Search results for ""Goose Lane Editions""

A compelling personal memoir and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic indifference and agenda-driven government policies.In his thirty years in the Canadian prison system, Robert Clark rose from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada's most dangerous and notorious prisoners, including Paul Bernardo and Tyrone Conn. He dealt with escapes, lockdowns, prisoner murders, prisoner suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes. He has managed cellblocks, been a parole officer, and investigated staff corruption. Clark takes readers down inside a range of prisons, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for mentally ill prisoners and the notorious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. In Down Inside, he challenges head-on the popular belief that a "tough-on-crime" approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation. Wading into the controversy about long-term solitary confinement, Clark draws from his own experience managing solitary-confinement units to continue the discussion begun by the headline-making Ashley Smith case and to join the chorus of voices calling for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.

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Winner, E.J. Pratt Poetry AwardShortlisted, BMO Winterset AwardCarmelita McGrath's Escape Velocity -- the long awaited follow-up to her Atlantic Poetry Prize-winning collection To the New World -- culls overlooked fragments from our domestic lives and ferries them on unpredictable journeys. A conversation with a telemarketer becomes a monologue on overcoming loss, stray animals provoke cautionary tales shared between generations of women, and junk mail fosters a meditation on necessity, debt, and the inevitability of one's passing. From the elegiac, to the playful, to the meditative, McGrath effortlessly shifts from a natural refinement to a near breathless elegance. Well worth the wait, Escape Velocity marks the return of McGrath's receptive intelligence, gathering strength and taking flight.

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In this his newest book, Peter MacCallum has assembled collections of his documentary photographs of the last decade that examine the particularities of the vernacular spaces of human labour, commerce, and habitation. Conceived as series, these documentary photographs juxtapose the miscellany of the commercial architecture of Toronto's Yonge Street with the uniform elegance of rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris; an aging zinc foundry in Montreal with a venerable independent garage in Toronto; the functional Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto with the tiny, lushly decorated Théâtre du Tambour Royal in Paris. Shifting from the industrial to the moumental to the domestic, MacCallum's roving eye lands upon the gritty morphology of the coal-fired Lakeview Generating Station, the restoration of Walter Alward's great limestone monument at Vimy Ridge, and the classical Greek spirit expressed in the front porches of ordinary Toronto houses dating from the early decades of the 20th century. The result is an engrossing collection of photographs that reveal a disarming beauty in sites that both embody and encompass a rich history of industry, commerce, and human habitation.

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An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013A Globe and Mail Top 100 for 2013A Quill & Quire Best Book of 2013Longlisted, Frank O'Connor International Short Story AwardSavage Love marks the long-awaited literary return of one of Canada's most lauded and stylistically brilliant authors. Slyly holding forth with subversive wit, Glover skewers every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural&emotional institution of love we are instructed to hold dear. Peopled with forensic archaeologists, members of ancient tribes, horoscope writers, dental hygienists, butchers — Glover's stories are of our time yet timeless; spectacular fables that stand in any era, any civilization. Whether we be sexually ambiguous librarians or desperadoes of the most despicable kind, Glover exposes the humanity lurking behind our masks, and the perversities that underlie our actions. Absurd, comic, dream-like, deeply affecting (on the molecular level): these stories revel in inventiveness yet preserve a strict adherence to the real. Glover directs his focus to moments when things seem too incredible to be supported, pointing us to truths that exhibit human nature in contexts we all recognize. Savage Love marks the return of a master, with laugh-out-loud stories of the best kind, often completely unexpected, rife with moments of tragedy or horror. This is Douglas Glover country, and we are all willing visitors.

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Winner, 2017 ReLit AwardKatherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions. Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface. And yet, for all its unflinching and raw lyricism, the poetry of All the Gold Hurts My Mouth is warm and searching, full of humour and hope. Engaging her readers with lush vocabulary and spare, tightly controlled forms, Leyton's poems become a rich quest for identity, authenticity, and nature uncorrupted. Reaching gloriously from isolation and pain to connection with love, Leyton channels the wit of past feminists to create a manifesto for our time, an affirmation of what might be possible.

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A man in a darkened workshop, surrounded and obscured by dust clouds. A pair of larger-than-life hands, holding a mallet, ready to strike. Spectacles that play with the idea of turning lies into truth and cynics into believers. A cinder block, precariously suspended above a fragile glass, held in place by a single line of tension. Welcome to John Greer: retroActive.Sculptor, conceptual artist, and unconventional art maker John Greer has been telling stories through his work for more than fifty years. Drawing on his present and past experiences, his travels and exploits, and his anxieties and fears, his work offers poignant meditations on the human environment, all the while challenging the viewer's perspective with humour, intelligence, and a trail of narrative.RetroActive offers a comprehensive view of Greer's work and his commitment to the discourse of sculpture. Stunningly designed by Susanne Schaal and featuring the photographs of Raoul Manuel Schnell, the book contains more than three hundred representations of Greer and his work - in situ, in galleries, in process - bringing into focus Greer's significant contributions to the world of art and ideas. Also included in the book are essays by Ray Cronin, Andria Minicucci, Dennis Reid, Ron Shuebrook, David Diviney, Sarah Fillmore, and Vanessa Paschakarnis.John Greer taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for almost three decades, where his thinking and teaching helped shape contemporary sculpture in Canada. His work has been included in more than fifty solo and sixty group exhibitions and is held in public and private collections around the globe. In 2009 Greer was the recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada's highest distinction in the field of art and culture.

