-winning journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr. and influential author and blogger Andrew Sullivan against former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and bestselling author and editor Kimberley Strassel to debate the current crisis of American democracy.“Our country is now as close to crossing the line from democracy to autocracy as it has been in our lifetimes.” — E. J. Dionne, Jr.It is the public debate of the moment: is Donald Trump precipitating a crisis of American democracy? For some the answer is an emphatic “yes.” Trump’s disregard for the institutions and political norms of U.S. democracy is imperiling the Republic. The sooner his presidency collapses the sooner the healing can begin and the ship of state righted. For others Trump is not the villain in this drama. Rather, his young presidency is the conduit, not the cause, of Americans’ deep-seated anger towards a privileged and self-dealing Washington elite. Trump’s disruption of politics as usual is what America needs to start the process of restoring democracy by the people, for the people.

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The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition.Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled.Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first.This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

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From the bestselling author of Firewater comes a moving tribute to an older brother that traverses the thresholds of memoir, fiction, and fantasy and reimagines what could have been.When Harold Johnson returns to his childhood home in a northern Indigenous community for his brother Clifford’s funeral, the first thing his eyes fall on is a chair. It stands on three legs, the fourth broken off and missing. So begins a journey through the past, a retrieval of recollections of his silent, powerful Swedish father; his formidable Cree mother; and his brother Clifford, a precocious young boy who is drawn to the mysterious workings of the universe. As the night unfolds, memories of Clifford surface in Harold’s mind’s eye. Memory, fiction, and fantasy collide, and Clifford comes to life as the scientist he was meant to be, culminating in his discovery of the Grand Unified Theory.Exquisitely crafted, funny, visionary, and wholly moving, Clifford is an extraordinary work that embraces myriad forms of storytelling. To read it is to be immersed in a home, a family, a community, the wider world, the entire cosmos.

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In this exceptional collection of original essays, twenty-five celebrated writers share one of their most intimate and life-changing experiences: giving birth. Moving, uniquely honest, and transformative, Great Expectations takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey like no other: Lynn Coady relates the painful memory of her teenage pregnancy and the anguish of having to give up her newborn for adoption; Peter Behrens expresses a father’s feeling of utter helplessness and incomparable joy during the birth of his first child; Christy Ann Conlin describes pregnancy and birth at age forty; Afua Cooper reflects upon the immigrant’s experience of three pregnancies and childbirths in a new land with foreign, and evolving, customs; Anne Fleming contemplates her partner’s artificial insemination and the birth of a beautiful girl; and Jaclyn Moriarty transcribes her grandmother’s and her mother’s birth stories, along with her own, to create a tender oral history spanning three generations.

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The new collection from Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction. The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure’s late father — accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”

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From Christy Ann Conlin, the critically acclaimed and award winning author of Heave, comes a breathtaking and unforgettable collection about how the briefest moment can shape us forever.In these evocative and startling stories, we meet people navigating the elemental forces of love, life, and death. An insomniac on Halifax’s moonlit streets. A runaway bride. A young woman accused of a brutal murder. A man who must live in exile if he is to live at all. A woman coming to terms with her eccentric childhood in a cult on the Bay of Fundy shore. A master of North Atlantic Gothic, Christy Ann Conlin expertly navigates our conflicting self-perceptions, especially in moments of crisis. She illuminates the personality of land and ocean, charts the pull of the past on the present, and reveals the wildness inside each of us. These stories offer a gallery of both gritty and lyrical portraits, each unmasking the myth and mystery of the everyday.

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In the third suspense-filled instalment of the critically acclaimed MacNeice Mysteries, Detective Superintendent MacNeice finds himself in the line of fire when two seemingly random acts of violence lead him deep into Dundurn’s seedy underbelly.On a cold morning in early spring, the body of a young woman is found trapped in the ice of Dundurn Bay. The next day at dawn, a homeless man discovers a school teacher in a public park. Gagged and bound with duct tape, the man is rigged to an elaborate grenade that’s been set to blow if anyone attempts to free him.Detective Superintendent MacNeice and his team are called in to investigate the two seemingly unrelated crimes, and quickly find themselves venturing into the dive bars and rooming houses of Dundurn, where Irish immigrants rub elbows with mercenaries and the city’s criminal underclass….

