Search results for ""house of anansi press""

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Danuta Gleed Literary Award finalistCity of Victoria Butler Book Prize finalistIntensely imaginative and darkly emotional, the weird and wonderful stories in Double Dutch deftly alternate between fantasy and reality, transporting readers into strange worlds that are at once both familiar and uncanny — where animals are more human, and people more mysterious, than they first appear.Shape-shifters, doppelgangers, and spirits inhabit the extraordinary worlds depicted in Trunkey’s stories: a single mother believes her toddler is the reincarnation of a terrorist; Ronald Reagan’s body double falls in love with the first lady; a man grieves for his wife after a bear takes over her body. The collection also includes moving tales grounded in painful and touching reality: a young deaf girl visits Niagara Falls before she goes blind; an elephant named Topsy is killed on Coney Island by Thomas Edison in 1903; and a woman learns the truth about her son’s disappearance while searching with her husband in the Canadian Rockies.This enchanting and, at times, heartbreaking debut collection of stories hails the arrival of an exceptional new literary talent.

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Never has the world experienced greater movement of peoples from one country to another, from one continent to another. These seismic shifts in population have brought huge challenges for all societies, particularly in the developed world. Do changes in population present the possibility of a new model for the structures of society? Does the Canadian model, which emphasizes values, parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law, make a fitting model for countries who still rejoice in ethnic purity? Can belonging encompass difference and distrust, while maintaining standards of human rights, particularly freedom of expression and assembly and the right of women? These timely and controversial subjects are at the very essence of Adrienne Clarkson’s 2014 Massey Lectures, Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship. Clarkson masterfully chronicles the evolution of citizenship throughout the ages: from the genesis of the idea of citizenship in pre-history, to Aristotle and the Greeks, to the medieval structures of guilds and class; from the warring factions of the French revolution, to Icelandic law-making tradition, and present-day modern citizenship based on values, economics, and multiculturalism. She concludes by looking forward, warning of what will happen if we don’t live up to our ideals of democracy, identity, and belonging.

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The A List edition of Leo McKay’s superb collection. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Like This takes you inside small-town Nova Scotia to expose the troubles that lie at its heart.Set in a fictional town called Albion Mines, (the old name for author Leo McKay's home town of Stellarton), Like This offers a gripping, and at times frightening, look at small-town Nova Scotia life. These superb stories are startling and often disturbing, filled with complexity and power. McKay portrays characters with astonishing depth and dead-on emotional rightness. The world is not fair in these stories. There is pain, abuse, solitude; but somehow there is also hope.Featuring a new introduction by Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Lynn Coady.

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Originally published in 1970, Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson is a collection of candid and wide-ranging interviews with Canadian writers, including Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, and more.With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing important to you? Do writers know something special? Does he or she have any responsibility to society? The result is a fascinating and immensely readable series of conversations with famed writers at the beginning of their careers.The A List edition will feature a new introduction by Graeme Gibson and interviews with the following authors:Margaret AtwoodAustin ClarkeMatt CohenMarian EngelTimothy FindleyDave GodfreyMargaret LaurenceJack LudwigAlice MunroMordecai RichlerScott Symons

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For the past 99 years, the Royal Ontario Museum has introduced its visitors to objects from all corners of the globe. In celebration of the Museum’s centennial, 21 Canadian writers, painters, filmmakers — even an astronaut — share their personal connections with a unique object from the Museum’s collection in this extraordinary volume. Read best-selling author and anthropologist Wade Davis’s insights about the Hudson Strait Kayak, the presence of the Shiva Nataraja in award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s household, or astronaut Chris Hadfield’s thoughts on a very rare type of meteorite, the largest of its kind ever found in Canada, and more. Combining curatorial expertise and intimate perspectives, this writing is complemented by stunning contemporary photography and striking documentary shots, emphasizing the personal experience within these natural and cultural masterpieces. The full list of contributors includes Anita Rau Badami, Robert Bateman, Joseph Boyden, Dionne Brand, Austin Clark, Wayson Choy, Wade Davis, Sheree Fitch, Charlotte Gray, Chris Hadfield, Lawrence Hill, Alex Hutchinson, Ross King, David Macfarlane, Joe MacInnis, Margaret MacMillan, Linden McIntyre, Deepa Mehta, Lynda Reeves, Guy Vanderhaegue, and Aritha van Herk.