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A century after the beginning of the Great War, the contributions of the Maritimes to the formation of the Canadian Expeditionary force remain relatively unexplored. Till the Boys Come Home examines the conduct of the war through the eyes of one particular agricultural and coal-mining community. As the clouds of war gathered across the Atlantic, the people of Queens County found themselves caught between the forces of tradition and change, struggling to balance military service with their commitments to domestic industry and charitable volunteerism. While their contribution to the overall military effort lagged behind that of the province at large, they were nonetheless determined to supply comforts to men at the front and to remind them that they were not alone in their fight — suggesting that, in the community, peoples' sense of patriotic duty extended to their main business of feeding and fuelling the province. With few exceptions, the men and women of Queens County supported the war by taking care of their own — both those from the county who volunteered for service and the families they left behind. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Curtis Mainville discusses patterns of military enlistment and labour; the intersections of local, regional, and national politics; and the ongoing tensions between the war effort and domestic needs, Till the Boys Come Home links the experiences of Queens County's men and women on the home front to those of their brothers and sisters serving overseas, resulting in a rich portrait of a community at war. Till the Boys Come Home is volume 22 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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The premise is deceptively simple: a dirt-poor charwoman and former prostitute leans on her mop and tells her life story. But what a story! As she reminisces and rants, telling stories about herself, her friends and neighbours, the priest and his church, and every other aspect of life in her village, she is actually telling the story of Acadie. More than 30 years after its first publication in English, and five years since Wayne Grady completed this new translation, La Sagouine is available in this new, updated edition. Faithfully interpreting Antonine Maillet's distinctive text, Wayne Grady brings out the cultural richness of the language as well as La Sagouine's strength of character and irrepressible humour. La Sagouine launched the careers of both Antonine Maillet and the actress Viola Léger. With sales of over 100,000 copies, it brought the existence of Acadian literature to a wide and admiring audience.

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Winner, Canadian Authors Award for Canadian History, Jeanne Clarke Memorial Local History Award, and Prince Edward Island Book Award for Non-FictionIs it possible to reach back in time and solve an unsolved murder, more than 170 years after it was committed?Just after midnight on April 21, 1842, John McLoughlin, Jr. — the chief trader for the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Stikine, in the northwest corner of the territory that would later become British Columbia — was shot to death by his own men. They claimed it was an act of self-defence, their only means of stopping the violent rampage of their drunk and abusive leader. Sir George Simpson, the HBC's Overseas Governor, took the men of Stikine at their word, and the Company closed the book on the matter. The case never saw the inside of a courtroom, and no one was ever charged or punished for the crime. To this day, the killing remains the Honourable Company's dirtiest unaired laundry and one of the darkest pages in the annals of our nation's history. Now, exhaustive archival research and modern forensic science — including ballistics, virtual autopsy, and crime scene reconstruction — unlock the mystery of what really happened the night McLoughlin died.Using her formidable talents as a writer, researcher, and forensic scientist, Debra Komar weaves a tale that could almost be fiction, with larger-than-life characters and dramatic tension. In telling the story of John McLoughlin, Jr., Komar also tells the story of Canada's north and its connection to the Hudson's Bay Company.

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In his second collection of poems, Jeff Latosik looks to those provisional moments of arrival and anchoring in what Canadian poet Don Coles has called "the catastrophe of time." Safely Home Pacific Western is a combination of words common to travel-package tour buses, and, as the title implies, there will be journeys to be had: into ruined stretches of the rural US and Ontario mine country, across the English Channel in a hot air balloon, into the flight paths of fish hurled across Northern Territory Australia by a water spout, and even the far blinking orbit of a Navstar satellite. But unlike that modern promise of a brief, comfortable excursion, these poems often end up in strange, uncomfortable places that shore up the always prevalent chaotic impulses of civilization, finding not reconciliation but charged moments of witness, of coming to terms with the very act of looking. Moving through alternate histories, cutting edge and antiquated technology, and the wily language of patent and invention, Safely Home Pacific Western peers deep into the notion of personal and communal progress to reckon with the only seeming certainty: that in a poem, as in our lives, we are done and undone by the emergent element we cannot control.

