Search results for ""Biblioasis""

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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Shortlisted for the 2014 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor Award In a linked collection that presents the secret small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by an affair she cannot end; a receptionist, and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers. Praise for All Saints "Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group--parishioners, priest, passersby--but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections. All Saints is a moving and soulful book."--Caroline Adderson

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"John Metcalf has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country."-Alice Munro The Argus-eyed editor; the magisterial prose stylist; the waggish, inflammatory cultural critic; the mentor and iconoclast. John Metcalf is a literary legend whose memoir maps the underground he labored tirelessly to establish.

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Well-regarded British author never-before-published in US Sales figures for previous three books (3500, 5000, 7500 respectively) are combined UK/Canadian sales Stories with striking universal settings—all seem to exist in primitive no-man's-land (i.e. not defined by country) Author has also worked in prisons and drug rehab facilities Work has attractive sensibility: combines the whimsy and visual sensuousness of someone like Marquez with the quirky, comic take on magic realism you see in, say, Rushdie or Angela Carter, and has some of Carter's feminism ... but at least in this book, less gore. Imagine The Passion of New Eve meets 100 Years of Solitude meets Haroun & the Sea of Stories Stories are short and easy to excerpt.

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Calling all contrarians! Even if the poets are less-than-well-known in America, the pugnacious spirit of these essays & the quality of their insights, especially re: prosody and form, will be of value to all serious readers of poetry.

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An ALA 2014 Over the Rainbow Selection An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013: Top 100/Editors' Pick A Vancouver Sun Favourite Read of 2013 "Reading Cullen ...is a little like drinking booze. Definitely not wine, because it's not all that genteel, and not beer, because it's not all that commonplace, but hard liquor because it's edgy, fast-acting, more than a little disorienting and frequently mixed with something sweet."--The Globe & Mail What has to die before you force yourself to change? That's the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver's East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen's debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Yet in this joint-smoking urban underground, we also glimpse the families, communities, friends and strangers from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air. Trashy but poignant, comic and profound, Canary hangs luminous above the coal-heap of fiction debuts--and proves Nancy Jo Cullen a writer of astonishing depths. "Cullen's prose is volcanic even when she's describing the most domestic situations possible--the language is full of subterranean rumbles that simultaneously disturb and delight. The writing is always surprising, always bright, even in the most somber moments. Moving and funny, these stories will break your heart in the very best way."--Suzette Mayr "Nancy Jo Cullen mines humanity's beautiful fault-lines. There is not one lousy story in this bunch, but there are plenty of lousy people, all of them gleaming with the shimmer of real. Cullen knows just where to find the funny in tragedy, and how to make words feel like life."--Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Nancy Jo Cullen is the 4th recipient of the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award for an Emerging Gay Writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph Humber. Her fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Grain, filling Station, Plenitude and Prairie Fire. Her short story "Ashes" was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology in 2012. Cullen is also the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry with Frontenac House Press. Her first collection, Science Fiction Saint, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta's Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. Her second collection Pearl was shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize and won the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. A transplanted westerner, Cullen lives in Toronto with her partner and children. She is at work on a novel and a fourth collection of poetry.

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A timely work whose apocalpytic vision of a cultures and empires on the brink will speak to present-day anxiety re: the decline of America Sibum was a draft dodger in the 70s, and has an outsider's perspective on a country he both loves and hates

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"Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher ...His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world."--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo Meet the "fast zombie" citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style 'likes' replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here. Since the publication of A Civil Tongue (1995), philosopher Mark Kingwell has been urging us to consider how monstrous, self-serving public behaviour can make it harder to imagine and achieve the society we want. Now, with Unruly Voices, Kingwell returns to the subjects of democracy, civility, and political action, in an attempt to revitalize an intellectual culture too-often deadened by its assumptions of personal advantage and economic value. These 17 new essays, where zombies share pages with cultural theorists, poets, and presidents, together argue for a return to the imagination--and from their own unruly voices rises a sympathetic democracy to counter the strangeness of the postmodern political landscape. Mark Kingwell is the author of sixteen books and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.

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"Liliana Heker is one of the most remarkable voices of the Argentinean generation after Borges ...her fiction chronicles the small tragedies that take place within the vast tragedy of our history. A universal and indispensable writer." - Alberto Manguel When Diana Glass witnesses Leonora's abduction from a street in Buenos Aires, she despairs that her friend has joined the ranks of los desaparaecidos, the missing ones. She begins to write the story of their friendship, but certain memories, details, and whispered allegations about Leonora's fate consistently intrude. Leonora was born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass. But, Diana wonders, is that necessarily a virtue? Gripping, intelligent, and intricately structured, Liliana Heker's novel of an unstable revolutionary pasionaria has inflamed readers across Latin America. The End of the Story is a shocking study of the pyschology of torture, and a tragic portrait of Argentina's Dirty War.

