Samson captures the essential images of contemporary life. Whether on the streets of his beloved and bewildering hometown of Winnipeg, an outpost in Antarctica, or a room in an Edward Hopper painting, he finds whimsy and elegance in the everyday, beauty and sorrow in the overlooked.This collection gathers together Samson's writing, starting with his band The Weakerthans' 1997 debut album Fallow, through Left and Leaving, Reconstruction Site, and the award-winning Reunion Tour. It also features lyrics from Samson's newly released solo album, Provincial, and selected poems.

    A lottery for one Canadian and one American to visit the International Space Station chooses a too-perfect Texan, and a aged lesbian bush doctor pilot. How can he keep his job and still do the right thing?

    The trial and its outcome are a matter of public record. What you are about to read about the tour of duty that inspired this book is not.What you are about to read is an emotionally draining and mind-snapping firsthand account of war on the ground in Afghanistan. It’s raw and explosive. Names have been changed to protect the brave and not so brave alike. What you are about to read is an account of soldiers who live, fight and die in a moonscape of a country where it’s sometimes hard to tell your friend from your enemy. It’s about trying to hold it together when a mortar attack is ripping your friends and allies apart, and your world unravels before your eyes.Rob Semrau wrote this book to tell us about the sheer hell that is the Stan, but also to recognize the incredible courage and compassion he witnessed in the heat of battle. The soldiers you are about to meet and the events that befall them will linger on in your mind long after you have closed these pages.

    She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

    Join him upon the high seas on another epic journey with Jacques the Anabaptist in the satiric spirit of Voltaire's "Candide." "Best of All Possible Worlds" begins with the return of Candide to find his beloved tutor, Pangloss, destitute and abandoned on the streets of Leyden, South Holland. The story then follows two brothers, Jakob and Robrecht Onderdonk, leading antithetical lives. Jakob is on a quest to abandon his life as a sailor for a more edifying life on land. In contrast, Robrecht is determined to fully embrace a sinful life at sea. Like Candide, "Best of All Possible Worlds" explores, with a comic air of irreverance and a witty dose of the absurd, the universal problem of evil in a world created by a perfect God.

    A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceauşescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us.Using precise, inventive language, Birrell creates astute and empathetic portraits of people we thought we knew – and deftly captures the lovely, maddening mess of being human.

    But upon returning to the Covert Operations And Surveillance Team base, he learns that a navy supply vessel has foundered in the Persian Gulf and is dispatched with his team-mates to secure four thermonuclear warheads from the wreck. Simultaneously, however, members of COAST are being murdered by unknown assailants. McKinley, Carter and Brook travel to the Middle East, Russia and Canada, desperate to outwit a mysterious adversary who always seems to be one step ahead. As the stakes rise, can they retrieve the hijacked nukes before a city gets vaporized?With the sinister menace of classic spy novels and the riveting action of a modern war story, COAST: An Act Of Burial immerses the reader in a thrilling roller-coaster ride of intrigue, adventure and espionage as the team race to prevent a crisis of apocalyptic proportions.Cover painting © Jonathon Earl Bowser, 2012, used by permission.

    The fire on the patch had burned everything to the ground, including his marriage. Now he's on the road looking for a fresh start. What he finds is a mysterious young woman named Tilda who tells him he's destined to be a hero or die a quick and painful death.When three stout men break into his hotel room, bind him to the bed and carve his skin with a stylus it appears she was right. The next thing Ted knows, his body is covered in an elaborate norse tattoo, complete with the power of the Gods. As he seeks out the three men who assaulted him, Ted learns that the creatures of Norse mythology walk in the world of humankind and some of them want to see it burn.Accompanied by the trickster Loki and the bequiling Tilda, Ted wants nothing more than to have his old life back. No more tattoos. No more smart-ass Gods. No more mystic powers. The problem is, if he succeeds, it might just be the end of the world.