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A riveting and redemptive family memoir, The Four Walls of My Freedom is Donna Thomson’s account of raising a son with cerebral palsy and a passionate appeal to change the way we think about “the good life.”Donna Thomson’s life was forever changed when her son Nicholas was born with cerebral palsy. A former actor, director, and teacher, Donna became his primary caregiver and embarked on a second career as a disability activist, author, and consultant.Thomson vividly describes her experience in treading delicately through daily care, emergencies, and medical bureaucracy as she and her family cope with her son’s condition while maintaining value and dignity (for Nicholas, too). She brilliantly demonstrates the vital contribution that people with disabilities make to our society and addresses the ethics and economics of giving and receiving care.Featuring an introduction by John Ralston Saul, and two new chapters, The Four Walls of My Freedom is a passionate appeal to change to the way we think about the “good life” that will touch anyone caring for the life of another.

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Garth Martens’ debut, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, is about the tar sands and industrial projects of Alberta, and the men who work in them. But to describe it as such restricts the book to its physical concerns, when in fact these are poems of great philosophical ambition, and startling ethical and psychological reach.Martens has made an elemental world both beautiful and severe, and on his stage, characters assume a collective status both emphatically human and radically mythic. He is interested in endurance, in addiction, loss, abuse, and pain, in how people are created, and how they create themselves, out of crude material both inherited, and scavenged. His language is rough and baroque; his metaphors are titanic in their range and scope. This is a book about grace and error, about hurtling towards the unknown, about acting out. Martens writes: "It is dark when you reach the excavation and you don't know if the road starts or ends here. If it's abutment, chimera, hole." Prologue for the Age of Consequence accrues the propulsive force of an epic. It will pry you open, and reorder what it finds inside.

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Inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, El Niño tracks the survival of one woman and a young, undocumented migrant as they journey through the no-man’s-land of a remote southwestern desert.Honey hasn’t seen her mother, Marianne, in more than two years. She drives deep into the once-prosperous border region of the Oro Desert for a surprise visit, only to discover that Marianne has vanished.Alone in an unforgiving environment populated with hostile locals, she meets Chávez, a young “coyote” or human trafficker, who convinces Honey he knows her mother’s whereabouts and agrees to take her there — for a price. As they make their way through the Oro’s brutal no-man’s-land they are tracked by Ocho, a teenage bounty hunter determined to recruit Chávez. And then there is Baez, Marianne’s wizened Shepherd-coyote mix, whose death and life intimately intersect with Honey and Chávez's search for Marianne and who tells the story of the Oro Desert as it slowly comes apart.Told in three distinct voices, El Niño is an intricately constructed and starkly written novel from a bold and inventive new writer.

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In this stunning graphic-novel adaptation of Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud’s play, the personal meets the political, East meets West, and old meets new. Claire, a Quebecoise art dealer, arrives in China to adopt a little girl. There she visits her ex-husband, Pierre, who after fifteen years in China has begun to question the new directions his adopted country is going in. Claire and Pierre’s lover, the young Chinese artist Xiao Ling, become fast friends. Through this classic love triangle, The Blue Dragon examines aging, cultural confusion, fertility, and creativity, and emerges as a fascinating examination of some of modern China’s most intriguing paradoxes. Fred Jourdain’s gorgeous, colourful, and cinematic drawings do full justice to the story’s genesis as one of Robert Lepage’s most dazzling theatrical constructions. A feast for the mind as well as the senses, The Blue Dragon is an extraordinary graphic novel for grownups.

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With imaginative aplomb and abiding passion, The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society masterfully traces the deep roots of the Arab immigrant experience. These unforgettable interlocking stories follow an Arab family as they flee the Middle East in the nineteenth century, settle in Montreal in the twentieth, and face the collision between tradition and modernity in the twenty-first. This family includes trailblazing Lebanese freedom fighters, undercover operatives in World War II, and brave Syrian refugees trying to find their place in Canadian society. The line of daring women culminates in Azurée, a young Arab woman living in the echoes of her ancestors' voices.

