Best of
Canadian-Literature

2007

The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor


Sally Armstrong - 2007
    In 1775, at the young age of twenty, she fled her English country house and boarded a ship to Jamaica with her lover, the family’s black butler. Soon after reaching shore, Charlotte’s lover died of yellow fever, leaving her alone and pregnant in Jamaica. In the sixty-six years that followed, she would find refuge with the Mi’kmaq of what is present-day New Brunswick, have three husbands, nine more children and a lifelong relationship with an aboriginal man. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Charlotte Taylor's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sally Armstrong, reclaims the life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with all the drama and sweep of a novel.

The Best Laid Plans


Terry Fallis - 2007
    He makes a deal with a crusty old Scot, Angus McLintock — an engineering professor who will do anything, anything, to avoid teaching English to engineers — to let his name stand in the election. No need to campaign, certain to lose - or is he?

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret of More


Mark Buchanan - 2007
    And though we ignore them, we know they point us to realms of wisdom or even mystery-to something "more."Author Mark Buchanan asked these same questions. "I want more, God," he prayed-and the answer was more than he was looking for. It was right there, hidden in plain sight among the syllables and syntax of a few words of advice from the apostle Peter. With time and experience, Buchanan learned to tease it out, this secret of more, and he wrote a book about it: "Hidden in Plain Sight." The answer, he discovered, is an investigation of the cross. The answer is an excavation of the virtues. The answer urges us passionately to "make every effort." And, Buchanan tells us, the answer is worth it.

The Penelopiad: The Play


Margaret Atwood - 2007
    As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, ruthlessly hangs Penelope's twelve maids.

Medicines to Help Us Traditional Metis Plant Use


Christi Belcourt - 2007
    This innovative and vibrant resource honours the centuries-old healing traditions of Metis women.

I Cut My Finger


Stuart Ross - 2007
    The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.

Odori


Darcy Tamayose - 2007
    Eddie dies. But Mai falls into the world of her great-grandmother on the island of Hamahiga somewhere between heaven and earth. Odori is a novel that navigates through the glorious Ryukyuan Kingdom and the Golden Era of the Sho Dynasty, through bloody World War II Okinawa, and over parched prairies of Southern Alberta

Found


Souvankham Thammavongsa - 2007
    Nongkai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp. My father kept a scrapbook filled with doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements.He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this." - Souvankham ThammavongsaThe poems of Found, with their blank spaces and small print, their language so unforgiving in detail that every letter, gesture, break, line and shape becomes for us a place of real meaning, were built out of doodles, diagrams, drawings into a work characterized by the elegance and power of its bareness--to let us see and to hold back much of what we see.

Southern Cross


Laurence Hyde - 2007
    This new hardcover edition is a facsimile of the original edition, published in 1951. Laurence Hyde was infuriated with the United States' continued testing in the Bikini Atoll, following the mass destruction and unthinkable horrors resulting from the atomic bombs dropped onHiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Hyde's graphic novel involves a Polynesian island and the islanders' idyllic and secure life that is forever lost after American sailors arrive and evacuate the islanders from their homes. During the evacuation, a fisherman kills a sailor who attempts to rape his wife. The couple flees with their child into the jungle to avoid capture. After the other islanders have evacuated, the Americans detonate an atom bomb on the ocean floor. The islandreceives the brunt of the bomb's destructive force, which annihilates all flora and fauna. The fisherman and his family are subjected to horrific suffering and pain before dying from the resulting blast and radiation.Southern Cross includes the original introduction by Rockwell Kent and two essays by Hyde in which he provides the idea for his book, a detailed description of the process of wood engraving, and a short history of the woodcut novel. A new introduction is provided by the woodcut novel historian David A. Beronä.

Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking


Robert Bringhurst - 2007
    His studies of poetry, polyphonics, oral literature, storytelling, translation, mythology, homogeny, cultural ecology, literary criticism and typography all build upon this sense of basic connection. Across the collection emerges a sustained interest in poetry the existence of a poetry to which poems are answers, an examination of philosophy in poetry, the relationship between poetry and music, and the concept of polyphonics. Bringhursts thinking involves the work of poets, musicians and philosophers as varied as Ezra Pound, John Thompson, Don McKay, Empedokles, Parmenides, Aristotle, Skaay, Plato, George Clutesi, Elizabeth Nyman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dennis Lee and Glenn Gould. The value Bringhurst places on translation the process of, the dialogue between one language and another, and the sheer experience of witnessing translation by reading and hearing poems, stories and songs in their original languages is another strong presence in this collection. Accompanying the English narrative are passages in Tlingit, Haida, Chinese, Greek, German, Cree and Russian, for readers who want to find the patterns and taste some of the vocabulary for themselves, for those interested in meeting the languages part way.

The December Man


Colleen Murphy - 2007
    Drama on courage, heroism, and despair exploring the long public shadow that private family violence casts.

Explorers Of The Dawn


Mazo de la Roche - 2007
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Thumbscrews


Natalie Zina Walschots - 2007
    It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it. Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic 'scene' and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as 'pervertable' locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements.

Palace of the End


Judith Thompson - 2007
    Winner of the 2008 Susan Smith Blackburn PrizeWith its emphasis on the human voice and power of the soul in the midst of a destructive war in Iraq, each of the three monologues in this book is a riveting and brilliantly portrayed indictment of one of the contemporary world’s worst conflicts.

Wonderfull


William Neil Scott - 2007
    Radios begin to speak secrets and unintended confessions, a rainstorm occurs that lasts for months, a young boy dies mysteriously in the surrounding woods after following the dictates of his heart, and Caleb Anson, the village's prodigal son, returns after a long absence with a grand design to bring Garfax into 'the future'.This magic realist tale, where dead relatives play dominoes in the houses of their loved ones, is told by Emma's youngest son, Oswald, a shy, observant boy living in the shadow of his charismatic family. Wonderfull tells the story of Garfax--which has become the stuff of legends to outsiders--and reveals how this village's unlikely past catches up to its inevitable future.

Broken Shackles: Old Man Henson From Slavery to Freedom


Peter Meyler - 2007
    Now, over 112 years later, a new edition of Broken Shackles is available.Henson was a great storyteller, and the spark of life shines through as he describes the horrors of slavery and his goal of escaping its tenacious hold. His time as a slave in Maryland, his refuge in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and his ultimate freedom in Canada are vividly depicted through his remembrances.The stories of Henson’s family, friends, and enemies will both amuse and shock the readers of Broken Shackles: Old Man Henson — From Slavery to Freedom. It is interesting to discover that his observations of life’s struggles and triumphs are as relevant today as they were in his time.