Search results for ""Biblioasis""

BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 JOSE SARAMAGO PRIZE AN AFRICA39/UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2014 TOP AFRICAN WRITER UNDER 40 A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE AFRICAN WRITER, 2012 WINNER OF THE GRINZANE PRIZE FOR BEST YOUNG WRITER, 2010 By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he's willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop's Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret is a charming coming-of-age story from the next rising star in African literature.

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A companion volume to Canadian Odyssey: A Reading of Hugh Hood's The New Age, God's Plenty surveys the short fiction of the writer dubbed Canada's Marcel Proust. Hugh Hood, an unparalleled stylist, was equally accomplished in short forms and long: this straight-talking assessment of Hood's stories is thorough, insightful, readable, and profound. With its story-by-story breakdown and rigorous engagement with Hood's technique, God's Plenty offers an excellent introduction not just to an undersung master, but to the art of short fiction full stop. W.J. Keith is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

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Marius Kociejowski follows up his now classic The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool with The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. A metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, Kociejowski discovers once again at the periphery of Damascene society--for the outcast is often made of the very thing that rejects him--a way to understand the challenges and changes refashioning post-9/11 Syria and the Middle East, reminding us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.

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New collection from a writer who has won four major fiction prizes from institutions and magazines across Canada Flood's last book, Red Girl Rat Boy (2014) was a finalist for both the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was selected as a "Best Book / Best Short Fiction" of the year by 4 major media outlets in Canada. Possible blurbs from Nancy Richler, Cary Fagan, Kate Cayley, Meredith Quartermain, Caroline Adderson, Irina Kovalyova Voice-driven stories (compare: Anakana Schofield), highly inflected, with remarkable character range (of age, class, gender) Realist fiction with a considerable variety of length, style, voice, and tone often dealing with the ways in which people deceive themselves about their motives.

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It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used to be, and his sister can’t wait to leave town for good. And everyone along his daily newspaper route looks at him a little differently, this boy who’s come back from the dead, who just might be the only one who understands the miraculous, heart-breaking mystery that is their lives. Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of North America’s hard turn to the right, 1979 offers a smalltown take on the buried lives of those who almost never make the news, and one boy’s attempt to make sense of it all.

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Title story adapted into Academy Award nominated feature film 45 YEARS; screened nation-wide, excellent cross-promotional coverage mentioning author + story Movie tie-in cover art = IFC / Sundance Selects poster image Original trade cloth version sold out of its initial 3,000 copy print run Named among Kirkus Reviews' Best Story Collections of 2015; critically acclaimed by NYTBR, WSJ, PW (starred review), and other major outlets Published alongside North American novel debut (see The Life-Writer) Previously known as a poet and translator, he began publishing fiction later in his career, and his reputation as a masterful short story writer has rocketed in the UK since The Shieling appeared in 2009, then the BBC award in 2010, and the Frank O'Connor in 2013 Pulls together the best material from his 30+ year career

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"Assured and stylistically confident ...Petersen's knowledge of and precise language for subjects such as natural history, the domestic arts, and music add to the classical feel of these stories, set all around the English-speaking Commonwealth. Crisp sentences and slightly old-fashioned vocabulary combine gratifyingly with evocative visual imagery to make this collection a pleasure to read."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Worldly Goods is a multi-faceted diamond: its carbon base is the stuff of life, and its reflective power is dazzling. Petersen can take a small event and in a few pages create an entire world ...a writer this good needs to be read."-Quill & Quire, starred review "What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen's debut collection of short stories ...marked her as a young writer to watch. [This] collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers."--Montreal Review of Books "Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire." --David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World These lyrical, open-eyed stories are set in North America, England, and the author's native New Zealand. With a focus on marriage, family, and the moral complexities that arise from these relationships, Alice Peterson's fiction evokes the best of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro. Alice Petersen's first book, All the Voices Cry, won the QWF Award for Best First Book. Born in New Zealand, she now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

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Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors. Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.

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BY THE FINALIST FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE AND THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMOES PRIZE "One of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language."--Philip Graham, The Millions "Subtle and elegant."--The Wall Street Journal "At once deadpan and beguiling."--The Times Literary Supplement "To understand what makes Antonio 'Mia' Emilio Leite Couto special--even extraordinary--we have to loosen our grip on the binary that distinguishes between 'the West' and 'Africa.' Couto is 'white' without not being African, and as an 'African' writer he's one of the most important figures in a global Lusophone literature that stretches across three continents."--The New Inquiry What would Barack Obama's 2004 campaign have looked like if it unfolded in an African nation? What does it mean to be an African writer today? How do writers and poets from all continents teach us to cross the sertao, the savannah, the barren places where we're forced to walk within ourselves? Bringing together the best pieces from his previously untranslated nonfiction collections, alongside new material presented here for the first time in any language, Pensativities offers English readers a taste of Mia Couto as essayist, lecturer, and journalist--with essays on cosmopolitanism, poverty, culture gaps, conservation, and more.

