Steph VanderMeulen - Editor

Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers)

More than fifty years after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye remains one of Canada's most influential intellectuals. This reappraisal reasserts the relevance of his work to the study of literature and illuminates its fruitful intersection with a variety of other fields, including film, cultural studies, linguistics, and feminism. Many of the contributors draw upon the ear... read more

Speaking for a Long Time: Public Space and Social Memory in Vancouver

Adrienne Burk

In the late 1990s, three monuments - Crab Park Boulder, Marker of Change and Standing with Courage, Strength and Pride - were built in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Located within a few city blocks of one another, the monuments were grassroots initiatives that challenged the norms of civic art by claiming a place in public space for society’s more vulnerable groups, and each figured in debate... read more

Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People

Kathryn Labelle

Situated within the area stretching from Georgian Bay in the north to Lake Simcoe in the east, the Wendat Confederacy flourished for two hundred years. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Wendat society was threatened by European disease and Iroquois attacks. Dispersed but Not Destroyed depicts the creation of a powerful Wendat diaspora in the wake of their dispersal and throughout the la... read more

Chai Tea Sunday

Heather A Clark

"Thirtysomething Nicky Fowler has it all-- a rewarding career, a loving husband and the perfect home. But when she and her husband suffer a complicated tragedy, the strain of two people dealing with an impossible situation in different ways breaks up their marriage. Emotionally lost, Nicky travels to Kenya to volunteer at an orphanage. Amidst the violence and abject poverty, Nicky discovers th... read more

Elephant in the Sky: A Novel

Heather A Clark

A testament to the healing power of unconditional love.Widely acclaimed for her emotionally powerful stories that capture the real lives of women, Heather A. Clark, bestselling author of Chai Tea Sunday, tackles the subject of childhood mental illness and the impact it has on a close family.The story begins from nine-year-old Nate’s point of view, etching the details of an unbalanced mind stru... read more

Husk

Corey Redekop

An outlandishly funny, unambiguously bloody novel about fame, love, religion, politics, and appetite It is one thing to die, alone and confused, trapped with your pants down around your ankles in the filthiest bus restroom in existence. It’s quite another thing to wake up during the autopsy, attack the coroner, and flee into the wintry streets of Toronto. It’s not like Sheldon Funk didn’t have... read more

A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic

Caseen Gaines

A Christmas Story has become a perennial holiday favourite since its release in 1983. While millions watch the movie every year on television, few know the story behind the film’s production, release, and unlikely ascent. Ralphie Parker’s quest for “a Red Ryder carbine action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time” didn’t begin or en... read more

A Timeless Place: The Ontario Cottage

Julia Harrison

As Julia Harrison's first summer of living in Ontario approached, she became aware of the culture of the cottage. Friends talked of nothing but languid afternoons on the dock, but Harrison marveled at the investment of money and labor that the idyllic escapes demanded. Curious about the rich and passionate meaning these places seemed to hold, she studied cottagers in the Haliburton region over... read more

Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada

Alison Marshall

In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For these men, the Prairies were a land of opportunity: there, they could open shops, and potentially earn enough money to marry. The result of almost a decade's research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of prairie Can... read more

Sulha

Malka Marom

Does one honour one's country, or one's heart? This classic dilemma is the theme of this lyrical and passionate first work of fiction by Malka Marom. Drawn from Marom's experiences as an Israeli and Canadian citizen, Sulha is the story of Leora's search for answers for her only son's future, through a reconciliation with her past. Sulha means peace in both Arabic and Hebrew, and against this b... read more

Watch How We Walk

Jennifer LoveGrove

When Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a star... read more

Phoebe's Way

Pamela Ditchoff

Phoebe’s Way is the story of a Saint John Ambulance therapy dog whose unsentimental lessons on aging propel this powerful work of fiction from author Pamela Ditchoff. Phoebe’s cross is carried throughout the rooms of Mersey House, a nursing home in Safe Harbour, Nova Scotia. Each chapter represents a station of the journey and an insight into the emotional weight born by the residents and thos... read more

Girl in Shades

Allison Baggio

Eleven-year-old Maya Devine has grown up with a warped view of reality. For one, she sees colour around people’s bodies and can sometimes hear what’s going on inside their heads. These insights make everyone a bit more interesting, but the one person she’ll never figure out is her mother. Marigold has never been like other moms, but still, Maya sometimes feels like she is all she has. When Mar... read more

