Best of
Canadian-Literature

2013

Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange


Stuart McLean - 2013
    This is a wise, wonderful collage of rituals and romance, road trips and guitar licks, Saturday-night hockey games and Sunday morning pancakes. A story about an exploding outhouse sits right beside one about a lost love because that’s just what happens in life. Sad things are all tangled up with funny things and sweet things, too.The voices in these stories are private and personal. Reading this collection is like joining a dinner party hosted by Stuart himself.

Rush: The Illustrated History


Martin Popoff - 2013
    Notable for bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee’s high register, Neil Peart’s virtuosic drumming and inventive lyrics, and the guitar heroics of Alex Lifeson, the multiplatinum band melds a diverse range of influences and along the way has amassed a large, notably loyal following worldwide. Rush is bigger than ever before with the hit 2011 documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage and this year’s new album, Clockwork Angels, and tour. Now, for the first time, Rush is treated to the epic visual celebration they so richly deserve in a beautifully designed and profusely illustrated history following the band’s entire career. A chronological overview history written by noted music scribe and Rush authority Martin Popoff spans the band’s entire career from 1968 to today. A complete Rush discography chronicles all their albums, from the debut album to 2112, Moving Pictures, and Signals to Grace Under Pressure, Vapor Trails, and more. The authoritative text is complemented by album reviews written by well-known music journalists from around the globe, commentary from fellow musicians, a discography, and hundreds of photographs and pieces of memorabilia, including picture sleeves, gig posters, rare vinyl, handbills, ticket stubs, and much more.

The Place of Scraps


Jordan Abel - 2013
    Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save.Drawing inspiration from Barbeau’s canonical book Totem Poles, Jordan Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. His poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions.Through the use of erasure techniques, Abel carves out new understandings of Barbeau’s writing – each layer reveals a fresh perspective, each word takes on a different connotation, each letter plays a different role, and each punctuation mark rises to the surface in an unexpected way. As Abel writes his way ever deeper into Barbeau’s words, he begins to understand that he is much more connected to Barbeau than he originally suspected.

Remembrance


Alistair MacLeod - 2013
    As he waits for the arrival of his son and grandson, he remembers his decision to go to war in desperation to support his young family. He remembers the horrors of life at the frontlines in Ortona, Italy, and then what happened in Holland when the Canadians arrived as liberators. He remembers how the war devastated his own family, but gave him other reasons to live. As the story unfolds, other generations enter the scene. What emerges is an elegant, life-affirming meditation on the bond between fathers and sons, "how the present always comes out of the past," and how even in the midst of tragedy and misfortune there exists the possibility for salvation.     His first new short story in over a decade, Remembrance is a powerful reminder of why Alistair MacLeod is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer


Eleanor Cowan - 2013
    Cowan grew up in Quebec in the 1950s, in a large Roman Catholic family with a lethal mix of violence, addiction, and toxic pedagogy. Cowan details the dance of a survivor moving into adulthood: one step forward towards freedom, two steps back into conditioning, until a tipping point of consciousness is reached. As her memoir makes clear, that tipping point is not just a critical mass of abuse or even a touchstone of personal growth. It requires an enlarged and feminist context, permission to know the unknowable, and language to name the unspeakable. Cowan's book is a primer in compassion, especially for those of us who were abused as children and left to struggle with legacies of distrust and rage towards our mothers. It's a vivid indictment of a mother-blaming culture that protects the very institutions that perpetuate child abuse.

The Skin Team


Jordaan Mason - 2013
    A vomit of lightbulbs. A compass recovered from the stomach, pointing to True North. Teams of boys in the woods get lost and forget their colors. Girls gather in the park, trying to remember what songs to sing. But the horses are too sick to bet on and a map is not the territory. Three skins convulse, three bodies converge. A sickness is shared between a girl and a boy and a boy and a river.Jordaan Mason's debut novel, THE SKIN TEAM, is a story of mesmerized violence and the shape shifting between love and sex and the singing that happens when the power goes out."Reading THE SKIN TEAM, you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason's radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style. This novel is something very rare, and it's about as beautiful as fiction can ever be."—Dennis Cooper