    

    Abandoned as an infant, Marcel is haunted by vague memories of his bohemian mother, and is desperate to know who his real parents are. When Oliver is promoted to foreign correspondent, he leaves Marcel in the care of his ill-equipped friends, including the beautiful Pippa. The world is being swept by a wave of liberation—coups, revolutions and the end of colonialism. While Oliver rushes toward the action, Marcel is set adrift in swinging London, a city of magic—and a city where he can never quite fit in. Just when it seems they will never be reunited, Marcel is sent to join Oliver in Vietnam. But by the summer of 1963, the war is escalating, and Oliver is finally overwhelmed by his doomed love for Pippa. When Marcel eventually uncovers the shattering truth about his mother, his entire world is rearranged. Now, as his fiftieth birthday approaches, Marcel is asked to take care of his friend’s eleven-year-old daughter, Iris. Prodded by her sharp-eyed company, he reflects on his own bittersweet childhood and the experiences that have shaped his present. Stray Love is beautifully illustrated with original drawings by noted Toronto artist/filmmaker Heather Frise.

    These stories highlight the little-known lives of women, most of whom were connected to--and overshadowed by--famous men. Women featured are: Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare; Helene Boullé de Champlain, wife of Samuel de Champlain; Molly Brant, sister of Joseph Brant; Laura Secord, who played an important role in the War of 1812; Georgina Hogarth, sister-in-law of Charles Dickens; Marguerite Monet Riel, wife of Louis Riel; Bridget Boland; Alice Seeley Harris; Constance Lloyd, wife of Oscar Wilde; Edith Bolling Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson; Annie Taylor; Syrie Wellcome Maugham, wife of Somerset Maugham; Pilar Casals, mother of Pablo Casals; Lillian Bounds Disney, wife of Walt Disney, Rani Lakshmibai, the ruler of the state of Jhansi who led the Indian Rebellion of 1857; Bertha Fried Hirning, a pioneer in the Spirit River area of northern Alberta and Joan Douglas, daughter of Tommy Douglas.

    Amen to dead kin. A tiny star wages war with all the others. Goddess Durga plants her ass on a hotel sofa. She multitasks a cigarette and vodka-vodka. Daydream murder eats up the daylight hours. She sits sexy, sits thin to compensate while he makes graceful moves toward locking the door. He says something stupid like "love without reason is psychopathic" or "Apollo by day, Dionysus by night" or maybe he just says something novel with the intention of summing it up, of earning her body. Topics outside this moment, beyond this page. Subjects of feeling, of knowing, not of breathing or or touching, but of sensing and anticipating claim textual holocaust on the plot, shaping like weeds to choke the story. White sage, crushed indigo have burnt up and filled the room with smoke. Fiery towers will commiserate with the heavens. Godhelpusnow. Cut to a man dragging a scalpel over his loyal cadaver. Scene fades to black.From "Quotidian Deformity" by Mike Thorn"I was inside metropolitan intestines, sloshing through the entrails of a world that spat me out. The presence exposed itself as everything. Corporate rapists with thin hair and sloppy smiles peered out from corners, their eyes bleeding black sludge. Housewives maimed their screaming infants with curling irons and santoku knives. Academic tyrants hurled tomes soaked in gasoline, glasses spattered with slime and defecation. I manoeuvred through this nightmare for three years, wanting nothing but a clean break. Although I made it out, there was no real escape."The Typist waited for the story to continue, but the Medium offered no resolution. "What do you mean?" the Typist pleaded."The ghosts still talk to me. They never stop talking."

    When her family was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, Elsa joined a community farm and was recruited by the Underground. Despite her deep belief in destiny, Elsa refused to bow to her fate as a Jew in war-torn Poland.

    Lines and passages were selected by the roll of a die and appear in the order the die saw fit. In blending confessional and procedural techniques with disjunctive chronology and random chance, this book explores and exacerbates possibilities of the narrative mode both within the text and for the reader. Not so much "written" as "received."

    Forced into an arranged marriage and subsequently widowed, she faces a life of eternal penance, praying for a miracle that she may find the father who has abandoned her. Paul Haston's critically acclaimed novel is based on a true story: the shipment of indentured Indian 'coolies' recruited by white colonials to work in slavery on the sugar plantations in 1870's Natal.

    When Olivia loses control at her birthday party, her friends decide to intervene once and for all, but perhaps each of these five women is battling an addiction of some sort.

    Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is.No mark survives this place: you too will yieldto unmemory. Give everything you arein three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy ironmove, follow its commands.Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd.Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian PoetsMathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.

    On May 26, 1991, Barbara Langhorst's father shot and killed her mother, then turned the gun on himself.Restless White Fields asks: how do you rebuild a life? In this unsentimental collection of poems, Barbara Langhorst revisits personal horrors few of us can imagine, with startling imagery that rends even as it heals.

    In Darwin’s Nightmare, we meet the reluctant mob enforcer Wilson who has spent his life under the radar. A simple job — steal a bag from the airport and hand it off — sets into motion a violent chain of events from which no one will escape untouched. In Grinder, a dangerous mobster’s nephews are missing and the only suspects are his lieutenants. Wilson is pulled back in to quietly find out who is responsible and settle the score with screams. The third installment, In Plain Sight, finds Wilson in the crosshairs again — but this time the gun is in the hands of a cop. Justice isn’t blind in the city; it’s as bent as the tip of a bullet. The only way for him to stay out of cuffs is to help put someone worse in them.

    She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and navels. Longing, exuberance, and grief colour her reflections, which at times take on the tenor of folktales or parables.Each of the short portraits in The Book of Marvels stands alone, but the connections are intricate; as in life, each object gains meaning from its juxtaposition with others. Crozier approaches her investigations with a childlike curiosity, an adult bemusement, and an unfailing sense of metaphor and mischief. With both charm and mordant wit, she animates the panoply of wonders to be found everywhere around us and inside us.

    Based on historical research the author conducted in Belfast (where the ship was constructed) and his birthplace of Halifax (near where it sank), the poems document not only the history behind the ship’s construction, but what life must have been like for those aboard her maiden voyage and in the years following her sinking. While many readers are familiar with the various myths surrounding the ship and its sinking, this book offers a new, startlingly sensitive perspective with poems that take readers inside the hearts and minds of its passengers.Billeh Nickerson is the author of McPoems and the co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets.

    When his dying lover becomes convinced he is being visited by a ghost, a man is forced to confront his own fears about being left behind. In a Mexican resort town where anything goes, a woman searching for a place to belong pushes herself to the limits of love and despair. And in the Journey Prize-winning story "Floating Like the Dead," a group of Chinese lepers spend their last days dreaming of escape after they are exiled to a remote island off the coast of B.C., at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of the characters in these stories are expats, outlaws, and outsiders, some by choice, others by circumstance. Yet in their struggles to be themselves and to belong, they remind us of our own deepest longings and desires. With this seductive and emotionally compelling collection, Yasuko Thanh announces herself as an exciting new voice in Canadian fiction.

    In this study of Goin' Down the Road, renowned film critic Geoff Pevere provides an engaging account of how a film produced under largely improvised circumstances became the most influential Canadian movie of its day as well as an enduring cultural touchstone.Featuring extensive interviews with the film's key participants, Pevere provides behind-the-scenes history and explores how the movie's meaning and interpretation have changed over time. He gives special attention to the question of why the film's creative mix of documentary techniques, road movie tropes, and social commentary have proven so popular and influential in Canadian filmmaking for decades.

    Told through the lens of Wallace Stevens’ poem �Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful memories. An intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.

    A smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the "hybrids," the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on p‚te and reciting poetry; a father and daughter's post-apocalyptic Pacific island civilization, built of floating garbage and sustained entirely by rubber, is beginning to fray, literally, revealing something disastrously like moss beneath its smooth synthetic skin; following an appendectomy, a young woman's belly starts transmitting what sound like Russian radio signals; a young publishing assistant, demoted at work and dumped by her boyfriend, finds herself unable to control her strange new appetites.Inhabited, occupied, possessed -- suddenly, the world as they knew it is no longer quite recognizable, not to mention safe -- if it actually was safe before. But it's the surprising, often revelatory ways in which Cram's characters navigate through these strange new landscapes that imbue these stories with complexity, grace and lustre.For a preview of the stories in Radio Belly search for Large Garbage: A Radio Belly Single -- downloadable for free from all ebook retailers.