Search results for ""house of anansi press""

The eighth novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught in a labyrinth of high-level political corruption. Ava is in Shanghai for the launch of the PÖ clothing line. She has invited Xu, and over the course of the glitzy event and a late-night dinner, she detects a certain hesitancy in him. He later confides that the Tsai family, headed by Tsai Lian, the governor of Jiangsu Province and a “princeling” — he is the son of a general who was on the Long March with Mao and a member of China’s power elite — is trying to force him and his triad organization back into the drug business. Xu is already paying millions of dollars a year to various Tsai businesses, but the family wants more and thinks the new venture can deliver it. Xu believes this move would lead to his eventual destruction and feels he has nowhere to turn. If he opposes them, they will crush him. If he goes along with them, he thinks that inevitably the police and military will hunt him down.Ava sets out to help Xu deter the Tsai family. As she digs into the breadth and depth of the family’s wealth and corruption, she gets caught up in a huge tangled web, extending all the way to the U.S. and the U.K., where it reaches the top echelons of political power.

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A humorous and vivid collection of stories about the struggle for human connection by two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee Russell Wangersky.As entertaining as they are insightful, the stories in The Path of Most Resistance are anchored by the concept of passive aggression in our everyday lives: ordinary people who are quietly, desperately, and indirectly trying to impose their will on the uncaring world around them. From a woman who compulsively shops for luggage in order to sublimate her desire for a divorce to a senior citizen who tries to force his family to visit by refusing to eat, the characters in this collection try to change their lives through oblique resistance. The Path of Most Resistance is an observant and compassionate look at the feelings of powerlessness that we all share, and will have readers silently cringing and nodding in recognition of their own bad behaviour.

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A funny, poignant, and at times heartbreaking memoir about one mother and her love of beautiful objets — and how it ultimately proved destructive.Being left with a strand of even the highest quality milky-white pearls isn’t quite the same thing as pearls of wisdom to live by, as Karen von Hahn reveals in her memoir about her stylish and captivating mother, Susan — a mercurial, grandiose, Guerlain-and-vodka-soaked narcissist whose search for glamour and fulfillment through the acquisition and collection of beautiful things ultimately proved hollow.A tale of growing up in 1970s and 1980s Toronto in the fabulousness of a bourgeois Jew-ish family that valued panache over pragmatism and making a design statement over substance, von Hahn’s recollections of her dramatic and domineering mother are exemplified by the objects she held most dear: from a strand of prized pearls, to a Venetian mirror worthy of the palace of Versailles, to the silver satin sofas that were the epitome of her signature style. She also describes the misunderstandings and sometimes hurt and pain that come with being raised by her stunning, larger-than-life mother who in many ways embodied the flash-and-glam, high-flying, wealth-accumulating generation that gave birth to our modern-day material culture.Alternating between satire and sadness, von Hahn reconstructs the past through a series of exquisitely impressionistic memories, ultimately questioning the value of the things we hold dear and — after her complicated, yet impossible-to-forget mother is gone — what exactly remains.

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New York, at the end of the 1920s. Xavier X. Mortanse, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man, who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary, falls into a hole -- the beginning of myriad bizarre humiliations he suffers, only to be shown mercy by a hairdresser named Peggy Sue who will later suffer a grotesque fate. When Xavier loses his job, he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show, where freakish and sordid acts attempt to outdo each other. Violence and ugliness blend cartoonishly with comedy and music as Gaetan Soucy dares us to look into the darkest sides of human experience. No one in this fascinating tableau is who he or she appears including Xavier himself, who is, as his mother says, too many people and no one.

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Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions. In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it. For that reason, each story in this collection has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, and sometimes malevolent, presence informs the characters and their actions. Gargoyles shows one of our best writers at the top of his form.

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Fully revised and expanded, this new edition of Rob Colter's bestseller provides straightforward solutions in three sections: Grammar and Style, Punctuation, and Spelling and Common Confusions. Within each section the entries are alphabetically arranged for easy reference. This is an indispensable grammar guide that should be in every Canadian's backpack, briefcase, or handbag.

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Governor General's Award-finalist Steven Heighton employs his signature blend of emotional fierceness and linguistic beauty to tap into "This whim / against what drifts to dark." The Address Book is a collection of remarkably well-crafted love letters, letters of loss, and lyrical moments of complaint and redress where music and intelligence are the last guard against wind walls of real grief. Elegiac, angry, tender, and brazenly heart-felt, these poems achieve their effect through total conviction; a complete immersion in the rich palette of human emotions — comfortable and otherwise. The collection's second half includes the author's versions from Western poetry's sustaining giants, including Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Catullus, Homer, and Rilke.

