Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …

Billeh Nickerson is a poet for our times--a witty, urbane chronicler of life through lavender-coloured glasses. His poems, full of astonishing pleasures, speak to the wonders of the world: about "the push of knowing you're different" and "the pull of wanting to belong." Whether it is professing his unrequited love for Wayne Gretzky, or offering his …

Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player who ever lived, and from the moment he stepped onto the ice, no offensive record was safe. No other player ever netted even one 200-point season: Gretzky did it four times! On April 18, 1999, this unequaled star of the rink retired. Take stock of everything he accomplished with this photo-filled, trivia- …

Hey, golf fans--take a swing at code puzzles, crosswords, wise quotes, and "tee-offs"--plus other games and trivia about your favorite sport! See how you score on numerical golf lore: answer each question with one of the numbers on a diagrammed golf course. Then, plug that number into a given equation and do the math. If you come up with 4, it's bo …

Which batting crown champion hit the most homers? Which pitcher was given a record 16 opening- day starting assignments? How much do you know about the stars of the diamond who stole center stage by smashing records and setting landmarks? Take the challenge and test your expertise on some of baseball's most remarkable milestones, from the game's ea …

Dagger-clawed, hook-beaked, sleek-feathered, and proud, the eagle is the king of the bird world--and a vision that awes humanity. From winged messengers in ancient times to symbols of sovereignty in the present, eagles have captured our imagination with their majesty, fearsomeness, and grace. These awe-inspiring birds have all these qualities and m …

The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.

On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacke …

The militarisation of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka began in the 1970s when attempts to reconcile by peaceful means the Tamils’ claim for basic individual and collective rights with the Sinhalese need to allay their chronic sense of insecurity finally failed. Since then the struggle has intensified, erupting successively in the burning …

The multifaceted pun in the title of Mark Cochrane’s latest book of poems (a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place) is a barbed hook of seduction for the reader in love with the body of language. And it is ever so clearly the body as a willful and skillful construct of the co …

Mom’s the Word was created out of a Saturday morning writers’ support group. Getting together to share their experiences, six women performers struck upon the idea to write about what they were going through as mothers trying to maintain their careers, their individual identities and their relationships with their partners. The result is an eve …

Heaven is George F. Walker’s ‘millennium play.’ Well, sort of, if we can free ourselves from the expectation of the usual science-fiction-based projection and imposition of our current personal, cultural and spiritual values on the future of the coming millennium, considered almost mandatory for authors working in this particular genre. As u …

In her University of BC Sedgewick Lecture for 1999, Sandra Djwa relates the life and times of two illustrious professors of English, who were among the most influential teachers in Canada's history. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Garnett Sedgewick and Roy Daniells shaped the way tens of thousands of students experienced literature.

Sedgewick, the firs …

What happens when the “other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?

From the playwright of “A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance between deception …

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with Tate’s stories? It is this q …

In this first-ever insider account of the American Embassy takeover in 1979, Massoumeh Ebtekar sets out to correct 20 years of misrepresentation by the Western media of what the aims of the Iranian students and the populist revolution they personified were, and have since remained.

She also explains, in considerable detail, how one faction of the Sh …

It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery.

Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy …

Jesse's project about his immigrant ancestors is due tomorrow and he hasn't started. In a last-ditch effort to find some information about his great-great grandfather, Yossi, Jesse rummages through the mess in the attic until he finds a little battered travel case, full of pictures, and something else—a Star of David. At first it looks plain and …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

Put your knowledge of goalies to the test with hundreds of intriguing multiple-choice trivia questions and an assortment of memory-jogging games and puzzles. Discover the identity of the only goalie to captain a Stanley Cup winner, the first netminder to have his number retired by an NHL team, the modern-day puck stopper who talks to his goal posts …

The life story of one of today's NHL superstars at the peak of his profession is told through color photographs of the star in action. In a text aimed at eight- to eleven-year-olds, Kerry Banks focuses on Teemu Selanne, the "Finnish Flash." During his first NHL season in 1992, Selanne demolished all previous rookie records for goals and points and …

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring the ironic and dramatic possibilities of the stereotypes …

They are familiar comic images--a man on a psychiatrist's couch, confessing his sins; lecherous men ogling a buxom server at a cocktail party; a man and woman in tattered clothing, bickering on a deserted island the size of a living room. They are the adult cartoons popularized in literary and men's magazines and collected in pulp digests--single …

In this lavishly produced volume, Joseph Plaskett has created a prose "life in art" as colourful and vital as his finest paintings. He begins with his early life in New Westminster, BC, at a time when there were no private galleries.

Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald were among his early mentors, and they helped him to win the first Emily Carr schola …

The first Hot & Bothered, a 1998 collection of short short stories on lesbian desire, went through three printings within its first year and appeared on numerous gay/lesbian bestseller lists, rising as high as No. 2 in the Lambda Book Report in 1999. Hot & Bothered 2, the sequel, contains even more sensuous tales of lesbian seduction and fantasy. …

Double Cross: The Inside Story of James A. Richardson and Canadian Airways tells the story of James A. Richardson's dream of promoting commercial aviation in Canada. It is also the tale of how Canada lost its chance to become a world leader in aviation as a result of government short-sightedness, departmental rivalries and bureaucratic bungling. Th …

Wade Davis has been called “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity." Driven by the desire to discover new plants for healing and visions, as well as to learn about other ways of knowing the wild, Davis journeys from the rain forests of Borneo to the mountains of Tibet, from the ice floe …

Dick Dekker's observations of wild peregrines--their habits, habitats, conservation and behavior. The peregrine falcon, fastest creature on earth, stoops out of the blue to take its wary prey by surprise. Yet, this high drama is rarely witnessed by people. This book offers the unique accounts of a passionate expert who has see more than 2,000 hunts …

Think you're savvy about baseball? Well, step up to the plate and test your skills with this entertaining array of challenging puzzles! * Crosswords--A thorough knowledge of diamond lore and lingo is the key to filling these in. * Match them up: Can you find the nickname that goes with each player? * Strikeout! Solve the puzzle and learn a great ba …

Provocative, suspenseful, and dangerously sensual, Jane tells the story of a young woman's need to be loved, her wish to be wanted. Perplexed by a world that treats her as an outsider--a girl with foolish, impudent desires--she becomes that girl, using her youth and sexuality to attract and repel. Yearning to be older, to be an adult, she dances a …

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those e …

Aboriginal people in Canada took hope with the election of Trudeau’s Liberals in 1968. They were outraged when the Paper introduced by Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Jean Chretien a year later amounted to an assimilation program: repeal of the Indian Act, the transfer of Indian affairs to the provinces, the elimination of separate legal …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, White Lung is a sardonic portrait of B.C.’s racial conflicts and chaotic economy.

Praise for White Lung:

"a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host o …

Now updated with a chapter-length afterword by the editors on the end of the Deng era and its aftermath, China in the 1990s provides a comprehensive survey of a nation in transition. An understanding of this complex process requires a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach, which the editors have achieved by bringing together experts from …

The Recovery of the Public World is a collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser and the field inhabited by his work. It is a field in which the private and the public are grounded in a poetic thinking that operates within the problematics of companionship and community. The companions are “you, dear reader,” the …

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date, Divinity Bash, creates a play informed by Ionesco’s arid visions, Dali’s baroque excesses and Jim Morrison’s amateur nihilisms. As the main character, Albert’s secure and straight world begins to unravel, so does the structure of the language, leaving words and …

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal conc …

This book stands at the point where actuality and legend converge in a land as old as time. From it extends an arid landscape upon which are inscribed the stories of peoples, civilizations, ideas that enslave and beliefs that liberate. Anatolia Junction weaves together three narratives: that of Fred A. Reed’s early winter journey through high An …

scars on th seehors is bill bissett’s latest report from and to the image nation, in which his metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself:

eye dont have 2 invent th world ium / alredee in it

There is much evidence of wounding here, of things gone completely raging:

whats th mattr / why yu …

In this book, the Gitksan and Gitanyow present their response to the use of the treaty process by the Nisga’a to expand into Gitksan and Gitanyow territory on the upper Nass River and demonstrate the ownership of their territory according to their own legal system. They call upon the ancient oral history (“adaawk”) and their intimate knowledg …

Whales, although among our most important and interesting animals, have been little studied until recently. Almost a third of about seventy living cetacean species have been recorded in North American Pacific coast waters.

Our word whale describes glimpses of surfacing cetaceans; its Old English root hvael means "a wheel." A large whale's rolling ba …

Content to juggle the demands of her career and family life, Betty's charm comes from being what her co-creator Gerry Rasmussen calls "a working class hero whose spirit cannot be broken by the endless series of outrages that make up modern life."

The creative world of a northern Native community is revealed in this innovative book. Once semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Dene Tha of northern Canada today live in government-built homes in the settlement of Chateh. Their lives are a distinct blend of old and new, in which more traditional forms of social control, healing, and praying ent …

Betty Goodwin is one of Canada's most accomplished and influential artists, and her powerful works about death, loss and the traces of life have influenced a generation of Canadian artists. "Her work is not a catalogue of distress," Anne Michaels writes, but "a record of hope in its most distilled form, potent and fiercely earned." To celebrate a c …

Above all
a poem records speech:
the way it was said
between people animals birds
a poem is an archive for our times
-Dorothy Livesay, "Anything Goes"
Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is considered a pioneer of Canadian poetry; her work is infused with an extraordinary grace and power, and shaped by a prescient feminist sensibility which le …

Once Upon an Elephant is a contemporary tale of Hindu deity Ganesh and what happens when worlds, cultures, and stories collide.

A whimsical, contemporary retelling of the creation story of Ganesh--the elephant-headed Hindu deity--Once Upon an Elephant is rife with humour and political satire.

When the police find unusual boy parts--a young man's hea …

Small Worlds is a fascinating compendium: photographs of aspects of everyday objects-coins, keys, cutlery-that, in photographer Matthew Wheeler's hands, are not readily recognizable.
How well do you know the world around you-the things right under your nose and at your fingertips?
The 100 photographs, extreme close-ups of objects that surround u …