Search results for ""Exile Editions""

Celebrating the diversity of Canadian short fiction, 12 writers are featured in this volume of the short list and winners of the 2012 Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Award. The curated short-story collection includes writing by contemporary storytellers Christine Miscione, exploring self-mutilation as the art of living; Leon Rooke and his maze of contradictory and unresolved questions; and Seán Virgo with a surreal tale of a wintertime house and harpsichords. Also showcased in the anthology are short fictions by Amy Stuart, Daniel Perry, Darlene Madott, Jacqueline Windh, Kelly Watt, Kris Bertin, Linda Rogers, Martha Bátiz, and Phil Della.

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Ten writers from across Canada are featured in this volume that presents the first year of the Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Award in a curated short-story collection. Contemporary storytellers honored with the prize in 2011 include Frank Wescott as he tells of a poet in love; Silvia Moreno-Garcia offering a new take on Mexican folklore; and Ken Strange with a story of conflict between head and heart in a neuroscience lab. The anthology also showcases talented short fiction by Gregory Betts, Hugh Graham, Kristi-Ly Green, Leigh Nash, Richard Van Camp, Rishma Dunlop, and Zoe Stikeman.

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Penned by the multitalented Gloria Vanderbilt herself, this collection features stories that are touching, surprising, and told in a beautifully calibrated prose. The tales seize upon brief moments that are resonant with the random static of everyday disaster, illustrating characters who merely step into a room to find that everything in their lives has been inexplicably reversed. Engaging and enigmatic, this anthology relates powerful narratives of passionate love as well as compelling defeat.

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Capturing the 20th-century literary world, this collection of nonfiction work includes essays, reviews, and articles concerning the personalities and events between 1928 and 1990. Starting in the 1920s with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the reflections move through the decades covering everything from war propaganda to the life of a writer.

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Focusing on the universe of beauty and dreams with an intensity that delves into self-recognition, these stories written over the last 15 years engage the reader with questions about our public and private lives. The stories touch on questions of identity and belief, the phantoms of memory, and the oppositions of beauty to experiences. Told in a language of brilliant power, these tales enable the reader with their enigmatic and dreamlike quality.

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Following the lives of five Anglo-Irish youths in the 1970s, this coming-of-age story plays off the fragmented cornerstones that delineate a remarkable period of social change. The five main characters take turns telling their turbulent stories, each culminating in adrenaline jolts that are punctuated with lonely drifts of rolling prose.

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Poems written with clarity and craftsmanship, this collection contemplates what is real and observable versus what is not. The verses are like asterisks that refer to somewhere else, and they strike with meditative depth and spiritual strength. Drawn from experiences in Burma, England, Spain, and the United States, these words depict moments in time and step back into silence.

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Dying Times is the story of a successful though conflicted lady litigator, told with a dark undercurrent of humor that underpins this striking meditation on dying, and discovering a meaningful approach to living. Death is all around the lady litigator. It is her loving, wise mother who, by dying, triggers open hatred within the family. It is her greedy, irascible but brilliant senior partner at a big downtown law firm who, while determined to control everything, even his own death, discovers generosity. It is the last client the senior partner and lady litigator will share, a man in a wheelchair who is appalling in his need to wreak ruin on his wife in a monumentally lucrative divorce case.Far from sombre, the novel is told with a wry wit and a transcendent tenderness that is fresh and surprising. It is a presentation of raw reality, with characters navigating the emotions of love on the verge of abuse and hatred, loyalty on the verge of betrayal, and visceral energy on the verge of exhaustion. Dying Times frames an important conversation: We die as individually as we have lived.