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A BOSTON GLOBE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2011 The poems in this collection inhabit several countries or no country at all, but many are concerned with boundaries: between words and silence, one person and another, today and tomorrow, freedom and fear. Although the poems rarely employ traditional forms of rhyme and repetition, their sound is the engine that propels them, while invented visual shapes intensify the experience of reading. All of these experiments are concerned with how art works, what it requires of us, and what it gives back. As the cow in a gallery tells the viewer: "Feed me, please, / your possibilities, / and I will fatten you."

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Bringing together for the first time in English a selection of poems from his two previously published collections, Kapuscinski offers up a thoughtful, philosophical verse, often aphoristic in tone and structure, that is engaged politically, morally, and viscerally with the world around him. Translated from the Polish.

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The poems of David Hickey's first collection, In the Lights of a Midnight Plow, glitter and startle. His is a writing deftly musical, where every detail and image has been carefully weighed, honed with a knife's edge and poet's ear to fit just so. The subjects are diverse, though his aim, always, is true: whether writing about nature, farming or domestic concerns, there is intelligence, beauty, humour and originality. Most importantly, there is language, the sparkle and sheen of it, the rhythm, all of which tells us that a new and important voice is at work here.

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An unnamed speaker navigates a world where God comes in the shape of a cardinal, speaks in the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe, and paints the desert with bones. Driven by sound, heartbreak, and the baffling limits and possibilities of language, a nameless speaker sets out into a dream-like wilderness where lyric and narrative meet, time dissolves, and figures as various as Moses, the apostle Paul, Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal, and Zora Neale Hurston gather in a colloquy. Born from a region of preachers and stuttering prophets, from the gift of tongues and psalms of lament and praise, Pascal’s Fire negotiates the wonder of the unknown and the tension of belief and confronts the vulnerability of speech where it brushes up against death and grief, wind and desert heat, unquenchable thirst and the steady sound of an IV drip.

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Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • An Oprah Daily Best Book of 2023 • One of the Globe and Mail''s Most Anticipated Titles of 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A 49th Shelf  Fall Book To Put On Your List • One of the Globe 100''s Best Books of 2023During the hottest summer on record, Bea''s dangerous new hobby puts everyone''s sense of security to the test.Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former se

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World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2022.Peter Wood enters a charming antiques shop owned by two young women one stormy evening. But after he returns a second time to a strange old man and a far gloomier atmosphere, and leaves with an unusual jade frog, Peter soon discovers that his purchase was worth more than he paid.

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One of Crime Reads most anticipated LatinX Horror and Crime Fiction of 2023This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet.Raised on his wits on the streets of Central America, the Cobra, a young debt collector and gang enforcer, has never had the chance to discern between right and wrong, until he’s assigned the murder of Polo, a prominent human rights activist—and his friend. When his conscience gives him pause and his patrón catches on, a remote Mayan community offers the Cobra a potential refuge, but the people there are up against predatory mining companies. With danger encroaching, the Cobra is forced to confront his violent past and make a decision about what he’s willing to risk in the future, and who it will be for.Following the Cobra, Polo, a faction of drug-dealing oligarchs, and Jacobo, a child caught in the crosshairs, Rey Rosa maps an extensive web of corruption upheld by decades of political oppression. A scathing indictment of exploitation in all its forms, The Country of Toó is a gripping account of what it means to consider societal change under the constant threat of violence.