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The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" is from Douglas Glover's 1991 Governor General Award-nominated story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

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In the aftermath of the 1960s, tensions simmer beneath the surface of a small town in rural Massachusetts. Watergate and the war in Vietnam have shaken Americans' faith in their government, the energy crisis clouds the future, and the civil rights movement has given way to uneasy race relations. But identical twin sisters April and Pilgrim live happily on their parents' farm, sharing a secret language and uncanny closeness. The twins shelter each other from the wider world, until adolescence and the hard realities of adult life catch up to them. In 1975, when the girls are sixteen years old, their father single handedly recruits a young Bahamian doctor to minister to the town's residents. While racial prejudice keeps patients away from his door, the idle "Dr. Panama," as April and Pilgrim refer to him, spends much of his time with the family. While the relationship between the girls and the young doctor begins to strain the bounds of propriety and comes to light, the family is torn apart. Years later, on the eve of the 2008 election that would sweep Barack Obama into the White House, the adult Pilgrim, long estranged from her family, learns her father has died and her mother, now suffering the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, is living in homecare. When she returns to Massachusetts to see her mother, Pilgrim discovers a country in financial crisis and her bucolic childhood home in shambles. It is in the midst of this decay that Pilgrim picks up the threads of her past and finds herself finishing what was begun three decades earlier.

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And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection, or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet: ALDEN NOWLAN's "A Boy's Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988. The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" from DOUGLAS GLOVER's 1991 GG-nominated story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY's unforgettable Christmas story "The Three Marys," adapted from her award-winning debut novel, Strange Heaven, published in 1993. Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN's glittering story "Simran" from her 1996 debut collection, English Lessons and Other Stories. KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER's haunting "What Had Become of Us," from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, Way Up. The extraordinary "Knife Party" from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.

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"One could do worse than to grow up on a river." In his new collection of essays, Wayne Curtis voyages back through the tributaries of his past, throwing a pastoral net over the backwaters of his childhood to ensnare the sepia-tinged moments of love, loss, and life lessons he gleaned through his rise to maturity on the waterways of New Brunswick. As Proust recalled his past through the delicate taste of a madeleine, so, too, Curtis ruminates on growing up on the Miramichi, albeit through the more uniquely Canadian flavour of the home-cooked doughnut. Curtis writes of the simple pleasures of fishing with friends, of one's first unforgettable kiss, and of a father who teased his children that "all dreams that were told before breakfast had a better chance of becoming real." Of Earthly and River Things is at once a nostalgic trek through history and elegy for a vanishing culture, a world where its people were grateful to the river for its bounty.

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David Askevold broke into the art scene when his work was included in the seminal exhibition Information at New York's MOMA 1970, which cemented Conceptualism as a genre. He later became recognized as one of the most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art; his work has been included in many of the genre's formative texts and exhibitions. This illustrated volume takes readers on an eclectic journey through the various strains of Askevold's pioneering practice — sculpture/installation, film and video, photography and photo-text works, and digital imagery. David Askevold moved from Kansas City to Halifax in 1968 to lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. During the early 1970s, his famous Projects Class brought such artists as Sol Lewitt, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner to work with his students, focusing critical attention on his adopted city and on his own unorthodox approach to making art. He quickly became on one of the most important conceptual artists practicing in Canada and throughout his career he remained at the vanguard of contemporary practice. David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East features essays by celebrated writer-curators Ray Cronin, Peggy Gale, Richard Hertz (author of The Beat and the Buzz), and Irene Tsatsos as well as several of Askevold's contemporaries including Aaron Brewer, Tony Oursler, and Mario Garcia Torres. It accompanies an exhibition that will open at the National Gallery of Canada in October 2011 and will tour thereafter to the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

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SUMMER, 1974 — Six teenaged boys died and fifty-four were injured in an explosion on a Canadian Forces Base in Valcartier, Quebec. A live grenade inadvertently made its way into a box of dud ammunition, and its pin was pulled during a lecture on explosives safety. One hundred and forty boys survived, each isolated in their trauma, yet expected to carry on with their lives. Thirty-four years later, Gerry Fostaty, who was an 18-year-old sergeant that summer and one of the first on the scene after the explosion, received an unexpected email from his former sergeant-major, triggering a journey into memory, a quest for a true picture of what had happened on that day. In As You Were, Fostaty pieces together the story of how a series of preventable mistakes led to tragedy. The only full account of an event that received minor attention at the time, As You Were is the story of a normal day turned horrific, how duty, responsibility, and honour make ordinary people take extraordinary measures, and how an embarrassed military did their best to ignore this devastating incident.

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In 1985, Gary Geddes won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, for The Terracotta Army, a brilliant sequence of his Chinese sonnets. The nine-couplet poems were inspired by his 1981 visit to the archaeological site in China where more than 8,000 individually sculpted, life-sized soldiers and horses were interred in the third century to accompany Emperor Ch'in Shi Huang Di into the afterlife. In this ideologically charged volume, Geddes gives voice to a few soldiers, who engage in myriad debates about the abuse of power, the yin-yang dance of narrative and silence, and the sanctity of the idiosyncratic self in the face of conformity. This new edition of The Terracotta Army, published to coincide with the Canadian tour of The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army, opening at the ROM in late June 2010, pairs Geddes' poems with photographs of the terracotta soldiers.