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Fairy tales occur both in oral and in literary form. The focus in this book has been on preserving the elemental structure of oral tradition without embellishment. But, this is a distinctive literary collection, one that gathers a dozen fairy tales which come from the Croatian national folklore tradition.This is also a contemporary English-language version that respects the ancient Slavic mythology of pre-Christian Croatia. And, through exceptionally communicative translations, Dasha C. Nisula has elevated them to be superlative examples of a how common plots, motifs, and elements of the fairy tale, are their own best explanation – that is, the tale’s meaning is contained in the totality of the threadline in the story. And these are 12 great stories!The book also includes a detailed introduction to Croatian fairy tales, and, in a historical and cultural sense, to the wider genre of fairy tales.In this bilingual edition the Croatian and English-in-translation are presented together – accompanied by a selection of original colour artworks by the cover artist, Josip Botteri Dini.

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In a time of malevolent righteousness, often described as Cancel Culture, J’Accuse is an essay-in-poetry by Canada’s Parliamentarian Poet Laureate emeritus that responds to the impacts of being “cancelled.” Shame is not a word that gets much play these days among the caustically righteous, but Clarke had been wronged, and the people who did the wronging should be ashamed of themselves.J’Accus is a poignant statement that calls upon individuals, scholars, artists, and journalists to never submit to impulses that intentionally, or even unintentionally, forbid debate and questioning.J’Accus ponders what is truly unspeakable: injustice.Clarke boldly confronts the reality that in our turbulent time there must be an interest in real voices and stories, otherwise any individual can fall victim to silencing – blacklisting – gag-orders – cancelling… And ultimately, this cri-de-coeur reveals the personal cost.

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The Hermit Says Goodbye completes the triptych Richard Teleky began with The Hermit's Kiss, followed by The Hermit in Arcadia. Through the persona of the hermit, he explores the nature of love, loss, solitude and mortality, asking what people can be to each other and what they are for themselves. As the hermit quests for understanding, he revels in - and meditates on - what the world has to tell us and what we might do with that knowledge.

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Hello! Wik'sas? is a book for curious kids who ask big questions – and adults who help them discover the answers.It is an illustrated conversation between Isla and Ethan – son and daughter of Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Rande Ola K'alapa, a much loved artist of mixed European and Indigenous decent – and their invisible friend Siri. Isabel Rogers, also a kid, is part of the story-telling process. We want this book to be a bridge. a route to one important thing: kindness… There are serious questions asked in this book, which provides an opportunity to discuss bullying, environmental protection, and inclusivity, all very important topics for children. We want lots and lots of kids to share in our fun and to think about their own questions, and discover the answers to them.

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Callaghan's writing is wide ranging but often takes on the perspective of a marginalized individual's view of the human experience. These tales are told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, Holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the "ordinary"—all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that "happiness is overrated." The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humour, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty.

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Michael Mirolla, in The Photographer in Search of Death, tells us stories that blend the explicable with the inexplicable. As if a camel were actually passing through the eye of a needle, these stories pass what is commonplace through a hyper-realistic lens into the utterly mysterious. Houses have rooms that appear and disappear. Very real objects, invaded by an unbelievable force, become believably unreal. Streets filled with everyday individuals become – in our modern technological environment – ultra ordinary. What we wish to avoid becomes unavoidable. This is a world beyond the merely “magical” – this is a binary world of becoming.

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This collection of stories takes readers to the fringes of both emotion and society as it explores the not-so-common lives of the everyday weirdos who could be their neighbors or friends. The sure storytelling brings a wide range of chaotic emotions, from love to rage, vividly to life and delves deeply into the characters’ social and cultural experiences.

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Stunningly original, this collection—a prodigious feat of verbal invention—contains idiomatic phrases spiced with quicksilver insights, exploring craziness and horror, grief and love, wry humor and historical commentary.

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Her ascent to the top of the literary world is well known. Now you can enjoy the great works of this formidable writer in The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Volume Two: The Later Years. Readers will gain a solid understanding of MacEwen's works, as these poems represent her strongest poetic voice, developed from years of writing. Her unique voice is both playful and melancholy, all the while being a daring addition to her genre. This book is a great introduction to the works of MacEwen.