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Selected by editor John Barton, the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Poetry showcases the best Canadian poetry writing published in 2021.“My goal,” writes guest editor John Barton of his long career as a literary magazine editor, “was always to be jostled awake, and I soon realized that I was being jostled awake for two—myself and the reader … I came to understand that my job description included an obligation to expose readers to wide varieties of poetry, to challenge their assumptions while expanding their taste.” In selecting this year’s edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Barton brings the same catholic spirit to his survey of Canadian poems published by magazines and journals in 2021. From new work by Canadian favourites to exciting new talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems to challenge and enlarge your sense of the power and possibility of Canadian poetry.Featuring:Leslie Joy Ahenda • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Bertrand Bickersteth • Tawahum Bige • Stephanie Bolster • Susan Braley • Moni Brar • Jake Byrne • Helen Cho • Conyer Clayton • Lucas Crawford • Sophie Crocker • Michael Dunwoody • Evelyna Ekoko-Kay • Tyler Engström • Triny Finlay • Elee Kraljii Gardiner • Lise Gaston • Susan Gillis • Beth Goobie • Patrick Grace • Laurie D. Graham • River Halen • Eva H.D. • Louise Bernice Halfe—Skydancer • Sarah Hilton • Karl Jirgens • Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph • Penn Kemp • Jeremy Loveday • Randy Lundy • Helen Han Wei Luo • Colin Morton • Jordan Mounteer • Samantha Nock • Kathryn Nogue • Michelle Porter • Rebekah Rempel • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Richard Sanger • Nedda Sarshar • K.R. Segriff • Christina Shah • Sandy Shreve • Adrian Southin • J.J. Steinfeld • Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang • Eric Wang • Tom Wayman • Jan Zwicky

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Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man’s reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life.What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn’t do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he’s overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we’re all doing here. So he’s made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy.Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what’s been thought and said. But Caroline is on her own path, one that compels Phil to rethink what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century. In Estates Large and Small Ray Robertson renders one man’s reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.

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World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2021. When Lady Jane Lynke unexpectedly inherits Bells, a beautiful country estate, she declares she’ll never leave the peaceful grounds and sets about making the house her home. But she hasn’t reckoned on the obstinate Mr Jones, the caretaker she’s told dislikes her changes, yet never seems able to be found.

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A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry—Oliver’s formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive; behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation.The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée. In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver’s conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.

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“This is a book,” writes guest editor Souvankham Thammavongsa, “about what I saw and read and loved, and want you to see and read and love.” Selected from work published by Canadian poets in magazines and journals in 2020, Best Canadian Poetry 2021 gathers the poems Thammavongsa loved most over a year’s worth of reading, and draws together voices that “got in and out quickly, that said unusual things, that were clear, spare, and plain, that made [her] laugh out loud … the voices that barely ever survive to make it onto the page.” From new work by Canadian icons to thrilling emerging talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems for you to fall in love with as well. Featuring: Margaret Atwood Ken Babstock Manahil Bandukwala Courtney Bates-Hardy Roxanna Bennett Ronna Bloom Louise Carson Kate Cayley Kitty Cheung Dani Couture Kayla Czaga Šari Dale Unnati Desai Tina Do Andrew DuBois Paola Ferrante Beth Goobie Nina Philomena Honorat Liz Howard Maureen Hynes George K Ilsley Eve Joseph Ian Keteku Judith Krause M Travis Lane Mary Dean Lee Canisia Lubrin Randy Lundy David Ly Yohani Mendis Pamela Mosher Susan Musgrave Téa Mutonji Barbara Nickel Ottavia Paluch Kirsten Pendreigh Emily Pohl-Weary David Romanda Matthew Rooney Zoe Imani Sharpe Sue Sinclair John Steffler Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang Arielle Twist David Ezra Wang Phoebe Wang Hayden Ward Elana Wolff Eugenia Zuroski Jan Zwicky

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"Books written out of great emotional distress are ... rarely great literature. Thomas Melle's [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note."—Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)A FINALIST FOR THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE • TRANSLATED INTO EIGHTEEN LANGUAGESAddicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

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By the end of the 2016 season, Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs both finally admitted to themselves and to each other that they were losing interest in the Tigers and, consequently, in baseball itself—a thread that had not only connected the two of them, but brought them together with their families and with their own histories as well. They weren’t sure what they were missing, but they had an idea where it might be found: in their own backyard. Drawing a radius of one hundred miles around their home in Windsor, Ontario, Heidi and Dale set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle in one summer, a schedule that took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, from bleachers behind high schools, to manicured university turf, to the steep concrete stands of major league parks. 100 Miles of Baseball is the story of their rediscovery of their love of the game—and with it their relationships, and the region they call home.