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The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize.Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world's most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

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John Mighton’s revolutionary JUMP at Home: Grade 3 workbook, now available as a PDF for the first time for at-home learning.“John Mighton’s JUMP program has demonstrated powerfully that, with the right instruction, no one need be left behind in math.” — New York TimesJohn Mighton's innovative JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) Math program is changing the way math is taught. With these workbooks, parents and caregivers can bring the JUMP program home to keep children learning.The key to the enormous success of the program is a step-by-step teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly that children can not only understand them, but also build up great confidence in themselves and their ability.This workbook includes an introduction that clearly explains the thinking behind the program and follows the carefully designed worksheets used by JUMP tutors and classroom teachers.Royalties from the sales of the JUMP workbooks are donated to the JUMP organization.

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The A List edition of one of the major achievements in recent Quebec literature — Roch Carrier’s La Guerre trilogy is a vital, moving, and assured portrait of life in Quebec. This volume includes:La Guerre, Yes Sir! A surrealist fable set in rural Quebec during WWI. Canadian Literature greeted its first appearance in these terms: “It is the French-Canadian writer Roch Carrier who comes closest to the significance, power, and artistry of Faulkner at his best … He might well be able to do for French Canada what Faulkner did for the American South." Floralie, Where Are You? In the second installment, Carrier reaches back to the wedding night of the Corriveau parents, whom we first meet in La Guerre, Yes Sir!. Once again, a single night expands until it becomes a world in itself. But this time it is a very different concoction, mingling desire and guilt, nightmare and fantasy, as Anthymo drives Floralie back to his village through the forest. Is It the Sun, Philibert? In the final installment, Young Philibert hitchhikes down to Montreal to make his fortune, and meets a different world. As he scrambles from job to job, he discovers a new Quebec — urban, industrial, and dedicated finally to the death of the person. 
In this moving trilogy, Roch Carrier’s savage vision comes across with great urgency and Sheila Fischman’s fluid translations sing with vivacity and grace.

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What is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else? Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English? I looked for women who had made and were formed by migrations, and who were in some way marked ‘qustionably’ by the socius, and I examined what I could of the forms and shapes of their migrations—

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Ava Lee squares off against the Chinese government over a controversial film depicting the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre in the latest thriller from bestselling author Ian Hamilton. Ava Lee is in the French Riviera with Pang Fai and Lau Lau for the long-awaited premiere of Tiananmen at the Cannes Film Festival. As the film collects numerous awards and international acclaim, a distribution deal with a major American firm is arranged by the film’s producer, Chen. When several months go by with no word from the Americans, Chen decides to travel to Los Angeles to determine what is preventing the film’s release. En route from his home in Bangkok, Chen goes missing. Ava is called in to investigate and soon learns that Chen is being held by the Thai immigration services on orders of the Chinese government, which is unhappy with the film’s depiction of the infamous massacre at Tiananmen Square and seeks to punish those responsible for its production. To protect her investment, Ava must find a way for Tiananmen to be released, while keeping secret her own involvement in the film’s creation and ensuring her friends are kept safe from retribution. It's a difficult balancing act, perhaps the most difficult of her life — the stakes have never been higher nor has failure been more costly.

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Available for the first time in more than fifteen years, this collection from celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard is a provocative investigation of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire.Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality. Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard — recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The collection is now available in a handsome A List edition with a new introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure.

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The remarkable debut poetry collection from renowned bestselling novelist and Award–winning poet Paulette Jiles, reissued in a handsome A List edition.Originally published in 1973, Paulette Jiles’s first collection amazed audiences with its rare depth of texture and verbal dexterity. Her work moves through landscapes that range from Africa to Mexico to Toronto with the ease of a travelling magician. Her swift, intricate metaphors leave the reader breathless, but her work also manages to be straight, earthy, vernacular, and disturbingly perceptive.

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This stunningly intimate collection of stories is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community — the secular and religious families who inhabit it and the tensions that exist there — that illuminates the unexpected ways we remain connected during times of change. When Uncle Isaac moves back from L.A. to help his sister, Elaine Levine, care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more drama than he would like in their suburban neighbourhood. Meanwhile, a nanny miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn’t fit in at school. A woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. And down the street, a mother and her two daughters prepare for a wedding and transitions they didn’t see coming. Spanning fifteen years in the lives of a multi-generational family and their neighbours, this remarkable collection is an intimate portrait of a suburban Jewish community by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent.