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An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013Romain was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. At 18, he leaves his family for a home in the forest, learning to live off the land rather than his family's wealth. Éléna flees a house of blood and mayhem, taking refuge in a monastery and later in the rustic village of Rivière-aux-Oies. One day, while walking in the woods, Éléna hears the melody of a clarinet and comes across Romain, who calls himself Starling and whom Éléna later renames Douglas, for the strongest and most spectacular of trees. Later a child named Rose is born. Fade to black. When the story takes up again, Douglas has returned to the forest, Rose is in the village under the care of others, and Éléna is gone. From these disparate threads, Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times. As the years pass, the story broadens to capture others in its elegant web — a doctor with a bruised heart, a pharmacist who may be a witch, and a teacher with dark secrets. Together they raise this child with the mysterious heritage, transforming this story into an ode to friendship and family, a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion. The Douglas Notebooks was originally published in French as Les carnets de Douglas. This edition was translated by Sheila Fischman.

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In this new edition of Alden Nowlan's poignant first novel, published posthumously in 1988, a boy growing up in a small Nova Scotia mill town is abandoned by the young mother he adores. Family relationships, sexual confusions, and the pains of love are rendered with deep and authentic feeling. This is an essential book for all readers who have admired the work of this major Canadian writer.

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One of Canada's most successful homegrown buisnesses, Black's Photography grew from a single store to a national, and international, chain. Robert Black, the former Vice President, weaves his own, and his family's, story into the history of the company. Beginning with his great-grandparents, Robert takes the story through the generations, imparting what each had contributed to the success of Black's. Part family history, part autobiography, and part business history, Picture Perfect is a unique look at a unique family business that rewrote the book on photography. Black and his brothers used new methods of advertising, took advantage of every innovation, did their own photofinishing, and introduced the practice of printing 4 x 6 photos, when no one else was doing it.

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George Sipos hears the frog song at two in the morning and wonders if it is passion that drives it or the loneliness of spring. In another poem, the wet leaves of fall are described in language that cuts two ways: "I work the rake, / you the wheelbarrow. when we get tired we will change." With quiet humour, he writes of nature, the land, and the tasks of an ordinary day. Alive with sublety, The Glassblowers quietly turns images and metaphors the way we might turn a small stone between our thumb and fingers to see its facets and colours.

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In this punchy, uproarious romp of a novel, the Halifax boxing world — peopled with has-beens, wannabes, and posers dressed in spandex, leopard prints, and tie dye — touches gloves with the colourful world of sports reporting. Both groups need something hot with speedy delivery. Enter a cast of misfits. There's Turmoil Davies, an enigmatic Trinidadian heavyweight poised to storm the Halifax boxing world. There's Ownie Flanagan, an old-school trainer who scans the obituaries for odd names and trains men with more ambition than talent. He's looking for "one real fighter" before he retires and believes Turmoil is it. And then there's Scott MacDonald, a journalist assigned to the boxing beat — a grotty but welcome getaway that promises to let him relive his own glory days through other men's sweat. With a wicked sense of humour, Elaine McCluskey conjures a larger-than-life world where spotty turf is defended with klutzy bravado down to the final, unpredictable ten-count.

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Shortlisted, Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry and Dartmouth Book AwardIn the "Boogie Nights" era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back -- meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. Rastafarian for "you and me," "I & I" expresses the oneness of God and man, the oneness of two people or the distinction between body and spirit. In George Elliott Clarke's hands, this existential aesthetic crystallizes in a love story of Gothic grit. The narrative gives this verse novel shape; the poetry makes it sing, straddling folk ballad, soul, and pop music, all the while moaning the blues.

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With blood on his hands, Curtis Woolf flees his home in New Mexico for Canada, where he starts a religious commune, the Family. There he heals others and preaches pacifism while enduring the torment of this own damaged soul. Then his lover, Martha, finds his gun and goes south to discover the truth, whatever that might be. Curtis sets out to bring her back, lest the Family fall apart. In the half-light of a nursing home sits Hollis, dragon lord of a lost Mormon line, who has anointed Curtis, damned him, and now awaits his return.Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's writing is full of dark humour and razor-sharp insight. Catching human fallibility head-on, she demands examination, confrontation, and a reckoning of pain with beauty.

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In 1917, the Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge in northern France, and a myth grew that Canada -- as a nation -- was born on its slopes. But the cost was tremendous: 10,000 Canadians were killed, wounded, or went missing in the three-day battle. Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Robert Borden assembled a "Union Government" to support conscription and called an election on the issue. Canada split along ethnic lines: English Canadians supported conscription; French Canadians rejected it. By year end, Canada teetered on the brink of civil war. As Andrew Theobald reveals, New Brunswickers were not spared the bitter divisiveness of the larger national debate. Determined to win the election, federal politicians fanned the flames of ethnic tension, pitting English against French and Irish Catholics against Protestants. In the end, the Conscription Crisis of 1917 fractured the ethnic harmony of New Brunswick, leaving a lasting and tragic legacy. The Bitter Harvest of War is Volume 11 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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An affair. A marriage. Accidental encounters. A secret spying mission masquerading as research for a short story on desire. This is the rich ground from which The Darren Effect springs, carrying us through the complexities, tragedies, and unanticipated triumphs of love and loss. The Darren Effect is a miraculous novel, in which the characters coalesce and crisscross in awkward, surprising, and hilarious ways. Damaged by grief and circumstance, Heather, Isabella, Darren, and Benny offer each other heartbreak, love, and redemption at a time when all previous points of reference have vanished.

