Although the other students on the tour are just happy to have a day off from school, shy Jess feels she knows what is around every corner and behind every door of the beautifully preserved Victorian home. It's as if she has lived in those rooms before. Her repeated visits and her interest impress the guide in charge, who offers Jess a volunteer summer job. But although she loves sharing her growing knowledge of Point Ellice House, Jess finds herself drawn to lonely spots around the property. There, persistent visions of a girl named Rose take her into the past, to a terrible disaster involving an overcrowded streetcar on the Point Ellice Bridge. Jess holds the key to a mystery that has persisted for more than a hundred years. And now it's up to her to solve it and to ease the troubled spirit who has haunted the area for so long. Inspired by the history of Victoria's Point Ellice House and the worst streetcar disaster in North American history, Penny Chamberlain's novel will grab her audience from the first page. And her imaginative interpretation of strange sightings (sightings that persist to this day) will keep young readers absorbed throughout.

    About a man who has visions, hovering on the edge but hating it, restless and at war with the world but wanting the peace that passeth understanding. Everything he does is half-done, except his death. When he falls, his parched spirit crying "thirsty," his family falls apart. This is a poem about Toronto, the city that’s never happened before, about waiting for a bus, standing on a corner, watching a stranger: the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, the milk store and the church. This is also about the poet, her own restless sensibility woven in and out through moments of lyric beauty, dramatic power and storytelling grace. It is written in the margins, like a medieval manuscript with shades of light and darkness.

    A marriage is tested as a mother struggles to cope with the disappearance of her prostitute daughter. Two angry women in a minivan act out their frustrations as they rampage through the night. A pill-dependent nurse juggles neuroses, infatuation, and exhaustion while supervising a high school dance-a-thon. A quiet tattoo artist takes in a homeless woman, and stumbles upon the true nature of beauty, jealousy, and love. Written in taut, unflinching prose, these stories are edgy and dark, sharply observed and uniquely imagined. As provocative as it is brilliant, Dead Girls introduces Nancy Lee as an astonishing and original new literary talent.

    At the time the population of Canada West was just short of a million and about 30,000 black people lived in the colony, most of whom were escaped slaves from south of the border. One of the people Drew interviewed was Harriet Tubman, who was then based in St. Catharines but made several trips to the U.S. South to lead slaves to freedom in Canada. In the course of his journeys in Canada, Drew visited Chatham, Toronto, Galt, Hamilton, London, Dresden, Windsor, and a number of other communities. Originally published in 1856, Drew’s book is the only collection of first-hand interviews of fugitive slaves in Canada ever done. It is an invaluable record of early black Canadian experience.

    Living in Paradise contains his best poetry from the seventies and eighties along with his first new poetry since he left the literary world to join a monastery. As Dennis Lee says in his penetrating afterword, "It's a book we have sorely missed." Readers will find generous selections from major works like Flying Deeper into the Century and Virgin Science, as well as from The Tough Romance, of which Lee says, "There is nothing in our literature to match this sinewy lyric explosion, with its pyrotechnics, its philosophic edge, and its undertow of heartbreak." With Living in Paradise, readers can rediscover a major poet, once again writing at the height of his powers.Praise for Living in Paradise“In truth, you couldn’t ask for a better testament to creative energy than this inspiring—and intriguing—collection.”- The Toronto Star“Most of the poems also make the take-your-head-off leaps and brilliant improvisational music that his best work offers. The new work is not impenetrably religious, but does seem less frenzied. If you don’t know Di Cicco’s writing, this book is a good place to start. For admirers, it’s catch-up time.”- Books in Canada“Now he’s back, a lost treasure self-unearthed, and writing again…We’re very glad to have you back, Mr. Di Cicco”- Broken Pencil“The poems…smoothly follow one after the other, transforming into the timeless entity of one poet’s oeuvre.”- Arc Magazine

    She is able to control all events to her advantage until a funny-looking red-haired man named Columbus changes her plans. He is unimpressed by the wealth of moose, turtles, and beavers in Coyote's land. Instead, he is interested in the human beings he can take to sell in Spain.Native American author Thomas King reinterprets the entire Columbus conquest mythology as a trickster tale, making the point that history is influenced by the culture of the reporter.

    The story describes how Parsons, raised in rural Nova Scotia and trained as an actor, then a nurse, came to be involved in the nascent Dutch resistance in World War Two. Interrogated by the Gestapo, then sentenced to death by a Nazi military court, Parsons ultimately served three years at hard labour. An intense air attack by the Allies in March 1945 was the backdrop for her dramatic escape, aided by a young Dutch baroness. But freedom wasn't the end of her life's challenges.

    Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere.Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.