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Heartsick, reverent, irreverent, and quietly political, Trinity Street is the much-anticipated fifth collection from poet Jen Currin, winner of the Audre Lorde Award and a Lambda finalist. While Trinity Street is in fact an actual street in Vancouver, it is also the site of an imaginary garden and imperfect utopia in the title poem of this new collection. Currin’s poems weave together the meditative and the disruptive, the queer and quotidian, and the worlds of the dead and the living. Connections are made through prayer and protest; friendships are forged on a planet challenged by climate crisis, collective grief, and the perils of late capitalism. These poems vibrate with unexpected shifts and precise, startling imagery, the touchstones of a poet whose work critics have described as “thrilling,” “emotionally evocative,” and “revelatory.”

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Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award Winner, 2023 Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community. A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.

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Finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink. Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight.

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Winner, 2023 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction Finalist, 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize A wildfire of a debut memoir by internationally recognized French/Cree/Iroquois journalist Brandi Morin set to transform the narrative around Indigenous Peoples. Brandi Morin is known for her clear-eyed and empathetic reporting on Indigenous oppression in North America. She is also a survivor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis and uses her experience to tell the stories of those who did not survive the rampant violence. From her time as a foster kid and runaway who fell victim to predatory men and an oppressive system to her career as an internationally acclaimed journalist, Our Voice of Fire chronicles Morin’s journey to overcome enormous adversity and find her purpose, and her power, through journalism. This compelling, honest book is full of self-compassion and the purifying fire of a pursuit for justice.

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A fresh look at a complex pope with a simple agenda: radically reforming the Catholic Church. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the consummate disruptor, disrupting archaic modes of church governance, disrupting our collective spiritual complacency in the face of new challenges to our human flourishing while at the same time remaining deeply faithful to the organic traditions of the church. He is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but beyond that he is a universal leader with commanding moral presence, able to connect with laypeople and with non-Christian faiths. Pope Francis is also a credible moral voice on issues of immigration, economic inequity, the devastating consequences of political populism, and the accelerating threats to the environment, in spite of the fact that he faces deep infrastructure and governance scandals in his organization. In his determination to reform the Vatican and ensure the Catholic faith evolves in a way that is relevant to the 21st century, Francis is

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Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children’s clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors’ gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother’s tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering. A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break.

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The much-loved, yet undervalued, final book of poems by British-Canadian poet John Thompson, is reissued in a handsome edition, featuring a new introduction by Rob Winger.Originally published in 1978, Stilt Jack is a series of powerful soliloquies on the complexity of love and the process of living. These are made immediate through Thompson’s command of metaphor, his eye for the New Brunswick landscape, his intense, often elliptical way of transfiguring everyday things into shorthand symbols of reality. This remarkable sequence of poems is based on the ghazal, an ancient Persian poetic form which is discussed in Thompson’s introduction to the original edition of the book.These poems more than fulfill the promise of Thompson’s first collection, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets. Stilt Jack is the last testament of a major poet at the pinnacle of his craft.

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Disturbing and sensuous, Audrée Wilhelmy’s tale of a hermetic family minding a lighthouse in willed isolation is reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.The Body of Beasts is a startling, gorgeously written novel that tells the story of the Borya family living in isolation. Their lives are altered when young Osip, peering from the lighthouse gallery sees a woman, Noé, arrive — her dress scant, her skin curiously scarred, and her manner mysterious and wild.Noé bears a child, Mie, to the eldest son on whose hunter-gathering the Borya family depends. She lives in a cabin on her own and covers the walls with drawings that allude to her mysterious life. The family’s entrenchment in nature is enthrallingly conveyed in young Mie’s sensuous ability to borrow at will the body of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. Her shape-shifting allows her to know the ways of the natural world, though only to a point. When her own awakening body starts to intrigue her, she asks her uncle Osip to “teach me human sex.” The Body of the Beasts is an imaginative tour de force, a beautifully described portrait of a world that exists outside of words; an uninhibited and erotic novel that, in the singular tradition of Québécois Boreal Gothic, explores our humanity — and animal nature.