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Harry L. Gill, of Fredericton, New Brunswick, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 at the age of 18. During his short but adventure-filled career, he flew a Hurricane fighter bomber over France, England, and India and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. In 1943 his airplane was shot down over Burma, and he died in the crash. Hurricane Pilot captures the perspective of a young man in the middle of a war in Europe and Asia. Drawing extensively on Gill's correspondence with his parents and his siblings, this very personal account of war shows how Gill was transformed from a small-town boy to a mature fighter pilot serving in a global war on another continent. His letters depict the enthusiasm of youth, a strong sense of humour, his plans for the future, and this continuing attachment to home. Hurricane Pilot is volume 10 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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Winner, Dartmouth Book AwardShortlisted, Atlantic Booksellers Choice AwardA small Canadian island declares its independence to the world and benign anarchy reigns. A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island's inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers' guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce's novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

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One night, Agatha Winter's phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It's the anniversary of their mother's accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches "willing amnesia": liberation by deliberately forgetting and disowning the past. But "willing amnesia" is no innovation: it runs in the family. The girls' grandmother and great-grandmother, both Holocaust survivors, have found their own superficially innocuous yet fiercely destructive ways to fend off memory. In separate struggles, the girls work to break free from the burden of their family's silence. Told in three major and two minor voices, Cricket in a Fist offers sophisticated psychological insight. Lewis's rich command of language transports us into a world of richly imagined characters.

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With a supple, meditative approach, Erin Knight explores the complexity of beauty in this first collection by an astonishing new talent. The Sweet Fuels also reflects on the notion of orientation -- whether in terms of magnetic north or street signs, the entrails of an animal or the vowels in a name -- as a task of translation. Of the more than four dozen poems in the book, some are written in English, others are rendered from Spanish. Still others perform a high-wire act -- written in English, converted to Spanish, and then back into English. The practise of translation allows for a direction that does not try to reorder or simplify the world, but rather emphasizes the promise of continuous engagement with our points of reference.

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In the early 1860s, Irish immigrants in the United States were eager to help the Fenian brotherhood overthrow the British in Ireland. The American Fenians' mission: to invade British North America and hold it hostage. New Brunswick, with its large Irish population and undefended frontier, was a perfect target. The book tells how, in the spring of 1866, a thousand Fenians massed along the St. Croix River and spread terror among New Brunswickers. When the lieutenant-governor called in British soldiers and a squadron of warships, the Fenians saw that New Brunswick was no longer an easy target, and they turned their efforts against central Canada. The Fenian "attacks" and the demand for home defence fanned the already red-hot political debate, and a year later, in July 1867, New Brunswick joined Confederation. Turning Back the Fenians is volume 8 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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Sometimes the life we have constructed needs to fall apart before we can begin the process of making something better. After his first marriage ended, Philip Lee found himself living with his younger brother in an old fisherman's house by the sea, trying to restore some order to the wreckage of his life. It was a dark year of rain-bucket showers, blowtorch espresso, and abandoned renovation projects. They were bachelors in every sense of the word.With wit, warmth, and sensitivity, Philip Lee writes about this dark year, the struggle to rebuild his life and family and his rediscovery of love's possibilities. Lee's journey takes him from the coastlines of Eastern Canada to the cities of China and the Greek island of Naxos. Cutting to the heart of the matter, he explores how it is that we might lift ourselves up through the great work of love.

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In On the Eighth Day, Antonine Maillet imagines a solution to the world's problems: a wider and more exuberant world, with its right more left and its left more right, created on "the day when everything is dared and anything is possible." She spins a tale of two brothers -- a giant carved from an oak tree and a scamp shaped out of bread dough -- born one remarkable night when magic made wishes come true. Thrilled to have a son to call their own, Mr. Goodman and Mrs. Goodwife play favourite and bicker over which creation is the better child, causing a rift in the family. To ease the fighting, John-Bear and Big-as-a-Fist decide to set off to seek their fortunes. But first they must visit their godmother, Clara-Galante, to receive their inheritance. A witch who lives deep in the woods, she gives them three wishes and some kind words, before sending the heroes "out into the world to follow their curious destiny beyond the hills on the horizon," left foot first for good luck. Wending their way through unforgettable lands -- the Timeless Village, the Upside-Down Town, the Path of the Vicious Circle -- the lads make many strange friends, who, peculiar as they are, seem strangely familiar. But, wherever Life leads them, Death lurks close behind. A wonderful picaresque akin to a cheerful Gulliver's Travels, a comic Pilgrim's Progress or an Acadian Wizard of Oz, On the Eighth Day is a fast-moving tale starring richly developed characters in a funny and poignant road story in which allegory gains power by taking a back seat to enchantment.