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Welcome to an alternate Canada, where steam technology and the wonders and horrors of the mechanical age have reshaped the past into something both wholly familiar yet compellingly different. These fifteen supercharged all-new tales reimagine Canadian historical events, explore other Canadas, and gather inspiration from the northern landscape to make us wonder: what if history had gone a different way?Experience steam-powered buffalo women roaming the plains; visit brutal gas-lit working class streets; join extraordinary men and women striking out on their own or striving to build communities; marvel as giant rampaging spirits are thwarted by miniscule timepieces, at a great clock that when it chimes the Seven O'Clock Man appears to terrorize a small village in Quebec, or when a Maritime scientist develops a deadly new weapon that could change the course of the American civil war.

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A lively collection populated by historical icons, each poem a story about the potency of imagination, territories, border-crossings of the mind – among them: the madness of a king who wants to be a swan, Michelangelo chiselling a heart that beats into his David, Tsar Peter with his three pet dwarfs acting as generals in the army, Vera Zasulich who became the world’s first woman terrorist, Robinson Crusoe hunting for the footprints of Friday, Michael Jackson pretending he is Marcel Marceau as he woos Marlene Dietrich in Paris.

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From writer, artist and philanthropist, Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication. “I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper’s brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world. Though I, and those who loved Carter, still hear his voice in our heads and in our hearts, my son’s voice was silenced long ago. I hope this prize helps other writers find their voice, and helps them touch others’ lives with the mystery and magic of the written word.” This volume presents the 14 shortlisted writers: Nicholas Ruddock, Leon Rooke, Hugh Graham, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Bruce Meyer, Priscila Uppal, Veronica Gaylie, Christine Miscione, Lisa Foad, Maggie Dwyer, Josip Novakovich, Bart Campbell, Lisa Pike and Linda Rogers.

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This classic play has been translated before, but only into a pallid approximation of the original joual. Scots, however, is an energetic and earthy vernacular with a distinctive sound system equal to joual. The play, a landmark in Canadian theatre, can now be truly appreciated in this superb translation, just as audiences in Glasgow and Moscow have learned to laugh with these ladies.

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This remarkable collection of poems lures you in, at first to stand alone in the dark, but slowly there comes a hint of light from a crack beneath a door, then a riot of sensuous intensity as you open up to the beauty that lies between the folds of words, bursts of poetic energy that casts warm light over all shadows.From the Introduction by A.F. Moritz "What is this poetry like? There are not many precedents for it or bodies of work very similar to it in English…Bien's word hoard is all his own, though, the way he animates it, constantly connecting the outer with the inner, the familiar with the distant, the limited with the vast, the realm of thought with the realm of life, non-sentient things with sentient ones… There is scarcely a stanza in Bien's work that does not contain some instance of these extendings and plunges into each other performed by things and whole modes of existence. More notable still is the mysterious ease with which the poems admit the contradictions present in perceptions, emotions and desires. In a Time of No Song will impress readers with its poetry of pure sentience and godlike laughter… The mysticism of the source is here, but most of all, I think, we will remember the great enactments and themes of this book through its omnipresent, brilliant tributes to life. We'll keep it by us for its indelible celebrations… A dove lands on my shoulder, the unbearable weight of magicwhat shelters each moment in every other, dies and lives, homelessly on,an orchard of lovely berries singing on a dying treeand so all the while, so too, I sing, that which sings me, in a time of no song.

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Erudite and funny, nostalgic and fanciful, these stories unlock the secret longings and unlooked-for victories that make up everyday life. Whether he finds himself in the stands at Yankee Stadium on Bat Day, or, as in "Aunt Daisy's Secret Sauce for Hamburgers," caught off guard by the myriad ways in which a recipe and its misspellings are a window into the woman who wrote it years before, or gently exploring how loss and love get intertwined for a "Bee Girl," Hayward writes with a sure sense of his characters and the complex, imperfect worlds they inhabit.Talent and passionate complexity have created an elegant and unforgettable collection of stories that are assured in depictions of characters and distinctive in voice.

