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Harry's Fragments
In a parody of a thriller novel, Harry the Hack, newly recruited literary spy, follows a mystery woman seeking wisdom and sanity.
Hell & Other Novels
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 …
The Athabasca Ryga
The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray the sights, sounds and people of Deep Creek, Atha …
White Pebbles in the Dark Forests
The third volume in Marchessault’s autobiographically based trilogy. White Pebbles in the Dark Forests traces a reconciliation between men and women, children and parents, animals and humans, and the past and future as it looks at the connections between the visible and the invisible. Following Like a Child of the Earth and Mother of the Grass, t …
Twenty Years at Play
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 …
Bonjour, Là, Bonjour
Michel Tremblay considers Bonjour, Là, Bonjour to be the best of all his works. “In Bonjour, Là, Bonjour, I apprehended the most of what I wanted to do in the theatre—to take out everything that is not strictly necessary.“
This new substantially revised translation by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco updates their original English translati …
A Record of Writing
Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces the development of Bo …
Hanging Fire
Astonishingly beautiful entrances into the personae of lost companions who reappear, animated by a voice in love with the music of their speaking.
1949
1949 continues the saga of the Mercer family, enlarged to include the extended family as well as off-stage characters from earlier plays. David French deals with the emotional and political decisions that the characters must come to as Newfoundland joins Confederation on April Fool’s Day of 1949. As recent immigrants to Toronto, the members of t …
Warriors
Warriors enters the world of advertising where, even if the product is war, the product can be sold. Two ad men lock themselves in a room to work on a new slogan for The Canadian Armed Forces — the tension of creation is brilliantly and dangerously portrayed as they consider the morality of the war machine.
Shinny's Girls and Other Stories
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 …
Sticks & Stones
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 …
Six Plays by Mavor Moore
Here is a collection intended to showcase Mavor Moore’s dramatic talent—these are theatre pieces stripped to the bare essentials of character sketches in quick, subtle lines; dramatic conflict, development and resolution with a minimum of props; and an emphasis on the performer’s resources as an actor, rather than the externals of scene chang …
Mother of the Grass
Born at the end of the first volume in this autobiographical trilogy, the little Jovette sets off on her journey across the Land of Permanent Sacrifice in Mother of the Grass. Wrenched from her childhood paradise on the banks of the St. Lawrence, she is plunged into the child-battering hell of working-class Montreal, then later into the despairing …
The Burden of Office
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 and Other Stories
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 …
Tracing the Paths
bpNichol’s The Martyrology is one of the most outrageous, challenging, intriguing and accomplished long poems written in Canada. No other poem of its length has raised the major concerns of our time with such urgency and brilliance. Initially recognized by only a few, this luminous continuing work has attracted more and more readers with the appe …
Like a Child of the Earth
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 …
Salt-Water Moon
It’s a splendid moon-filled night at Coley’s Point in August, 1926. Eighteen-year-old Jacob Mercer has returned from Toronto to the tiny Newfoundland outport, hoping to win back his former sweetheart, Mary Snow. But Mary has become engaged to wealthy Jerome McKenzie, and she is still hurt and bewildered by Jacob’s abrupt departure a year earl …
Mimosa
An authentic recreation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent background of colonial Africa. Schermbrucker’s enigmatic prose creates a sweeping historical saga from Cairo to the Cape.
Mimosa is Bill Schermbrucker’s second published work of fiction. His first book Chameleon was published by Talonbooks to high critical acclaim.
The Real World?
A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of four women and three men.
The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors
Oliver Wells, naturalist, writer, ethnographer, farmer, and stock breeder, was born in 1907 at the pioneer farm established by his family three generations before in the valley of the Chilliwack River. The name of this farm, Edenbank, echoes the rich heritage and idealist aspirations of the pioneer family who came to the valley to establish a new w …
The Box Closet
The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s …
Coast Salish Essays
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 …
Gypsy Guitar
David McFadden has set for himself, in this sequence of one hundred poems, a task both breathtaking in its scope and stunning in its accomplishment. By echoing with his gypsy guitar the troubadour tradition of the Languedoc, the great sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the redefinitions of beauty and truth of the romantics, and the distr …
Local Boy Makes Good
This book does more than collect three of John Gray’s musical plays in one volume. In his preface to each play, and in his charming and wide-ranging introduction, Gray takes this opportunity to offer his readers some startling insights into the process by which his plays have come about; into his ongoing concern that his audiences not experience …
An Error in Judgement
On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Nati …
Signs of Literature
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 …
Cambodia
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 …
Jitters
Jitters, David French’s sophisticated backstage comedy, opens on the night of a preview of a new play, “The Care and Treatment of Roses.” Within minutes, the audience is plunged into the world of the theatre, a world of instant loves and hates, easily bruised egos, contradictory interpretations of role and script—all complicated by crises …
Goodnight Disgrace
From his wheelchair in a nursing home, the aging Conrad Aiken recalls his long, stormy friendship with Malcolm Lowry. When Aiken is 40, Lowry’s father pays him to tutor the young Malcolm. But the protegé becomes Aiken’s friend, and, gradually, a real literary contender. Mercer’s powerful play reveals the shifts in the two men’s relationshi …
This Is My Own
This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941–1948 is a collection of letters written by Muriel Kitagawa during this period, as well as statements, essays and manuscripts which arose from Kitagawa’s commitment to write about the injustices of the government’s policies and to educate the Canadian public on the h …
The Fighting Days
The Fighting Days is set in Winnipeg during 1910-1917. The play focuses on the life and work of Francis Marion Beynon, a Manitoba journalist and political activist. When the play opens, Francis is on her way to Winnipeg, leaving behind a sheltered and religious rural childhood. Soon after she arrives she meets Nellie McClung and becomes involved in …
The Trial of Judith K.
Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modern business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in the increasingly obscure process.
Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
In the Shadow of the Vulture
Set in the desert on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border, this harrowing novel was inspired by an actual event: the abandonment to starvation and death of a “shipment” of Mexican immigrant workers. The sinister shadow of the vulture falls over every character in Ryga’s story—Ramon, the flesh-merchant; Juan, the bandito; Anastasio, the def …
The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie
An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.
Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon
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 …
bpNichol
Scobie illuminates bpNichol’s relationship to Dadaism, contemporary French literary theory, and the writing of Gertrude Stein, and argues strongly for Nichol’s importance as a writer of fiction.
Other titles in The New Canadian Criticism Series:
- ABC of Reading TRG
- Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism
- Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, …
The Circus Performers' Bar
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 …
Capital Tales
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 …
Remember Me
It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive stude …
Margaret Atwood
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 …
bpNichol Comics
The scope, innovation and depth (down to the heart) of bpNichol’s writing makes him one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. He is widely known for his research into genres as diverse as the lyric, the long poem, sound poetry, concrete poetry, critical theory and now, with the publication of bpNichol Comics, we can even …
Walsh
A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. The play examines Sitting Bull’s relationship with superintendent Walsh of the North West Mounted Police and is the study of the disillusionment of a man who believes in his government’s integrity but who is betrayed by that government. …
Saga of the Wet Hens
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 …