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Where did passports come from? Why did 1930s stewardesses carry wrenches? And how did teetotalers shape the modern vacation? Wanderlust answers these questions and more, as author Laura Byrne Paquet delves into the social history of travel. Now a multi-billion dollar industry, travel is also one of the world's oldest. Paquet follows hypochondriac Greeks to the Oracle of Delphi, checks out the bedbugs in medieval coaching inns, enjoys a Finnish sauna with a group of well-bred Victorian ladies, and relaxes on a transatlantic liner with some of England's Bright Young Things from the 1920s. In breezy style, she explains the difference between a traveller and a tourist and explores the future of travel, from grand plans for commercial space travel to underwater hotels. As the book reveals, we've always loved to travel -- the only thing that keeps changing is how we get from here to there.

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In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love -- not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hippies and idealistic students. Baking by day in the hot sun and tormented by mosquitoes and blackflies, Alma and her fellow planters relieve their backbreaking toil at night with sex, dope, and alcohol. But her brief passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer named Willem raises the ire of Karl (whose amorous attentions she has deflected in the past), and he viciously rapes her. Pregnant and alone, Alma flees to an abandoned mining camp where she and Willem once made love. There, with the help of the camp's single weird inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby an increasingly ominous new life. Weaving together Alma's story with an ancient Flemish folktale about a peasant girl's magical hold over a lustful count, Kuitenbrouwer links the power of narrative with the passion for self-realization. The Nettle Spinner is a gritty, sensuous debut that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

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Sheree Fitch's best-selling adult poetry collection explores the shadows that never penetrate the sunlit world of her children's books. With over 5,000 copies sold of the first edition, this second edition 10 years later and 13 poems wiser adds depth and texture to the original collection; like a fine cognac, it has become richer with the passing years. Sheree Fitch's refreshingly direct lyrics explore the harsh realities of women's lives and the many kinds of shelter they create for themselves and give to each other. The title suite is peopled by battered wives, single mothers, women who are poor and perhaps homeless, and exhausted caregivers, with each woman speaking in her own voice. The new poems in "Moonsongs" express a decade's personal development, not in the form of answers, but in the form of more pointed questions. In This House Are Many Women and Other Poems demonstrates Fitch's poetic depth and versatility. But whether she writes passionately of victims and workers in a woman's shelter, finds epiphanies in family life, or examines the uncertainties of romantic love, Fitch never loses her sense of humour. Who else but the creator of Mable Murple could conjure up Diana, the domestic acrobat who transforms her home into a circus or Eve, the mother of us all, offering child-rearing tips?

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Hot on the heels of Douglas Glover's Governor General's Award for fiction for his riotous novel, Elle, Goose Lane has brought back into print Glover's hilarious novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, originally published in 1988. At the centre of this story of a modern-day knight errant is Tully Stamper, a bankrupt, a liar, a tippler of corn juice and a deadbeat husband who has abandoned his wife and child no fraudulent psychiatric grounds. He is also one of the world's last innocents. The setting for Tully's adventure is Gomez Gap, Florida, a sliver of the Old South turned into a Hollywood backdrop for the movie recreation of a famous Civil War battle. From the time Tully stumbles out of the swamp and into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her flamboyant film-director husband Oscar Osterwader to the moment when the enraged citizens of Gomez Gap carry him back to the swamp and leave him chained to a pine tree to die, we are Tully's co-conspirators, his partners in crime, sharing his pain, his optimism and his wayward wit. A disarmingly intimate and energetic portrait at once hilarious and cautionary, crazy and bittersweet, The South Will Rise at Noon shows off Douglas Glover's true comic form.

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Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski, Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country's English literary history.Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to the poets' ages at the time of writing, the poems in the book comprise a single lifeline. The reader follows an amalgam of the Poet from the passionate intensity of youth, through the regrets and satisfactions of adulthood and middle age, and into the reflective wisdom of old age.All the writings are about love, but love in a dizzying array of colours, shapes, and sizes. Deep, enduring love, unrequited love, passionate love, violent love. Here are odes and lyric ecstasies, tirades and tantrums, pastoral comforts and abject horrors -- all delivered with the vibrancy, wit, and erudition of our finest poets. Where the Nights Are Twice as Long is more than an anthology: it is an unforgettable journey into the long night of love.