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A muscle’s “twitch force” is a measurement of its energy potential. It’s history dependent: you can forget it, but it’s engraved on you where you can’t see it, and all it wants to do is repeat. Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Michael Redhill’s first collection of poetry in eighteen years, Twitch Force has a gnomic, satirical, and lucid intelligence. In “Ingredients,” heredity’s recipe is told via short-form family narrative; in “My Arrangements,” a stolen laptop battery leads to an encounter with the Israeli Olympic women’s beach volleyball team; while in “The Women,” human beauty is parsed down to the level of chromosomes: “I’m beautiful; I have my mother’s feet. The women who change into men are beautiful men who were once beautiful women.”This is poetry concerned with love and its loss, despair and hard-won hope, knowledge and essential mystery, aging and timelessness. Readers are cautioned: ideas that present as self-explanatory may be closer than they appear. Twitch Force is a stunningly realized return to the form from one of Canada’s bravest and most original poets.

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Spin has been updated with a new introduction reflecting on the current era of Brexit and Trump.Aided by masses of data, sophisticated computer modelling, and smart manipulation of social media, political strategists are reshaping the way voters think. And act. Clive Veroni analyzes the inner workings of campaign organizations to show how they build and motivate teams, and how they approach strategic and future planning. And those strategies being used to influence our choices at the ballot box will soon be used to influence our choices in the grocery store.Spin focuses on the well-known characters from the worlds of politics and marketing to reveal how all of us will be affected by the surprising new ways in which companies and politicians will try to persuade us to vote for their brands.

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A moving portrait of a father and daughter relationship and a case for late-stage creativity from Emily Urquhart, the bestselling author of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. “The fundamental misunderstanding of our time is that we belong to one age group or another. We all grow old. There is no us and them. There was only ever an us.” — from The Age of CreativityIt has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong? After all, many well-known visual artists completed their best work in the last decade of their lives, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne among them. With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we’ve done anything for the last time?The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood.

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The first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’ prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais’ masterful series won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais’ novel to life for English-speaking readers.A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past and an uncertain future, between the beauty of the world and the horrors of history.During her time here, Renata becomes tormented by thirst — for justice, for pleasure, for intoxication — while all around her, festivities are going on in joint celebration of the birth of baby Vincent and the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of three days and three nights a flock of characters assembles — an entire spectrum of humanity is depicted in the grip of doubt and suffering. In this swirling, baroque fresco, Marie-Claire Blais captures the essence of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.

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The highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry, edited by Ian Williams, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Griffin Poetry Prize finalist. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Each year, the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

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From award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill comes a masterful and moving novel in the tradition of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be.At 11:04 a.m. on January 21st, 2017, Jordan opens the door to his mother’s bedroom. As his eyes adjust to the half-light, he finds her lying in bed, eyes closed and mouth agape. In that instant he cannot tell whether she is asleep or dead. The sight of his mother's body, caught between these two possibilities, causes Jordan to plunge headlong into the uncertain depths of consciousness itself.From androids to cannibals to sex clubs, an unforgettable personal odyssey emerges, populated by a cast of sublime outsiders in search for the ever-elusive nature of self. Part ontological thriller, part millennial saga, Liminal is a riotous and moving portrait of a young man in volatile times, a generation caught in suspended animation, and a son’s enduring love for his mother.

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A brand new edition of the smash-hit play, now a wildly popular CBC TV series. Mr. Kim is a first-generation Korean immigrant and the proud owner of Kim’s Convenience, a variety store located in the heart of downtown Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood. As the neighbourhood quickly gentrifies, Mr. Kim is offered a generous sum of money to sell — enough to allow him and his wife to finally retire. But Kim’s Convenience is more than just his livelihood — it is his legacy. As Mr. Kim tries desperately, and hilariously, to convince his daughter Janet, a budding photographer, to take over the store, his wife sneaks out to meet their estranged son Jung, who has not seen or spoken to his father in sixteen years and who has now become a father himself. Wholly original, hysterically funny, and deeply moving, Kim’s Convenience tells the story of one Korean family struggling to face the future amidst the bitter memories of their past.