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From Dr. David Posen, the bestselling author of Is Work Killing You? and The Little Book of Stress Relief, comes a book about listening to your body, understanding your mind, and making better choices in your life.For over thirty years, Dr. David Posen has counselled patients suffering from severe stress, anxiety, and depression. Over that time, he noticed a pattern. As our lives have become faster and increasingly fragmented, many of us have become disconnected from our true selves. Using a holistic approach that combines elements of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, Authenticity teaches readers to acknowledge and accept their true selves in order to make better and more informed life choices. Drawing on real-life examples from his experience in stress management, Dr. Posen has identified five common sources of conflict: personality traits, time and speed, sleep, values, and passions. For each of these areas, the solution is surprisingly simple. We must learn to live in a way that is authentic and true to our unique selves; we must live in harmony with who we truly are.

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Staking Claims to a Continent is a highly readable examination of how Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Sir John A. Macdonald took part in a daring game of nation building that has impacted the global order to the present day.Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. John A. Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in January 1815. All were Protestants; none came from a wealthy family. In an earlier era, such men would not have risen to political heights. They personified an age of social and economic transformation, thrust to the top by the very forces that tore the continent apart.Davis tried to create a country by ripping the South out of the United States and establishing the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Lincoln’s crusade to save the Union honed the industrial-military power that would one day dominate the world. Macdonald led the drive to shepherd the diverse British North American provinces into a federal state that would secure the northern half of the continent and keep Canada out of American hands.In a high stakes game, these three national projects competed to create viable nation states. And the success or failure of the projects would have consequences — not only for the long-term future of the continent but also for the entire global order.

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From the author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed graphic memoir In-Between Days comes a splendid new colouring book of original new illustrations with a few choice words of hope that will inspire and delight.When Teva Harrison was first diagnosed with cancer, she felt lost, cast adrift. In order to pull herself out of depression, to draw herself forward, she started to draw. In the beginning, the drawings were tiny wildflowers photographed on her travels. Something about that act of looking, drawing the edges until flowers emerged, focusing on something so short-lived, resilient, and beautiful changed the nature of her days. It let the joy back in. This colouring book is an expansion on that germ of hope. Having cancer has made the world feel especially precious to Harrison, and she finds magic and delight everywhere: symbol-enriched heraldry, animals and birds, everyday objects that give her pleasure, foliage and flowers, and a few choice words of inspiration and hope.

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Originally published in 1967, Dave Godfrey’s debut collection features stories about hunting — in Florida, in Africa, and in northern Ontario. They are about the interplay of gun and subway, decoy and stock market, guide and draft dodger. But they are more than just stories about hunting. Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola is a powerful example of the idiosyncratic imagination of a writer who broke new ground in fiction. It is a seminal collection by one of Canada’s most influential literary figures and it is a must-read for those who want to understand Canada’s literary landscape, past and present.

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For half a century, the Canadian travel company Butterfield & Robinson has been turning travellers onto the joy of experiencing the world by bicycle and on foot. Slowing Down to See the World celebrates B & R’s fiftieth anniversary with a stunning, fully-illustrated chronology of their remarkable entrepreneurial journey. Spurred by creativity and fueled by fun, this is the story of visionary leaders who bucked the traditional focus on the bottom line, and pursued an unwavering (and at times unusual) commitment to trip quality and traveller satisfaction. In the course of simply doing their own thing, Butterfield & Robinson pioneered luxury active travel, established an internationally recognized brand, and brought scores of people into their community. For the initiated, Slowing Down to See the World is a ride down memory lane. For the uninitiated, it’s a primer on how to live a good life. And for everyone, it’s a reminder that work doesn’t really feel like work when you’re surrounded by inspiring and energetic people.

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What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal?With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

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Governor General's Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in his astonishing collection Patient Frame. From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure, these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. Heighton's work has long shown a resolve to achieve some viable rapprochement between the mind's cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body. Dynamic, vigorous, tender poems as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. Patient Frame brings together more of Heighton's vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.

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Atonement is Sheila Fischman's translation of Gaetan Soucy's brilliant novel, originally published in French as L'Acquittement. Twenty years after leaving the tiny village of Saint Aldor, Louis Bapaume has come home to make amends. During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underway, he meets old villagers, forgotten neighbours, and characters who are either imagined or real. But there's only one person he seeks: the von Croft twin he taught to read music and to whom he wants to atone. Soucy creates a world where nothing is left to chance and the line between dream and reality is always shifting.