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An honest and unaffected collection of human experiences that deftly tackles themes of grief, loss, missed opportunities, and the pain of letting go. The stories in Michael Melgaard’s poignant debut collection, Pallbearing, offer candid snapshots of life in a small town, where the struggle to make ends meet forces people into desperate choices. In “Little to Lose,” a son confronts his mother over the crushing prison of debt created by her gambling addiction. The aging divorcee in “Coming and Going” spends her days in paranoid pursuit of evidence with which to incriminate her neighbours in the derelict trailer park where she lives. And in “Stewart and Rose,” lifelong friends find love after their respective partners die — and then face loss all over again. With deceptively spare prose that carries outsized emotional weight and pathos, Melgaard brings his characters to life in sharp-edged portraits and all-too-human dilemmas, creating engaging stories that resonate with honesty and depth, and linger in the imagination.

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Acclaimed poet Nilofar Shidmehr’s debut story collection is an unflinching look at the lives of women in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada.The stories begin in 1978, the year before the Iranian Revolution. In a neighbourhood in Tehran, a group of affluent girls play a Cinderella game with unexpected consequences. In the mid 1980s, women help their husbands and brothers survive war and political upheaval. In the early 1990s in Vancouver, Canada, a single-mother refugee is harassed by the men she meets on a telephone dating platform. And in 2003, a Canadian woman working for an international aid organization is dispatched to her hometown of Bam to assist in the wake of a devastating earthquake.At once powerful and profound, Divided Loyalties depicts the rich lives of Iranian women and girls in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada; the enduring complexity of the expectations forced upon them; and the resilience of a community experiencing the turmoil of war, revolution, and migration.

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From internationally acclaimed playwright and author Robert Lepage comes 887 — an autobiographical story originally toured as a solo show. Framed by Lepage’s attempt to memorize Michèle Lalonde’s poem “Speak White,” 887 is an exploration of memory, culture, and community in Quebec.As the 40th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie in Montreal approaches, playwright Robert Lepage is invited to recite Michèle Lalonde’s seminal poem “Speak White” from memory on the special night. After agonizing hours spent attempting to memorize the piece, Lepage finds himself unable to recall a single line. In a last effort he decides to employ a mnemonic device dating back to ancient Greece called the Memory Palace — a technique of imagination and association. Lepage’s Memory Palace is 887 Murray Avenue, the apartment block where he grew up. Winding his way around the rooms of the building and the lives of the tenants therein, Lepage guides the reader through a world of recollections of 1960s Quebec, the decade that shaped the province’s cultural and political consciousness.A mesmerizing and multifaceted glimpse into the realm of memory, 887 is a tour of culture and community in 1960s Quebec through one masterful artist’s remarkable, boundary-defying perspective.

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The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined.Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done?In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.

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In the tradition of Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, Bad Singer follows the delightful journey of Tim Falconer as he tries to overcome tone deafness — and along the way discovers what we’re really hearing when we listen to music.Tim Falconer, a self-confessed “bad singer,” always wanted to make music, but soon after he starts singing lessons, he discovers that he’s part of only 2.5 percent of the population afflicted with amusia — in other words, he is scientifically tone-deaf. Bad Singer chronicles his quest to understand human evolution and music, the brain science behind tone-deafness, his search for ways to retrain the adult brain, and his investigation into what we really hear when we listen to music. In an effort to learn more about his brain disorder, he goes to a series of labs where the scientists who test him are as fascinated with him as he is with them. He also sets out to understand why we love music and deconstructs what we really hear when we listen to it. And he unlocks the secret that helps explain why music has such emotional power over us.

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Nine years in the making, award-winning poet Kevin Connolly’s new collection extends its author’s investigation of identity, authority, intention, and authenticity.What is public poetry? In an age of tweets and trolls, what should it even try to be? Through revision, redaction, ventriloquism, homage, self-sabotage, and outright plunder, the poems in Connolly’s Xiphoid Process interrogate the alleged futility and alleged insight of mid-life. Are we who we are simply because we’d otherwise be nothing? Or are we (more hopefully) something parked, for a time, in time, trying to make something useful out of the experience? Walt Whitman, Tom Petty, Alec Baldwin, Doug Stanhope, Journey, Judd Nelson, Billy Ripken, Johnny Weissmuller, Don Felder, Lindsay Lohan, Shiprock, NM, the police blotter at Point Reyes Station, California, and the moons of Saturn are all poised to make their case in the poet’s latest deliberations.

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