Specially edited, updated, revised and rewritten by the author, and for the first time complete in one volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, first published in 1988, as well as A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron, both of which were first published in 1980. These books have come alive in a remarkable way an …

According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium.”
In the play, the cou …

From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with t …

In this her first book of “prosaics,” Renee Rodin discovers a home in the wilderness surrounding her. Pieced together from childhood memories of Montreal, dreams of her mother’s towering absence, long distance calls with her father, street politics and the joy of children, Bread and Salt, what you bring for luck to a new house, is a joyous af …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” an …

Her star rising as a Hollywood diva, Frances Farmer chooses to join the socialist Group Theatre in New York. This idealistic, raucous and non-conforming movie star, pursued by the government for her alleged communist connections, was finally incarcerated with the help of her mother at Steilacoom, a Seattle psychiatric hospital, where she was loboto …

There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.

The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba in the spring of 1994. His observations on the decay …

The terminal illness and death of the author’s father and a recent trip to Egypt led Lola Lemire Tostevin to explore what she perceives to be the essential relation between language and death. In the hieroglyphs and carvings of ancient Egyptian temples she experienced how the bleakness of death and the desert were transformed into something that …

Life Without Instruction is based on a true story and a real trial. Artemesia Gentileschi’s father, the late-Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi, takes the unusual step of having his daughter trained in the art of painting under the instruction of his friend, Agostino Tassi. Tassi rapes Artemesia, and is taken to trial by both Artemesia and O …

Here are twenty-one user-friendly tales, set in the Okanagan Valley, Austria, Washington, Nanaimo, the Yukon, Iceland, Germany, the future — and Daphne’s Lunch Diner. The Rain Barrel is George Bowering’s first collection of short stories since 1983. Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the detail …

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity—the capitalist visio …

Available for the first time in one volume, Trees Are Lonely Company is a collection of Howard O’Hagan’s short stories previously published to critical acclaim in The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station & Other Stories and Wilderness Men.

spanning decades of O’Hagan’s experience—as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller—this …

“Neil Bishop has … revived this novel, Death of the Spider, in the true light of its prophecy (be it but dreamed), in the bright light too of its modernism, for this novel is both a poetic indictment of our contemporary society and a forerunner of the feminist novel—while admirably avoiding the traps of theory and rigidity. The author draws u …

Behind our everyday, apparently rational preoccupations lie the traces of a longing for sanctity and redemption. In these haunting, often chilling short stories, Beverley Daurio maps the sub-atomic space of contemporary alienation: a woman celebrates her divorce; a photographer trying to stay off drugs visits a monastery; an historian avoids facing …

Vancouver’s New Play Centre led the way in developing and producing the work of playwrights from Western Canada for the emergent Canadian theatre in the 1970s. The New Play Centre has been a major force in Canadian cultural life for two decades; it retains its dual role as playwrighting workshop and production company and remains an important fac …

While Mary Burns is a writer of exceptional talent in the “social-realism” school, Shinny’s Girls is a collection of stories which are more than just a “good read.” All of the stories in this collection are about mothers and daughters, written from a sensitive and perceptive “post-feminist” point of view, examining the lives of the fi …

The publication of Sticks & Stones, George Bowering’s first book of poems, has been one of Canada’s great literary mysteries for almost three decades. Rumoured to have been published by the Rattlesnake Press in 1962, yet only ever found in the darkened vaults of secretive bibliophiles in the form of imperfectly collated, incomplete press proofs …

Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media “sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of “privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Ca …

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be — husbands and wives, fat …

Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting and writing.” Though a first nove …

Wayne Suttles has devoted much of his professional life to research on the cultures of the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, especially the Coast Salish of the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound Basin. Born and raised in this region, he has been guided by a life-long love of its natural environment and wish to know how its Native peoples lived in it …

This language primer begins with a suitably esoteric-looking chapter called "The Language of Time." It isn’t until the second paragraph that the unsuspecting reader realizes Hughes is talking about the language of Time magazine, which he analyzes as a piece of fiction. Indeed, for Hughes, there is no such thing as a substantive distinction betwee …

In this disturbing collection of investigative fictions, Brian Fawcett asserts that the informational white noise of the Global Village is creating a cultural and intellectual breakdown that will eventually lead to the disappearance of local and individual identity. He argues that under the glitzy surfaces of television and the information “revol …

Douglas Glover is at his versatile best in this new collection of short stories. Urbane, stylish and slightly off-beat, the stories touch on the lives of a wide variety of human beings, whose only shared experience is the age in which they happen to meet: an abbot and a tramp sharing a seat on a Mexican train, a retarded farm boy and his incontinen …

The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context t …

The survivors and victims inhabiting the pages of Capital Tales dash forever the romantic myth that our peerless captains of industry are guiding us through the mists of progress to a shining land of prosperity. Tough, uncompromising portraits of people discovering the illusions they live by, the stories culminate in a confrontation between the nar …

Margaret Atwood’s writing, according to Davey, reveals not only an extraordinary facility with language, but also a deep mistrust of it as something shaped by an instrumental and largely male culture. Her language directs its readers to a hidden level of itself – unspoken, symbolic, gestural – and away from denotative meaning. In discussions …

One night in the Promised Land of the North of the Americas, at the centre of a fabulous vortex, four women—Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hèbert—meet, and perform six tableaux. Onstage, the women talk and gallop, they sit and rock; they descend from the heavens like angels, they menstruate, they sing; they bake brea …

“The leopard may not be able to change its spots, but the chameleon sure can.” In Chameleon & Other Stories, Bill Schermbrucker takes as his central metaphor a creature who changes its colour to reflect and blend in with the environment, just as human beings are sometimes asked to change their colour to reflect and blend in, to protect themselv …

Brian Fawcett explores the connection between track and existentialism, pool and foolscap, tomato cans and the Knights of the Round Table. In the process, he becomes a horse, confronts the Red Menace and almost drowns himself. This book is for anyone who knows what it’s like to learn—literally and figuratively—the rules of the game.

According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, “Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this image and focuses on it. The Fairies Are Thirsty is …

In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, Michel Tremblay examines the sacred and the profane—their similarities and differences; how they merge and become one another. The play consists of two interweaving monologues on religion and sex spoken by Manon (from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou) and Sandra (from Hosanna). In the end, both characters realize that th …

In Real Mothers, a collection of short stories, Audrey Thomas journeys to France, Greece and Africa; she also writes about Galiano Island, B.C., where she lived while these stories were taking shape. Real Mothers concerns itself with women who, in one way or another, are mothers; with mothers and daughters; with mothers and husbands—or lovers; an …

Boiler Room Suite is Rex Deverell’s play about two Skid Row winos who have climbed into the boiler room of an abandoned hotel on the Prairies to seek refuge from winter and from the world, until it turns kinder. Aggie Rose is a former actress and Sprugg is a failed poet. Together they act out their fantasies, trying to bring “a little warmth, …

Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories, some of which were first published in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. Jane Rule is also the author of Desert of the Heart and Memory Board.

In the sensual and tender “Middle Children,” two closeted young lesbians radiate the joy of their love …

Crabdance is a tragicomedy in three acts in which a lonely, middle-aged woman plays elaborate, ritualistic games with three men whom she forces to play the roles of her son, her husband and her lover.