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WINNER OF THE 2021 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION A sea witch, a bossy Virgin Mary, and a lesbian widow’s wife—in ghost form—walk into a short story collection ... Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics. Couples counseling with Marzana, her girlfriend's ghost, might not be enough to resolve past indiscretions; our heroine could need a death goddess ritual or two. Plus, Hoofy’s not sure if his missing scam-artist boyfriend was picked up by the cops, or by that pretty blonde, their last mark. When Jan takes a room at Plague House, her first year of university takes an unexpected turn—into anarcho-politics and direct action, gender studies and late-night shenanigans with Saffy, her captivating yet cagey housemate. From the lovelorn Mary Louise, who struggles with butch bachelorhood, to rural teens finding—and found by—adult sexualities, to Grimm’s “The Golden Goose” rendered as a jazz dance spectacle, Kristyn Dunnion’s freewheeling collection fosters a radical revisioning of community. Dunnion goes wherever there’s a story to tell—and then, out of whispers and shouts, echoes and snippets, gritty realism and speculative fiction, illuminates the delicate strands that hold us all together.

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Heralding a new regionalism, New Brunswick interrogates the popular representations of Shane Neilson's home province. Structured as a group of serial long poems, this fifth book by the winner of the 2017 Walrus Poetry Prize recasts the political, economic, and social histories of settler New Brunswick, particularly as they relate to the sacrifices of his parents. As forests are reborn and fields are healed by rest, Neilson insists that though "we want catastrophes of fire," out of the ashes of charred dreams and old myths arise avenues for reconciliation through vulnerability and affect.

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I am from Halifax, salt-water city, a place of silted genius, sudden women, figures floating in all waters. “People from Halifax are all famous,” my sister Faith has said. “Because everyone in Halifax knows each other’s business.” From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of The Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amidst the old-monied decadence of Halifax. An arcana of oddball angels, Alex Pugsley’s long-awaited debut novel follows rich-kid drug dealers and junior tennis brats, émigré heart surgeons and small-time thugs, renegade private school girls and runaway children as they try to make sense of the city into which they’ve been born. Part coming-of-age-story, part social chronicle, and part study of the myths that define our growing up, Aubrey McKee introduces a breathtakingly original new voice.

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A daughter explains to her mother why calling the police isn’t always a sound idea. A dad tries to understand how his influence over his children persists in their adulthood. A caretaking group of sisters must rely on each other, but one has a fierce drinking problem. Throughout Nosy White Woman, ordinary people, caught in the passing moments of their daily lives, confront the reality that the quiet societies they thought they knew aren’t really so simple after all, the morals not always obvious. In these sixteen stories, Martha Wilson turns a clear-eyed yet compassionate gaze on everyday experience, from rattled family discussions, to self-examination of body and voice, to increasingly present anxieties about the end of the world, stripping each one down with precision and sardonic wit to reveal surprising truths: that individual lives always intersect with the political, and that our small gestures and personal habits reverberate in the larger world of which we can’t help being citizens.

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Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas Glover’s new essay collection fuses his long experience as an author with his love of philosophy and his passion for form. Call it a new kind of criticism or an operator’s manual for readers and writers, The Erotics of Restraint extends Glover’s long and deeply personal conversation with great books and their authors. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his fiction, he dissects narrative and shows us how and why it works, why we love it, and how that makes us human. Erudite and obsessively detailed, inventive, confessional, and cheeky, these essays offer a brilliant clarity, a respite in an age of doubt. They raise the bar.

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Now in its 48th year, Best Canadian Stories has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many writers who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon. Caroline Adderson, Margaret Atwood, Clark Blaise, Tamas Dobozy, Mavis Gallant, Douglas Glover, Norman Levine, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Diane Schoemperlen, Kathleen Winter, and many others have appeared in its pages over the decades, making Best Canadian Stories the go-to source for what’s new in Canadian fiction writing for close to five decades. Selected by guest editor Russell Smith, the 2018 edition draws together both newer and established writers to shape an engaging and luminous mosaic of writing in this country today—a continuation of not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters. Best Canadian Stories 2018 features work by: Shashi Bhat, Tom Thor Buchanan, Lynn Coady, Deirdre Simon Dore, Alicia Elliott, Bill Gaston, Liz Harmer, Brad Hartle, David Huebert, Reg Johanson, Amy Jones, Michael LaPointe, Stephen Marche, Lisa Moore, Kathy Page, and Alex Pugsley.

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2017-18 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the National Hockey League. But the league almost didn't survive its first year. Bob Duff chronicles the trials and tribulations of that first season, and tells the story of that first generation of hockey heroes who lent their names to the game they loved, and helped to make it great. Bob Duff, former sports columnist for the Windsor Star, has covered the NHL since 1988 and is a contributor to The Hockey News and msnbc.com.