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AS FEATURED IN THE OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTEST LIBRARY Everybody knows a brown-noser when they see one. But how about a freeter? A workbrickle? A jack? Can they tell downsizing from greybearding or brightsizing? With The Idler's Glossary (2008), Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn offered a spirited defense of leisure. As confirmed idlers themselves, they assured us their Glossary could provide "everything you need to know about how to conduct a life." Today, however, as we recover from the worst global recession since 1929, the work-world is a very different place. In order to understand it better, our anti-capitalist etymologists are therefore putting down their cigars, picking up their shovels, and drudging out English from the ditch of corporate jargon. For anyone who's ever had to moil for high muckety-mucks, The Wage Slave's Glossary is essential reading--as the moral wit of Kingwell & Glenn is indispensable to the present age.

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Featured on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION Longlisted for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. "Clear-eyed ... Robertson is no stranger to confronting unsavoury truths."—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag "Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson found a 'road back' in this splendid and intriguing book." —Jim Harrison Shortly after completing his sixth novel, Ray Robertson suffered a depression of suicidal intensity. Soon after his recover, he decided to try and answer two of the biggest questions we can ask. What makes humans happy? And what makes a life worth living? His answers aren’t what you might expect from a mental illness memoir—but they’re exactly what you’d expect from Ray Robertson. With the vitality of Nick Hornby and a brashness all his own, Robertson runs his hands over life, death, intoxication, and art. Unashamedly working-class and unabashedly literary, Why Not? is a rolling, rocking, anti-Sisyphean odyssey. Ray Robertson is the celebrated author of eight books and six novels, including What Happened Later, about Jack Kerouac's last years. He lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario.

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The fourth title in Biblioasis's Renditions Series, Century begins with the nightmare visions of a young woman named Jane Seymour, catching the reader up in a chronicle of the Seymour family that moves from Austria, America and Africa, through Edinburgh and Venice, and then back through the Paris of the Belle Epoque and forward to 1923 Germany. Terrifying, powerful, slashing and satiric, yet at the same time musical and wonder-filled, Century remains the most important work of Ray Smith's ouevre, and one of the most impressive, and far-reaching novels ever published in Canada.

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In the tradition of erotic confession (with a catch), Smith's pornographic novel explores female desire. The unnamed narrator -- gorgeous, sophisticated, bored, underemployed -- embarks on a series of intense urban encounters in an unnamed city. Her desire is limitless: passionate, playful, intense, humorous. Diana is a literary experiment to arouse and to paint a sexual portrait of a city.

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What are boys and men thinking? That's what the wry, observant, heartbroken and hilarious girls and women in these stories want to know. What are they thinking when they warn women against adventure, gulp ale in moonlit truck wrecks, steal their fingers down their nurses' thighs, tell their little girls fairy tales? What are insane boys the most exquisite, and where have the musical geniuses flown without our love? What is Jerome Hepditch doing in a loincloth, and how will his wives acquire escape vehicles? Winner of the 2006 Metcalf-Rooke Award, this collection is about women's hunger and men's minds, and what survives when they collide.

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Cold-cocked is the first book to explore a woman's way of watching the game poet Al Purdy called a "combination of ballet and murder." Written by author and born-again hockey aficionado Lorna Jackson, Cold-cocked looks at hockey through a woman's eyes and heart but is written with a sportswriter's energy and rigor and a hip cultural critic's cynicism and wit.

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Set in locales and time periods as varied as nineteenth century England, contemporary Spain, and postwar Alberta, these five stories and two novellas introduce us to characters whose obsessions occupy the borderlands between fantasy and reality. In the title story, the half-black grand-daughter of slaves becomes an exotic dancer in New York during WWI and develops a passion for goldfish.

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AN OPENCANADA SUMMER READ 2019 In the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina lies Mostar, a medieval town on the banks of the emerald Neretva, which flows from the “valley of sugared trees” through sunny hills to reach the Adriatic Sea. This idyllic locale is the scene of Maya Ombasic’s childhood—until civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia and the bombs begin to fall. Her family is exiled to Switzerland, and after a brief return, they leave again for Canada. While Maya adapts to their new home, her father never does, refusing even to learn the language of his new country. A portmanteau of Mostar and nostalgia, Mostarghia evokes Ombasic’s yearning for a place that no longer exists: the city before the civil war, when its many ethnicities interacted in a spirit of civility and in harmony. It refers as well to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Nostalghia, the viewing of which illuminated the author’s often explosive relationship with her father, a larger-than-life figure who was both influence and psychological burden: he inspired her interest, and eventual career, in philosophy, and she was his translator, his support, his obsession. Along with this portrait of a man described by turns as passionate, endearing, maddening, and suffocating, Ombasic deftly constructs a moving personal account of what it means to be a refugee and how a generation learns to thrive despite the struggles of its predecessors.

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