My Heart is Not My Own


Michael Wuitchik - 2013
    John Rourke is haunted by his days as a relief doctor in West Africa. In the 1990s, in the midst of a civil war, he provided medical attention and supplies to the people of Sierra Leone. He befriended a local nurse named Mariama Lahai and a doctor named Momodu, but lost contact when the conflict escalated to conflagration. His last memory of Sierra Leone is of Mariama delivering a beautiful baby girl to a tortured, mutilated mother just before armed rebels take the hospital.Now living in Vancouver and happily married to Nadia, who is expecting their first child, John is thrust back into the horrors of the past by the arrival of a package from Sierra Leone. He realizes that before he can commit to his future, he’ll have to confront his conscience and the pain of his past. He embarks upon a journey that takes him back into Mariama’s world of child soldiers, bush-wives, and African secret societies.My Heart Is Not My Own is a story of love, courage, and resilience that is brought to life through the powerful voice of Mariama.

Bears Without Fear


Kevin Van Tighem - 2013
    Our species emerged out of the depths of time into a world already populated by these great carnivores. Before we mastered iron and later developed firearms, we had few defences against bears--only watchful caution and elaborate ceremonies and sacrifices to ward off fear.Where human populations grow, bears have traditionally dwindled or disappeared. But when we return to the wild, to places where bears still survive, all our primeval fears awaken again. The risk of an automobile accident on the way to bear country far outstrips the risk of a close-range encounter with a bear, but it's the bear that worries us as we hurtle down the pavement at a hundred kilometres an hour.In this timely and sensitive book, Kevin Van Tighem calls on decades of experience, knowledge and understanding in order to enlighten readers about our relationship with and attitude toward bears. Along the way we are confronted with the realities confronting these great animals as a result of our ever-expanding human population and their ever-shrinking natural habitat. Through historical research, field observation, practical advice, personal anecdotes and an array of stunning photos, Van Tighem has written a comprehensive book that is meant to demystify bears in order to promote a deeper understanding of these powerful yet vulnerable creatures.

Powwow Counting in Cree


Penny M. Thomas - 2013
    Both words and pictures reflect the rich culture and tradition of the Cree people.

Fear of a Black Nation


David Austin - 2013
    In October 1968 the Congress of Black Writers at McGill University brought together well-known Black thinkers and activists from Canada, the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean--people like C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, Rocky Jones, and Walter Rodney. Within months of the Congress, a Black-led protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) exploded on the front pages of newspapers across the country--raising state security fears about Montreal as the new hotbed of international Black radical politics.

Lily's Story


Don Gutteridge - 2013
    Lily’s struggle to survive and grow and discover her place in the scheme of things is complicated not only by the ordinary travail of frontier living, but by the impact of historical events themselves: the railway rivalries of the 1860s and 70s, the accidental discovery of oil at Petrolia, the grand tour of the Prince of Wales in 1860, the Underground Railroad ferrying liberated slaves to safety in Canada, the Riel Rebellions, the Great War and the influenza pandemic that followed it. During her long life, Lily witnesses the birth of a nation, and the founding and rise of her home village of Point Edward. Lily’s Story is part history and part fable, replete with historical personages and a bizarre gallery of local characters. It is ultimately a story of survival and loss, about aging and the changes it brings, and about the role of memory itself.

The Counting House


Sandra Ridley - 2013
    Symbols and origins of traditional rhymes involving kings and queens serve as inventory, alongside elements of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In forensic sequences of inquisition, scrutiny, and reckoning, Ridley reveals the maiden as muse as modern darling - unhoused and exacting - in "all of her violet forms."

The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie


Grant Lawrence - 2013
    Grant, his parents, Bobby Orr and the rest of the Canadian hockey team were ontheir way to Game Three of the famous Summit Series -- seven games played between Russia and Canada in 1972, during the height of the Cold War. It was at this point -- at the age of one -- that Grant's life-long entanglement with hockey began.In this deeply personal, yet incredibly witty memoir about Grant's relationship with hockey, the narrative passes back and forth between tales of Grant's life and a fascinating history of hockey, complete with lively anecdotes about the many colourful characters of the NHL. Through Grant's early life, he struggled with the idea of hockey. He was an undersized child who wore thick glasses and knee-braces, and he understood, first-hand, what it was like to be in the attack zone of the hockey-obsessed jocks at his school. For Grant, bullying and the violent game of hockey seemed to go hand-in-hand. Yet he was also enamoured with the sport, and eventually learned that playing goalie on a hockey team isn’t all that different from playing in a band and that artistically-minded wimps find just as much joy in the game as their meathead counterparts.In The Lonely End of the Rink , Grant Lawrence brings the allure of hockey into a zone where it can impress upon the nerds and geeks as well as the jocks. Grant is a highly original writer, and with this book, he tells a quintessentially Canadian story about the nation’s favourite sport.