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The fourteenth semi-annual Munk Debate, which will be held in Toronto on November 5, 2014, pits Bret Stephens and Robert Kagan against Fareed Zakaria and Anne-Marie Slaughter to debate the legacy of President Obama.From Ukraine to the Middle East to China, the United States is redefining its role in international affairs. Alliance building, public diplomacy, and eschewing traditional warfare in favour of the focused use of hard power such as drones and special forces are all hallmarks of the so-called Obama Doctrine. Is this a farsighted foreign policy for the United States and the world in the twenty-first century — one that acknowledges and embraces the increasing diffusion of power among states and non-state actors? Or, is an America “leading from behind” a boon for the nations and blocs who want to roll back economic globalization, international law, and the spread of democracy and human rights?In this edition of the Munk Debates, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bret Stephens and famed historian and foreign policy commentator Robert Kagan square off against CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and noted academic and political commentator Anne-Marie Slaughter to debate the legacy of President Obama. With ISIS looking to reshape the Middle East, Russia increasingly at odds with the rest of the West, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a standstill, the Munk Debate on Foreign Policy asks: Has Obama’s foreign policy taken the U.S. in the right direction?

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Yugoslavia, 1991. The State is crumbling, and in the midst of the political chaos secret policeman Marko della Torre has been working both sides of the law — but somewhere along the way he's crossed the line. When a corrupt cop called Strumbic helps three hired Bosnian thugs to hunt him down and kill him, della Torre makes a run for it through Croatia, Italy, and finally to London, where he’ll take Strumbic for all he's worth. A page-turning thriller shot through with black humour and razor-sharp dialogue, Zagreb Cowboy is the spectacular debut novel in a taut new crime fiction series.

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I am made of centuries & carbohydrates the development of my molars the hunger the teeth grew has been with me since childhood I can’t escape the mouths of others Brandi Bird’s long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird’s work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the “I” of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don’t speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird’s poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages—specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis—and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.

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Moving, insightful, linked stories about the determination of Somali immigrants — despite duty, discrimination, and an ever-dissolving link to a war-torn homeland. In the insular rooms of The Private Apartments, a cleaning lady marries her employer’s nephew and then abandons him, a depressed young mother finds unlikely support in her community housing complex, a new bride attends weddings to escape her abusive marriage, and a failed nurse is sent to relatives in Dubai after a nervous breakdown. These captivating and compassionate stories eloquently showcase the intricate linkages of human experience and the ways in which Somalis, even as a diaspora, are indelibly connected.

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A stylish and inspiring guide to living a happier life in balance with the natural world Minimal offers readers inspiration and tools to embrace simple living and create meaningful, lasting change in their lives. From advice on home decorating and decluttering, and easy-to-follow recipes for making your own cosmetics and cleaning products, to tips for shopping sustainably, composting, and restoring old furniture, Minimal provides a host of small but powerful ways to live a more balanced life while being good to the planet.

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Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life. Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020. Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.

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Available for the first time in over thirty years, John Krizanc’s internationally acclaimed play redefined the limits of theatre with its haunting tale of art, sex, violence, and political intrigue in Fascist Italy. In the late twenties the poet, war hero, and lothario Gabriele d’Annunzio waits in his opulent villa — a gift from Benito Mussolini in return for his political silence — for the arrival of the artist Tamara de Lempicka, who is to paint his portrait. What follows is a tale of art, sex, violence and the meaning of complicity in an authoritarian state. The action is directed by the reader/audience member, who decides which characters to follow and which narratives to experience. John Krizanc’s masterpiece redefined theatre and won six L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards, six Dora Mavor Moore Awards, six Drama-Logue Awards, and six Mexican Association of Theatre Critics, and Journalists Awards for its original productions. Now available in a handsome new A List edition, Tamara is an astonishing piece of experimental art and a penetrating look into ethical choices in times of encroaching autocracy.

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A groundbreaking, insightful book about women and power from award-winning journalist Lauren McKeon, which shows how women are disrupting the standard (very male) vision of power, ditching convention, and building a more equitable world for everyone. In the age of girl bosses, Beyoncé, and Black Widow, we like to tell our little girls they can be anything they want when they grow up, except they’ll have to work twice as hard, be told to “play nice,” and face countless double standards that curb their personal, political, and economic power. Women today remain a surprisingly, depressingly long way from gender and racial equality. It’s worth asking: Why do we keep playing a game we were never meant to win?Award-winning journalist and author of F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Lauren McKeon examines the many ways in which our institutions are designed to keep women and other marginalized genders at a disadvantage. In doing so, she reveals why we need more than parity, visible diversity, and lone female CEOs to change this power game. She talks to people doing power differently in a variety of sectors and uncovers new models of power. And as the toxic, divisive, and hyper-masculine style of leadership gains ground, she underscores why it’s time to stop playing by the rules of a rigged game.