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Has had 12 poems broadcast on The Writers' Almanac with Garrison Keillor since 2005, several with multiple airings Robyn Sarah has published widely in the US, increasingly widely in the UK, and in Canada, with poems appearing in: US: The New Criterion, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The Hollins Critic, The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, Poetry (Chicago), New England Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Antioch Review, Boulevard, Rosebud, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, The American Voice, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International, Contemporary Author, Slope (online), Perihelion (online), Literary Magazine Review UK: Times Literary Supplement, PN Review, Jewish Quarterly, Nth position (online) Her voice is musical but accessible and frequently meditative, with reflections on nature, age, and the passing of time; compare to Mary Oliver

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"Ondjaki delivers playful magical realism with delightful defiance." —The Barnes & Noble Review "As with Ondjaki's other novels—including Bom dis camaradas (2001; Good Morning Comrades) and Os Transparentes (2012)—this is a strangely deceptive read. Although the narrative often feels rather whimsical, Angola's long history of colonialism and conflict, its various foreign allies and enemies, and the extraordinary suffering of its population, are menacingly present . . . a brave and highly political work."—Times Literary Supplement "Remarkable . . . at once a coming-of-age novel, rousing adventure, and lyrical experiment. . . . It is no surprise that this energetic and endearing novel is the work of a writer of such stunning accomplishment as Ondjaki. . . . The result is ebullient, cinematic, and downright magical."—Words Without Borders In a crumbling apartment block in Luanda, impoverished families hoard memories to survive a corrupt regime. Odonato—nostalgic for the days of socialism—searches for his son, a petty criminal. As his hope drains away, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, and literary experimentation, Slow Red confirms Ondjaki as one of Africa's major writers. Ondjaki is a writer and filmmaker whose novels and stories have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. He lives in Luanda, Angola. Stephen Henighan is a writer and translator. He teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

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Lyric poetry that is light without being frivolous, for people who are more punk than prog. This is poetry that doesn't try too hard to be important, instead reveling in its utter lack of importance and celebrating man's right to clown around--often his only defense against a cruelly stacked deck.

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As the sickly boy dreams in bed, the shadows beneath his parlor curtain are stirring, taking shapes inexpressible even in a child's dreams. "Real keeps us silent," argues the taxidermied rabbit to the young air-rifle that shot it dead. "Real keeps us still. You must never ask anyone if they are Real." For exactly as long as history, a secret peace has bound the human and inanimate worlds. But the stories of the other world are pushing into our own, and that peace will be tested tonight...In this collection of twenty-six poems and the unbelievably weird happenings that link them, Noah Wareness steals electricity from nihilistic horror fiction and shaggy late-night cartoons to create a landscape of profound loss, vertigo and wonder.

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The collection, which began as a response to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing," metamorphosed into witty, poetic responses to famous epigraphs and quotations. Built upon the words of others--from Leonardo da Vinci to Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood to Jimmy Kimmel--the resulting pieces explore veganism, sex, parenting, death, and Coachella.

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While engrossed in an account of the death of a student obsessed with his own hair, a man leans down to absently pet his dog--oblivious of the true nature of the creature crouching beside him. This classic ghost story by M.R. James is a spooky holiday delight.

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Straight Razor and Other Poems brings together Salvatore Ala's new poems and selections from his privately published broadsides. It is a beautiful and original collection. Both formal and lyrical, it is the work of a determined and committed craftsman.

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A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He’s going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature. But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over—including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school—Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too. The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It’s a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda’s place as one of Canada’s funniest and most provocative writers.

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David Hickey's second collection builds upon the myriad strengths of his first. In a specimen book of songs, stories, and covenants, Hickey's subjects range from art and astronomy to snowflakes and suburbia. These poems "take their time / Covering the roadside trees in forms of their careful willing ...gesturing down to earth, unveiling new shapes / for all that they find." David Hickey is a past recipient of the Milton Acorn Prize, the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States.

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The second full-length collection from sonneteer and formalist poet Catherine Chandler, Glad and Sorry Seasons brings together new suites of poems--on grief, recovery, the deadly sins, and the virtues of faith, hope, and love--to meditate on those polarities of light and dark, joy and sorrow, that illuminate and cloud our lives by turn. With subjects ranging from Alzheimer's to Edward Hopper's Automat, in handsomely crafted stanzas and metres, and including translations from Quebecois and Latin American poets, Glad and Sorry Seasons is a stunning and learned offering from a poet unmistakably committed to form. Waiting For the man in the Intensive Care Unit waiting room, Hopital Notre-Dame, Montreal, June 2012 Some nights I've seen a slice of silver slink across this room I now call home, above my makeshift bed--a rickety chair beside the snack machine. Close by, the elevators whirr and beep. I cannot, dare not, drift asleep, let down my guard, inviting shoulder taps, a whispered Sir, or dreams of her once-vivid eyes that stare & stare & stare, dull, distant, hard. Thus I will will her through another day. Make crazy compromises. Pray.