Infidelity

Stacey May Fowles

Ronnie, a hairdresser with a history of recklessness, feels stifled by the predictable, comfortable life laid out before her with her live-in boyfriend. Charlie is an anxiety-ridden award-winning writer, burdened by his literary success and familial responsibility, including a bread-winning wife and a child with autism. When the unlikely pair meets, a filmic affair begins on office desks and i... read more

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

Stuart Ross

?Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn’t know where to turn. The memory: the assassination — by his mother — of a prominent neo-Nazi. In a non-chronological montage of memories, Ben travels back and forth thro... read more

The Miracles of Ordinary Men

Amanda Leduc

A haunting story about rapture and grace Amanda Leduc’s stunning novel is the tale of two unlikely dreamers: Sam, a man who wakes up one day to find himself growing wings, and Lilah, a woman who has lost her brother to the streets of Vancouver. As Sam finds himself falling away from the world as he grows feathers from his back, Lilah seeks sexual penance under the harsh hand of her boss, her o... read more

Ride the Lightning

Dietrich Kalteis

A fast, powerful read full of action, twists, and dark humourBounty Hunter Karl Morgen goes after Miro Knotts on a skipped bond, finding the dope dealer wrapped around an underaged girl at a rave in Seattle. Dragging Miro in the hard way gets Karl's licence revoked, while Miro gets off with a suspended sentence. Karl then finds work as a process server in Vancouver, thinking it's the kind of p... read more

Hidden Harvest: The Rise and Fall of North America's Biggest Cannabis Grow Op

Mark Coakley

Mark Coakley lifts the veil in Hidden Harvest on the untold story of a group of criminals — Ontario police would call them “a gang with no name” — whose most famous exploit was turning an abandoned Molson beer factory north of Toronto into a giant indoor jungle of cannabis. The operation produced tens of millions of dollars in profits, and involved gun smuggling, slavery, violence, pornography... read more

Return to Food: The Life-Changing Anti-Diet

Sherry Strong

Chances are if you are feeling flat, fat and tired, or are experiencing chronic illness, you are not eating real food. If you want to bounce out of bed feeling fit and fabulous you must find out what is and isn't real food. This book challenges prescriptive approaches to diet, eating and food, with a revolutionary philosophical approach based on science and studying the healthiest, longest liv... read more

Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words

Malka Marom

When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom had the opportunity to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she was eager to reconnect with the performer she’d first met late one night in 1966 at a Yorkville coffeehouse. More conversations followed over the next four decades of friendship, and it was only after Joni and Malka completed their last recorded interview, in 2012, that Malka... read more

The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: Heroes & Icons (Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame series)

Steven Johnson, Greg Oliver, Mike Mooneyham, J. J. Dillon

The legendary good guys worthy of a spot in the pro wrestling hall of fame At its core, professional wrestling has always been about the forces of evil trying to undermine everything good — and a red hot heel needs a valiant hero to battle against, someone fans can root for, identify with, and look up to. Wrestling heroes like Hulk Hogan, Dusty Rhodes, The Rock, and Andre the Giant are celebra... read more

Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories (Literary Translation)

Cloudburst is a milestone in Canadian literature. For over a half-century, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and continuing through the coups d'etat and military repression in South and Central America in the 1970s and 80s, Spanish-speaking writers have been arriving in Canada as exiles and immigrants and have been creating new works in their native language. Cloudburst is the first antholo... read more

They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf: Written by Christa Wolf, 2013 Edition, Publisher: University of Ottawa Press [Paperback]

Christa Wolf

Swinging the Maelstrom: A Critical Edition (Canadian Literature Collection)

Malcolm Lowry

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry.This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by ste... read more

Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers)

Margaret Atwood enjoys a unique prominence in Canadian letters. With over thirty books to her credit, in genres ranging from children's writing to dystopic novels, she is as creatively diverse as she is internationally acclaimed. Her success, however, has been double-edged: the very popularity that makes her such a prominent figure in the literary world also renders her vulnerable to claims of... read more

Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers)

Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination begins with the premise, first suggested by Margaret Atwood in The Animals in That Country (1968), that animals have occupied a peculiarly central position in the Canadian imagination. Unlike the longer-settled countries of Europe or the more densely-populated United States, in Canada animals have always been the loved and feared co-in... read more

The Canadian Modernists Meet (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers)

The Canadian Modernists Meet is a collection of new critical essays on major and rediscovered Canadian writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. F.R. Scott's well-known poem 'The Canadian Authors Meet' sets the theme for the volume: a revisiting of English Canada's formative movements in modernist poetry, fiction, and drama. As did Scott's poem, Dean Irvine's collection raises questions -... read more