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Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation. A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost. Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear. All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.

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Reissued for the first time in a handsome A List edition, the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning collection from one of Canada’s most profoundly inventive and eminent poets, featuring an introduction by award-winning poet Sonnet L’Abbé.The poetry in the Governor General’s Award–winning collection Furious is charged with Erin Moure’s characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, “The Acts,” Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry.

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In the most explosive novel in the Ava Lee series to date, Ava partners with a CIA agent to investigate a college on a Philippine island that is suspected of training terrorists — what she discovers is brutal and shocking. Ava has spent two nights luxuriating in a hotel in Yunnan Province with the actress Pang Fai, with whom she has begun a secret relationship. She receives an urgent phone call from Chang Wang, the right hand to the billionaire Tommy Ordonez and one of Uncle’s oldest friends. Chang asks Ava to fly to Manila to meet with his friend, Senator Miguel Ramirez. Ramirez asks Ava to investigate a college in Tawi-Tawi, an island province in the Philippines, which he suspects is training terrorists. Ava’s investigation leads to a partnership with a CIA agent, and together they attempt to stop an international plot so horrific in size and that Ava’s judgement and morals are tested like never before.

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The groundbreaking and multiple award-winning national bestseller work about systemic racism, education, the failure of the policing and justice systems, and Indigenous rights by Tanya Talaga.Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning author Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.

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Winner, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction AwardWinner, Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short FictionLonglisted, Scotiabank Giller Prize“Lisa Moore’s work is passionate, gritty, lucid, and beautiful. She has a great gift.” — Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The GatheringInternationally celebrated as one of literature’s most gifted stylists, Lisa Moore returns with her second story collection, a soaring chorus of voices, dreams, loves, and lives. Taking us from the Fjord of Eternity to the streets of St. John’s and the swamps of Orlando, these stories show us the timeless, the tragic, and the miraculous hidden in the underbelly of our everyday lives. A missing rock god may have jumped a cruise ship — in the Arctic. A grieving young woman may live next to a serial rapist. A man’s last day on Earth replays in the minds of others in a furiously sensual, heartrending fugue. Something for Everyone is Moore at the peak of her prowess — she seems bent on nothing less than rewiring the circuitry of the short story itself.

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To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought. Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a society of appetite flirting with self-destruction. Many voices act as vigilant witness to our urban wastes and wastefulness. Moritz's unmistakable cadences -- magisterial, philosophical, and funny -- mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke as he extends his already prestigious and singular poetic project.

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First published in 1972, Columbus and the Fat Lady introduced readers to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Matt Cohen’s skewed and hilarious worldview. By turns funny, surreal, wistful, savagely satirical, and brilliantly inventive, the stories in this collection intrigue and surprise the reader with their unexpected language and plots. He conjures up images that are both absurd and perceptive. From Sir Galahad as a schoolteacher to Christopher Columbus as a carnival attraction, these stories feature the improbable with strength and virtuosity. This collection is a foray into the jungles of life on this planet and the tangled but fascinating interiors of the human head.

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With a dozen original songs percolating in his head, bestselling author Eric Siblin had two chance encounters in the same month: one with a real estate agent named Jo, a talented singer with pop star dreams; and the other with a college acquaintance named Morey, a fiery guitarist, record exec turned digital music producer, and manager of his teenage daughter’s burgeoning singing career. These two serendipitous events mark the start of a musical odyssey.In Studio Grace, Eric Siblin chronicles the twelve-month realization of a long-held dream: recording an album of original material. To get there he plunges into the joyful and painful heart of songcraft, grappling with elusive verses and choruses until they are ready for recording. Siblin’s songs are captured in three very different studios reflecting the evolution of sound recording: a tiny basement studio run by a wedding band drummer; the famed Hotel2Tango analogue studio, where a former producer of Arcade Fire connects Siblin with hipster musicians; and the mansion attic where his new friend Morey creates songs on a laptop using the latest in digital technology and the global distribution network that is YouTube.Published to coincide with the release of the album of the same name, Studio Grace is an entertaining and demystifying behind-the-scenes look at the making of a record filled with songs about love gained and love lost, about modern identity theft and ancient battlegrounds, about life and death, fleshed out by a host of eclectic characters, from ambitious young singers to veteran session musicians and unknown engineers to high-profile producers — all of whom are pursuing the multi-layered dream of a four-minute pop song.