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Old vines and older grudges tangle in the Okanagan Valley. An elderly widow, eking out a living collecting detritus, seeks to avenge the murder of her friend. A love-weary security guard clashes with bounty hunters. An ursine meth-cooker faces even stranger creatures on the frozen tundra of Nunavut. As the dead walk and the living despair, a private detective unravels a bizarre mystery.In The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir, the whole spectrum of the noir esthetic is explored: from its hardboiled home in crime fiction to its grim forays into horror, fantasy, and surrealism; from the dystopian shadows it casts in science fiction to the mixture of desire and corruption it brings to erotica; from the blood-spattered romance of the frontier to the stark nihilism of literary realism.

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A woman’s childhood life in Scotland and a new life in Canada are explored by her daughter in this memoir-style poem that profoundly embodies the classic North American immigrant tale. The story opens with Tom, Dick, and Harry, three ancestors who emigrated to New York. It cycles back to the author’s father, a young soldier who catches the eye of his wife-to-be at the glove counter in Woolworth’s. In between we encounter the real, rare characters of everyday Glasgow life, including cousin John Lennon in a scheme to raise pigs, and a bicycle-riding Richard Nixon who arrives just after a factory blow-up. Framed by a prologue and epilogue, the story is told in a working-class vernacular—the characters all real, the voice gritty, witty, and distinct as it unfurls a beautiful tapestry by way of the music and language of Glaswegian storytelling.

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Bruce Meyer’s forté is to delve into the interconnectedness of our relationship with the physical and the spiritual. He is a poet channelling the music and suffering of the human experience and, beyond that, the spiral of cultivation and destruction that sustains and endangers humankind.His poems are daring and artistically defying, composed with gravitas, powerful mindfulness, and reverence. His voice is mutable, each stanza like a window onto a multidimensionality that opens itself to both complexity and clarity.Testing the Elements touches on themes such as bullying, growing up, maturity, age, love, and nature; it is poetry that is memorable and speaks to the human spirit about what it means to live and endure in the world.

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The best of today's Canadian short fiction is showcased in this third volume of the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series, which features the 12 stories short-listed—among them the three winners—for the 2013 $15,000 Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Competition. The book contains contemporary writing that reflects a diversity in emerging and established Canadian writers, including Austin Clarke, Leon Rooke, Priscilla Uppal, Greg Hollingshead, Sang Kim, Matthew R. Loney, Helen Marshall, George McWhirter, Rob Peters, David Somers, Yakos Spiliotopoulos and Liz Windhorst Harmer. The collection contains the winners, including Kim's "When John Lennon Died," a story about loss, homesickness, and nostalgia; Uppal's "Cover Before Striking," a disturbing, poetic tale sure to make readers' hearts race; and Clarke's "They Never Told Me," a haunting, unforgettable story that reaches the deepest places in the mind and heart. Following the stories are biographies of each contributor.

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Existing somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souled-ness, Christine Miscione's debut collection illumines all that is perilous, beautiful, and raw about being human and brings a new voice to contemporary literature. From the surgically gutted and the racially transformed to the story of self-excision that won the Vanderbilt/Exile Award for short fiction, this anthology is chock-full of razor blades masquerading as lemon tarts and everything in between. The writing and its use of imagery and language is innovative and calls into question the definition of a short story by challenging previous notions of the convention in terms of length, style, and plot. Inventive, assured, and accessible, the stories pair emotional depth with great technical skills and peel back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, and the unexpected. This provocative collection reimagines ideas of the body, the world, interiority, and relationships with the self and with others through a satiric approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, irreverent analysis, and comic existentialism.