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"Polari," from the Italian "polare" ("to talk") is a coded language, originating in the UK and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert personal and shared identities. It spread around the English-speaking world via the Royal Navy, the merchant marine, and cruise ships, adding and subverting many foreign-language words — like polari — along the way. While Polari does not employ this jargon or probe its success as a mode of connection between gay men, the language of Barton's poems may be viewed as an effective tool for communicating a sense of history, politics, and aesthetics. Think of Polari as a cross-sectional scan of a living tree that reveals ring after ring of Barton's experience of language, with the new buds at the tips of its branches adding colour, movement, and ornament. Most of these poems were written using set forms drawn from Robin Skelton's The Shapes of our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide of Verse Forms and Metres from Around the World (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). While the forms Barton has appropriated are not by themselves the vehicles of a particular sociolect or an anti-language, except, say, of poetry itself, he have nevertheless twisted them to follow the turns of his point of view and aesthetics. When it comes to time, geography, and subject, Polari covers a lot of ground: from child memories to the frailties and deaths of ageing parents; from Queen Victoria's coronation to the first ascent of Everest; from the October Crisis to the trial of Omar Khadr. The titles of nine poems are borrowed from the Diagram Prize, an award given out by the UK magazine, The Bookseller, for the oddest book title of the year. The titles chosen — an example is "Highlights in the History of Concrete" — may sound frivolous, even absurd, but the poems are less or more so. The serious nature of their themes being at odds with their titles gives them an engaging tension, and will be read as signature of his particular brand of polari.

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Philosophers, psychologists, and mystics perceive crisis as an opportunity for growth, with the most dramatic crisis being the experience of death. In A Good Enough Life, documentary film writer and director Susan Gabori has turned to this ultimate human experience, revealing the profound paradox of confronting life when faced with the inevitability of death. In monologues shaped from interviews with twelve terminally ill people, Gabori explores how people try to cope with death. Reflecting on the lives they have led and what still lies before them, each person interviewed for the book deals eloquently, in their own words, with a topic many people cannot bring themselves to discuss freely.The twelve speakers in A Good Enough Life are dying of AIDS, cancer, or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and range in age from thirty-three to seventy-eight. To protect their identities and those of their families, Gabori has given them names other than their own. Yet, in their own voices, they speak uninterrupted about life in the face of impending death. Gabori approached each of them, looking for answers she was sure they had, even though they might be unaware of it. They each answered questions they had never before been asked and many revealed things they had never before told anyone for fear of not being understood. All but one of the twelve people featured in the book have died. Although they led radically different lives, certain realizations and understandings echo from one portrait to another. Each story is filled with honesty and the joy of discovery in the midst of extraordinary struggles and hardships. Together, they offer a priceless gift: the opportunity to find out more about life at the end of the human journey.

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The twenty true tales in Amazing Medical Stories give a rich and entertaining picture of the ways in which medical workers (both real and fake) have used the keys to the mysterious kingdom of life: health, disease, and physical anomaly, birth, death, and post-mortem diagnosis. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to hilarity, from satisfaction of curiosity to evocation of terrible pity. Amazing Medical Stories deals with quacks and charlatans, the giants Angus McAskill and Anna Swan, the first case of antisocial personality disorder, as well as wonderous inventions and achievements by physicians.

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A kayak may seem an unlikely place for adventure, but that's exactly what you'll find in Paddling in Paradise. Author Alison Hughes has created the definitive guide to sea kayaking in Atlantic Canada. Whether she is describing the exhilaration of experiencing the world's highest tides in the Bay of Fundy, or the pure beauty of the coast of Cape Breton, Hughes shares her deep and genuine conviction that life is only truly lived with paddle in hand. In Paddling in Paradise, Alison Hughes describes eight multi-day trips off the coasts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, ranging from beautiful nature paddles that neophytes will dream about for the rest of their lives to adventures that will test the mettle of experienced sea kayakers and their guides. Photos and a map enhance each description, and each ends with a Fact File that includes contact information for outfitters, a list of special preparations or equipment, advice for travelling to nearby cities, detailed directions to put-in points, and suggestions for whale watching, cycling, and other activities that visiting kayakers would enjoy. Paddling in Paradise also includes an introduction to the region and the unique appeal of sea kayaking as well as a chapter on trip planning, safety, and all aspects of camping along the shore.

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Atlantic Canada is enjoying a renaissance unknown since the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada features work by 60 of the region's finest poets in a volume that will whet appetites for more. The earlier poetry renaissance began in 1945, with the establishment of The Fiddlehead magazine. In this new volume, the present Fiddlehead editor Ross Leckie, and his collaborators Ann Compton, Laurence Hutchman, and Robin McGrath, showcase the lasting effects of that earlier renaissance and confidently forecast that the newest generation of Atlantic poets will help to make poetry a pre-eminent literary form in Canada once again. Coastlines provides expansive reading pleasure because of the astonishing range of poetic intelligences it represents and the myriad ways poets find to work and rework the topography of Atlantic culture and landscape. The earliest poems in the anthology were written in the 1950s by the acknowledged greats — Acorn, Nowlan, and Thompson — and by Alfred Bailey, Elizabeth Bishop, and Charles Bruce. The collection also features work by senior poets such as Kay Smith, M. Travis Lane, Fred Cogswell, and Douglas Lochhead, and mid-career poets such as Elisabeth Harvor, Harry Thurston, and John Steffler. Poets of the post-1995 renaissance include Anne Simpson, Sue Sinclair, Michael Crummey, and George Elliott Clarke, who won the 2001 Governor General's Award; Lynn Davies, Sue Goyette, and Carole Langille have all been recent finalists, and both Brian Bartlett and matt robinson have won the Petra Kenney Memorial International Poetry Prize. The newest voices in Coastlines belong to Tammy Armstrong and Geoff Cook, whose work was selected from manuscripts published in 2002.