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Elise Partridge’s The Exiles’ Gallery extends the range of her widely acclaimed earlier books, Fielder’s Choice and Chameleon Hours, praised as “first-rate” (James Pollock) for their “authenticity” (Stephanie Bolster) and “brilliant precisions that reflect life’s plenitude” (Rosanna Warren).Widely praised for her engagement and her attention to craft, Elise Partridge’s The Exiles’ Gallery confirms her standing as one of the most thoughtful, authentic voices in contemporary poetry. The poems in her third collection continue to explore what she has called “implicit questions about fullness of life or lives somehow thwarted, diminished, ended too early.” Through formal technique, painterly detail or her signature compressed directness, Partridge’s poems explore the past, present and future with compassion and grief, bearing witness to our not-so-still, all-too-brief lives.Above all, The Exiles’ Gallery is a book of celebration. In these restless, nimble, and complex poems of apprehension — whether by a candid glance backward at childhood or through tributes to friends — Partridge’s arresting images and diction give shape to the complexity and abundance of experience, made more luminous and gilt-edged by the corridor of encroaching shadows. Dispossessed but defiant, these are songs of preservation and love.

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Based on the solo show by critically acclaimed playwright and actor Ins Choi, Subway Stations of the Cross is a journey of an ancient faith in today’s restless world. Inspired by a real-life encounter with a homeless man, award-winning playwright Ins Choi (Kim’s Convenience) has originated an astounding work of artistry and imagination in these fourteen spoken-word poems and songs that make up Subway Stations of the Cross. Part public disturbance, part performance artist, and part modern-day prophet, Ins Choi embodies the form of a nameless vagabond who is both beggar and seer. He creates a rich tapestry of the profane and the sacred, the humorous and the banal, the contemptuous and the poignant in both poetry and lyric. It is a holy communion for the urban soul. This relevant and challenging show is captured here in book form with illustrations of subway drawings by Guno Park, whose work has been featured internationally.

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Does government surveillance make us safer? The thirteenth Munk Debate, held in Toronto on Friday, May 2, 2014, pitted Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz against Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian to debate whether state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedom — the democratic issue of the moment.In a risk-filled world, democracies are increasingly turning to large-scale state surveillance, at home and abroad, to fight complex and unconventional threats — but is it justified? For some, the threats more than justify the current surveillance system, and the laws and institutions of democracies are more than capable of balancing the needs of individual privacy with collective security. But for others, we are in peril of sacrificing to a vast and unaccountable state surveillance apparatus the civil liberties that guarantee citizens’ basic freedoms and our democratic way of life.In this edition of the Munk Debates, former head of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden and civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz square off against journalist Glenn Greenwald and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to debate the legitimacy of state surveillance. With issues of Internet privacy increasingly gaining prominence, the Munk Debate on the Surveillance State asks: Should government be able to monitor our activities in order to keep us safe?

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Staking Claims to a Continent is a highly readable examination of how Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Sir John A. Macdonald took part in a daring game of nation building that has impacted the global order to the present day.Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. John A. Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in January 1815. All were Protestants; none came from a wealthy family. In an earlier era, such men would not have risen to political heights. They personified an age of social and economic transformation, thrust to the top by the very forces that tore the continent apart.Davis tried to create a country by ripping the South out of the United States and establishing the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Lincoln’s crusade to save the Union honed the industrial-military power that would one day dominate the world. Macdonald led the drive to shepherd the diverse British North American provinces into a federal state that would secure the northern half of the continent and keep Canada out of American hands.In a high stakes game, these three national projects competed to create viable nation states. And the success or failure of the projects would have consequences — not only for the long-term future of the continent but also for the entire global order.

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A delicately rendered memoir on motherhood, family, and the beauty of the natural world.In fall 2007, Lynn Thomson experiences a huge life shift. Her teenage son, Yeats, is just beginning high school. Yeats has always struggled against the system, against the pressure to conform. He is a poet at heart: acutely sensitive, highly intelligent, and solitary by nature. Lynn and Yeats have always been close, but after fourteen years as a stay-at-home mom Lynn is going back to work for her husband, Ben, who has just opened his own bookstore.When Lynn and Yeats take a trip to Vancouver Island, they discover a mutual love of bird watching. Lynn is the only other person Yeats has found who loves nature and watching birds. Plus, she has a car. Lynn describes in wondrous detail the many trips she and Yeats take, from the Wye Marsh and Pelee Island in Ontario, to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, to an ill-fated trip to the Galapagos Islands. The two grow closer with each bird-watching expedition. At the same time, Lynn notices that her son is beginning to pull away — and she must learn to let go.Birding with Yeats is a delicate, sensitive, and gentle reflection on the unique bond between a mother and son, and the magic that is the natural world.