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At once casting aside and reinventing the confessional mode, Liar is a booklength monument to love found, betrayed, renounced, and ultimately accepted as transformative. The white-hot immediacy of detail and scorching emotional honesty of Liar make for a compelling tour through one lover's accounting for her own actions and those of her beloved. From the delusion of ownership to the pain of estrangement, Crosbie's surgical intelligence exposes what romantics so often refuse to acknowledge: the lover's own complicity in her joy and suffering. Swinging between the grotesque and the beautiful, Crosbie's depiction of the lover adrift alters how we think of the love poem -- indeed, how we think of passion itself.

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Winner, CODE’s 2016 Burt Award for First Nation, Inuit and Métis Literature In this important graphic novel, two brothers surrounded by poverty, drug abuse, and gang violence, try to overcome centuries of historic trauma in very different ways to bring about positive change in their lives.Pete, a young Indigenous man wrapped up in gang violence, lives with his younger brother, Joey, and his mother who is a heroin addict. One night, Pete and his mother’s boyfriend, Dennis, get into a big fight, which sends Dennis to the morgue and Pete to jail. Initially, Pete keeps up ties to his crew, until a jail brawl forces him to realize the negative influence he has become on Joey, which encourages him to begin a process of rehabilitation that includes traditional Indigenous healing circles and ceremonies. Powerful, courageous, and deeply moving, The Outside Circle is drawn from the author’s twenty years of work and research on healing and reconciliation of gang-affiliated or incarcerated Indigenous men.

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When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: "What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?" Her answer is "survival and victims."Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.

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A fun, informative guide to hosting the perfect party every time. "Every dinner party experience I’ve had in the last ten years at Corey’s has been incredible. But practice really does make perfect and I can now honestly say there is nowhere I’d rather be in the world than at his table … I can’t begin to express the relief I felt in reading this book and realizing there was a method to his success."- Sarah Polley, from the introduction We’ve all been there: twenty minutes before guests arrive, and you’re unsure if you’ve got enough wine, or enough chairs, or whether your friend is a vegetarian or a vegan. Hosting a dinner party is hard, but Corey Mintz can help. For his popular Toronto Star column, "Fed," he has presided over 115 dinner parties, every week opening his home to strangers and friends alike in an effort to perfect the craft of hosting. And in How to Host a Dinner Party, he shares everything he’s learned in a hilarious handbook that will appeal to everyone — from those throwing their first dinner party to seasoned entertainers looking to enhance their skills. This book guides readers through everything they need to know about hosting, starting with the golden rule — that the goal of a dinner party is to have fun with our friends, not to show off our cooking skills. It will explain why we like to gather for dinner, when we should host, who we should invite, what we should cook, and how we should cook it. Featuring recipes, anecdotes, expert analysis, and an endless bounty of how-to tips, it is the essential guide to perfecting the art of welcoming people into your home.

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These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on? In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us. Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.

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An actionable guide to mindfulness and practical ethics for any creative professional who wants to make a living without selling their soul.It can be difficult to live according to our values in a complicated world. At a time when capitalism seems most unforgiving but the need for paying work remains high, it is important to learn how we can be more mindful and intentional about our impact — personal, social, economic, and environmental.As designer and creative director Kelly Small had to do to navigate a crisis of ethics and burnout in their career in advertising, we can admit our complicity in problematic systems and take on the responsibility of letting our own conscience guide our decisions.Start with one or many of these 100+ rigorously researched, ultra-practical action steps: Co-create and collaborate Get obsessed with accessibility Demand diverse teams Commit to self-care Make ethics a competitive edge Be mindful of privilege Create for empowerment, not exploitation With a humorous and irreverent tone, Small reveals how when we release unnecessary judgement and become action-oriented, we can clarify the complicated business of achieving an ethical practice in the creative industries. Discover the power of incremental, positive changes in our daily work-lives and the fulfillment of purposeful work.

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John Mighton’s revolutionary JUMP at Home: Grade 2 workbook, now available as a PDF for the first time for at-home learning.“John Mighton’s JUMP program has demonstrated powerfully that, with the right instruction, no one need be left behind in math.” — New York TimesJohn Mighton's innovative JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) Math program is changing the way math is taught. With these workbooks, parents and caregivers can bring the JUMP program home to keep children learning.The key to the enormous success of the program is a step-by-step teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly that children can not only understand them, but also build up great confidence in themselves and their ability.This workbook includes an introduction that clearly explains the thinking behind the program and follows the carefully designed worksheets used by JUMP tutors and classroom teachers.Royalties from the sales of the JUMP workbooks are donated to the JUMP organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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