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In turns touching and disturbing, this powerfully suggestive story describes a young boy coming of age on his father's farm while being stalked by the new, mentally handicapped employee. Set against a backdrop of abandonment, betrayal, and confusion, the novel explores the human psyche and the contemporary theme of child abuse with subtlety and masterful writing.

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Presented for the first time in this beautiful, genre-crossing collection is Lawren Harris’s original book of poems and 16 color images of the artist’s early urban painting. In 1922, while the Group of Seven was emerging as a national phenomenon, Harris published his only book of poems—Contrasts—the first modernist exploration of Canadian urban space in verse. He also wandered the streets of Toronto, sketching and creating a powerful set of city paintings. With a 14-page walking tour of Toronto that includes historical and biographical tidbits, this book contains sections of further readings in relation to Harris, the Group of Seven, Toronto and the Ward, and other Toronto walks, more than 65 questions for discussion, and a complete listing of the paintings that provides details on size, medium, and current location. Unlike any other book on Harris, this edition offers a new view of Harris’s career before the Group of Seven while presenting an exciting window into city life at the turn of the century.

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Eighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.

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Eighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.

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Cataclysmic and arresting, this collection of stories is told in a style as quick and efficient as a switchblade, lending a fresh interpretation to ordinary life in all its guises. The featured tales are at turns mordant, shocking, and entertaining, containing a new tonality and strong atmospheric tones. The unique characters are illustrated as existing on the edge of estrangement, while others have toppled over, finding themselves in situations that skew to the dark side. Underscoring a writing style both tactile and surprising, this anthology depicts an intriguing tension through hardscrabble subjects and lively voices.

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A sprawling story confronting social, historical, and racial tensions, this novel is set against the backdrop of the Trail of Tears, when President Andrew Jackson evicted the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands. The narrative follows several generations of one Native American family in their quests for wealth, love, power, and dignity, lending insight into their civilization’s world view and religious outlook. Embedded in the roots of mythology and the sacred history of a fascinating culture, this account illustrates the intense love-hate relationship between two peoples that was ultimately to end in the destruction of the Cherokee way of life.

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Written by one of Canada's leading cultural commentators, this collection explores a wonderful gamut of topics, including the arts, sports, politics, and pop culture of the 1980s. Both hilarious and brilliant, the essays range from exposés on cocaine dealers and the murder of heiress Nancy Eaton, to articles on the politics of Jean Chrétien, the music of Miles Davis, and the literature of Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow, and Morley Callaghan.

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Providing a rare and creative sense of authority’s various faces, this collection of poems travels from intellectual and artistic power to philosophical, military, and imperial power; and above all, personal influence. The verse introduces the persuasiveness, complexities, and intrigues of “table talk”—a European tradition of informed and enlightened conversation that has virtually disappeared from the experience of North American culture. Commanding and informed in their own sense of purpose, these pieces evince a gentle curiosity for greatness, creating an engaging portrait of simple humanity, powerful minds, and memorable ideas.

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Reinventing the folktale, the family romance, and the detective narrative all at once, the 10 stories in this collection explore the emotional and spiritual development of characters searching for meaning in life. From an insurance adjustor who has worn the same suit for 20 years to a woman mourning her thrice-dead husband, they all struggle to find themselves in these darkly comical, absurd, yet touchingly poignant short stories.

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Mexican-Canadian Martha Bátiz has crafted, in her first collection written in English, visceral stories with piercing and evocative qualities. She has filled her recognizable, sisterly/motherly, and imaginative characters with qualities we all hold close to our hearts, but this is powerfully juxtaposed by the uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives. Most often they are women, trapped in violent relationships, facing dangerous political situations, or learning to live with the pain of betrayal. Yet Bátiz’s stories shimmer with the emotional surge of vindication, evoking the rewards women attain after a powerful exploration of their darkest moments. As an emerging writer, Bátiz crafts her stories with qualities reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, and Cuban author Leonardo Padura: with precision, haunting vision, and the will to survive all odds.

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