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The brilliant new collection from Michael Crummey, bestselling author of Galore. Michael Crummey’s first collection in a decade has something for everyone: Love and marriage and airport grief; how not to get laid in a Newfoundland mining town; total immersion baptism; the grand machinery of decay; migrant music and invisible crowns and mortifying engagements with babysitters; the transcendent properties of home brew. Whether charting the merciless complications of childhood, or the unpredictable consolations of middle age, these are poems of magic and ruin. Under the Keel affirms Crummey’s place as one of our necessary writers.

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Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Poetry and the League of Canadian Poets: Raymond Souster Award The follow up to The Sentinel, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, A. F. Moritz's The New Measures is a bold collection of fiery, passionate, visionary, and fiercely singing new work. These poems make unique music, by turns tender and forceful, terrified and assured, grateful and enraged. They revel in pleasure, and the thirst for more pleasure. And they insist on the hope -- perhaps paradoxical, perhaps impossible, yet never extinguished -- for the perfection of a world both natural and human. The New Measures makes fear and grief into prophecy and joy at each turn of phrase. It is a brilliant new work from one of our greatest poets.

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Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award in the Translation Category A Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean’s great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community. Kukum recounts the story of Almanda Siméon, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle, who falls in love with a young Innu man despite their cultural differences and goes on to share her life with the Pekuakami Innu community. They accept her as one of their own: Almanda learns their language, how to live a nomadic existence, and begins to break down the barriers imposed on Indigenous women. Unfolding over the course of a century, the novel details the end of traditional ways of life for the Innu, as Almanda and her family face the loss of their land and confinement to reserves, and the enduring violence of residential schools. Kukum intimately expresses the importance of Innu ancestral values and the need for freedom nomadic peoples feel to this day.

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Ava Lee clashes with the most powerful family in Malaysian Borneo in this exhilarating new thriller from bestselling author Ian Hamilton. After a warehouse owned by the Three Sisters is destroyed under suspicious circumstances, Ava Lee travels to the Malaysian province of Sarawak to investigate. She quickly discovers that the powerful Chong family has a political and economic stranglehold on the province and is likely responsible for the warehouse. As Ava digs deeper into the Chongs, she is shocked to learn of their billion-dollar illegal logging operation in Sarawak, which has decimated the Bornean rainforest and threatens the existence of the Penan — a nomadic Indigenous people who have lived in the region for centuries. Determined to avenge the harm caused by the Chongs and to put an end to their dominion over Sarawak, Ava follows a money trail that leads back to the Hong Kong real estate market. There, Ava and Sonny Kwok embark on a campaign of terror against the Chong family — attacking their holdings and bank accounts. Can Ava attain the vengeance she seeks? Or will the powerful Chong family triumph once again?

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Bestselling author of Autopsy of a Boring Wife Marie-Renée Lavoie is a master of making us fall in love with her characters. She does it again with the tender coming-of-age story Some Maintenance Required. It is 1993, the last year of school and Laurie’s final spring before adulthood. She works part time at a restaurant and looks after Cindy, her neglected, potty-mouthed little neighbour. Like her mother, Laurie devours books and dreams big. Her father works at a garage, where Laurie constantly struggles to keep her car running. It is here that a budding romance intensifies Laurie’s understanding of class differences, and opens her eyes to a more complicated world. With her big heart, she takes Cindy globe-trotting without even leaving town, and learns how to come to terms with circumstances beyond her control. Life teaches Laurie that everyone requires some maintenance sometimes. A story of taking responsibility and coming into adulthood, Some Maintenance Required is as funny and as impressive as its main character.

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Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the way we live now. George Grant explores the fate of traditional values in modern education, social behaviour, and religion, and offers his insights into some of the most contentious ethical deliberations of the past half-century.In essays ranging in content from classical philosophy to the morals of euthanasia, Technology and Justice showcases Grant’s stimulating commentary on the meaning of the North American experience.

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