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Douglas Glover's collection of stories mezmerizes like no other. A sheer tour-de-force, the collection features eleven new stories that demonstrate that Glover is capable of writing like no other writer. Like a good Beatles album, the collection includes Glover's best new stories, linked only by the quality of the writing. The stories are wide ranging examples of fine, often comic, writing."The Left Ladies Club" is about a man who leaves teaching to become a writer, giving himself licence to live the bohemian life. In Glover's merciless portrayal, the Ragged Point literary scene consists of the sorriest bunch of excuse-mongering losers you'll ever encounter.In "La Corriveau" (ref: the Siren of Quebec who murdered her husband and was later hanged in an iron cage above a crossroads), an Anglo woman awakens to find a dead man (presumably a francophone) in her bed. In a hilarious turn-of-events, the female narrator, who cannot at first even remember the man's name nor how they happened to share the same bed, conceives of ways to hide the body in plain sight, while narrating the political implications of her circumstances interplayed with details from popular culture and Quebec history. In "Lunar Sensitivities," a mathematician and a scientist compete for the attention of a beautiful woman; in "Abrupt Extinctions at the End of the Cretaceous," dinosaurs compete for love and life. In both stories, love does everything but triumph. Ranging over time from pre-history to the present, from the American South to the Canadian North, Douglas Glover maps the heart in all its passion, valour, ineptitude, and vulnerability. Occasionally scabrous, horrifically funny, intermittently appalling, and wildly erotic, the stories in this collection bring to life a world in time, irony and desire prevail.

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A Fit Month for Dying is the third book in M.T. Dohaney's highly praised trilogy about the women of Newfoundland's outports. Fans of The Corrigan Women and To Scatter Stones will embrace this new book, while those reading the author for the first time will discover her characteristic bittersweet humour. Tess Corrigan seems to be living the good life. She is a popular politician, the first woman to serve as a Member of the House of Assembly. Her husband Greg is a successful lawyer and son Brendan is a seemingly happy hockey-mad twelve-year-old. Originally from the village of The Cove, the family is now comfortably ensconced in Newfoundland's capital city of St. John's. Urged on by Greg's mother Philomena, Tess sets out to unravel her convoluted family tree. She searches out her natural father who is living in a retirement community, or as he calls it a "raisin farm," in Arizona. Ed Strominski was an American serving at the Argentia Naval Base when he married Tess's mother Carmel. Charming and outgoing, his one flaw was neglecting to reveal the small detail that he already had a wife. The stigma of growing up as the daughter of the abandoned "poor Carmel" has shaped Tess's life.Involved with her own family problems and with her political work, Tess has no inkling of trouble when Brendan begs her to let him quit the Altar Servers' Association at their St. John's church. Always forthright, Tess insists that he fulfill his responsibilities to the organization. Her decision sets into motion a series of betrayals, revelations, and realizations that change forever her family and the village of The Cove. After a confrontation with the father of one of Brendan's friends, Tess is shattered by the disclosure that her son has been abused by their trusted priest, Father Tom. Shame and grief envelop the family and their world becomes as turbulent as the seas of Newfoundland. Deeply held beliefs are destroyed as the characters begin to challenge long imposed systems of cultural, political, and spiritual authority. But out of the ashes of Tess's life a small phoenix of hope arises in the form of Greg's brother who, on his way to a feed of capelin, reveals to her his own story of abuse and survival. Buoyed by his story, Tess begins to gather strength to rebuild her life, her family, and her faith in human nature.

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In her bold debut novel, Linda Little has crafted a story where music, creativity, and sexuality merge, as a young Nova Scotian carver embarks on a profound discovery of his sense of self. Strong Hollow tells the story of Jackson Bigney, a young man coping with a crippling past of repression, alcoholism, and poverty. Failure seems built-in to Jackson's life. His father, a brutal man with a short fuse, despises his son, and Jackson's brothers thrive on drinking, violence and petty crime. Jackson finds solace only by carving tiny objects -- acorns, field mice, bottle caps and leaves -- as he has done since childhood. The day Jackson finds his father dead in a ditch beside the MacIntyre road is the day he begins his own metamorphosis. At nineteen, the seventh of nine children and the eldest still at home, Jackson seems predestined to follow in the feckless footsteps of his father. He becomes silent and empty, unable to feel or to articulate emotion.Setting himself up as a bootlegger, Jackson builds a small cabin. He lives only in the present, expecting no more from life than work, alcohol and empty sex. One summer, Jackson meets Ian Sutherland, an accomplished fiddler and a powerful attraction develops between them. Twenty-nine and in love for the first time, Jackson feels alive with anticipation and fulfilment. Inevitably, at summer's end, Ian leaves and Jackson is shattered. Seeking to fill the void in this life, Jackson begins to restore a derelict fiddle. At a music shop in Halifax, he meets an accepting circle of friends. And as the fiddle takes shape, Jackson's perceptions of himself begin to change and he realizes that how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself.

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