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Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, the latest collection by Bosnian expat Goran Simic, is as much a departure as it is a continuance. In this book, we find the world-renowned poet visiting familiar themes in fresh ways.

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In his sixties, Yeats published the half-dozen poems that drew Crazy Jane out from his imagination to act as a profane voice against the strictures of the Church and the mores of his age. Wayne Clifford, in his sixties, after a lifetime of wondering why Yeats offered so little explanation of Jane's human presence absorb his own imagination, has let Jane free to speak once more. In Jane Again, we learn why Jane is crazy, if indeed she is, what part her Jack has played in her passion, how she understands the nature of the divine, and who she insists herself to be in this world almost large enough to hold her. Wayne Clifford's Jane Again is bawdy, irreverent and humorous; it is also loving, moving and beautiful, and should help to cement Clifford's reputation as one of the most inventive versifiers to come out of Canada in years.

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An A.V. Club Book to Read for June 2019 In moments of exile and self-exile, exodus and return, Elise Levine’s uncanny narratives lay bare the secret grammar of their characters’ psyches. An ill-tempered divinity-school candidate refuses to minister to a dying man’s wife; a couple fails to connect as they tour an ersatz cave in the south of France; holy women grieve in medieval England, and a pregnant runaway hitches a ride with a Church leader of dubious intentions. Propelled by their longing for pasts that no longer exist, these reluctant Adams and contemporary Eves confront the unspoken, the maligned, the abject aspects of their inner geographies, mining them for gems that glint and scatter in the light. Uncompromising and honest, lyrical and wry, This Wicked Tongue dares to tell the truth about the places we have come from and the new ones we might find.

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"Disquieting, deceptive, crafted with a sly and measured expertise, Alison Moore's story could certainly deliver a masterclass in slow-burn storytelling. "—The Independent "The Lighthouse is a spare, slim novel that explores grief and loss, the patterns in the way we are hurt and hurt others, and the childlike helplessness we feel as we suffer rejection and abandonment. . . . The brutal ending continues to shock after several re-readings. "—The Guardian "[A] hauntingly complex exploration of the recurring patterns that life inevitably follows, often as a consequence of one's past. "—The Sunday TimesFuth, a middle-aged, recently separated man heads to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. During his circular walk along the Rhine, he contemplates the formative moments of his childhood. At the end of the week, Futh returns to what he sees as the sanctuary of his hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.Alison Moore's first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants (Biblioasis, 2015), were Observer Books of the Year. A third novel, Death and the Seaside, is forthcoming in the US from Biblioasis. Her shorter fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies and is collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Moore lives in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border with her husband and son.

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A New York Times Notable Book 2016 An October Indie Next List “Great Reads” Pick After the death of her beloved husband, Katrin, a literary biographer, copes with the loss by writing his personal history. While researching the letters and journals he left behind, however, she comes to the devastating conclusion that his life before their marriage was far richer than the one they shared. To understand and recreate the period of his greatest happiness—hitch-hiking through France as a young man, madly in love with his companion, a French girl named Monique—Katrin embarks on a heartbreaking journey to discover the man she never fully knew. David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and, translator. The title story of his North American debut collection of short fiction, In Another Country: Selected Stories (Biblioasis, 2015) was adapted into the Academy Award–nominated feature film 45 Years. He is the author of one previous novel, Davies, as well as four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, and five collections of poetry. He lives in Oxford, England, where until 2012 he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

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As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister’s apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man’s identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador. Dance With Snakes is a macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable. The non-stop action raises provocative questions about social exclusion and the role of the media, but this novel by the author of the acclaimed Senselessness also evokes the tenderness of relations among those on society’s margins.

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A memoir that chronicles unflinchingly the destructiveness of bipolar disorder - an illness that infiltrates thinking, feeling and acting in ways that change the very fabric of identity, of the life story one is telling oneself; however, The Lily Pond is equally searching in its exploration of the psyche's resources in healing and reknitting that story.

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