Beyond Survivorman


Les Stroud - 2013
    He has survived for weeks at a time in harsh situations and in isolated, challenging environments. Offering us a rare glimpse of some of the world's most remote cultures—such as the Sea Gypsies in Malaysia and the San Bushmen in Africa—Beyond Survivorman covers Stroud's most challenging journey of all: learning not only how to survive, but also how to connect spiritually to the earth.

Everything Rustles


Jane Silcott - 2013
    Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes). Winner, CNFC Readers' Choice Award for THRESHHOLD. Staff Pick, BC BookWorld. Listed as one of the season's Ten Most Anticipated Books in the Himalayan Walking Shoes Journal. In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her: marriage, menopause, fear, desire, loss, and that guy on the bus, the woman on the street, wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms. "It is a refreshing adventure to open a collection of essays that are exactly that: beautiful bursts of curiosity. To essay is to attempt, to make an effort (OED). Canadian author Jane Silcott presents an engaging array of attempts in essay form. Her efforts are honest musings of married life, being a woman of a certain age, and questioning her ability to understand the deep and personal... Every individual essay is succinct, but packed with emotion, a gazing eye, and an inner grounding. Silcott expresses the wisdom of a middle-aged woman with the curiosity of a young girl." Examiner.com"Silcott has a strong voice, and like Didion's it is one that draws the reader in, page after page. In EVERYTHING RUSTLES, the Vancouver-based author examines that slow onset of fears, which are increasingly more pronounced as we age. This collection of short essays is written in an eloquent, poetic and deeply personal manner." Vancouver Sun "Jane Silcott writes crisp and compelling narratives; as their import emerges, small epiphanies wink into consciousness, and we are taken up into everyday life. Reading this collection of her work we glimpse layers of the real that seem so often to conceal the world from us. A wonderful book, a book of wonders." Stephen Osborne, Publisher, Geist Magazine"

The Hottest Summer in Recorded History


Elizabeth Bachinsky - 2013
    Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. Her vision is unapologetically bold, finding the erotic in everyday moments and keenly capturing the complicated truths of life in a powerfully candid style.

The City Still Breathing


Matthew Heiti - 2013
    Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.These eleven people -- from the police officers who retrieve the body to the teenager who carries it away to the young woman planning to strike out for Toronto and Sudbury's local drug dealer -- are all damaged in some way, and eventually, through the body itself, are brought together in a strange moment of violence.

Rove


Laurie D. Graham - 2013
    She calls up, too, prairie suburban place, through an investigation of its plants, animals, and most trodden routes--those things that continue to differentiate one suburban place from the next--as suburban spaces continue to proliferate and falter. Using a variety of poetic styles: lyricizing the vernacular, assembling narrative out of lyric, Graham writes of her maternal Ukrainian prairie roots. Inspired by Andrew Suknaski's poetry, Laurie D Graham has created a new poetic landscape of her own, in this exciting and expansive first book of poetry.

Fathom Lines


Erin Bedford - 2013
    Her mother, Vee, pines for the husband she lost so many years ago, and can’t stop thinking of the place she grew up and left behind on purpose.Things come to a head on the first day of spring when Vee finds a package on her doorstep, a box of mementos that she buried 25 years ago at her husband’s grave. Who would be cruel enough to dig it up and send it back to her so many years later? And why did she bury it in the first place?The mystery is slowly revealed as Vee drifts in and out of memories–her childhood in the North during the 1950s and 1960s, her love affair with a charming Québécois man, a family wrenched apart by pride, a loss that unhinged her–and as Lise pieces together the puzzle of her mother’s past in an attempt not only to understand her mother’s life, but also her own.

Permission


S.D. Chrostowska - 2013
    Part meditation, part narrative, part essay, it is presented to its addressee as a gift that asks for no thanks or acknowledgement--but what can be given in words, and what received? "Permission" not only updates the "epistolary novel" by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens a new literary frontier.

The Deer Yard


Allan Cooper - 2013
    While there, he and his longtime friend Allan Cooper embarked on a poetic correspondence; Thurston would send his Campbell River poems east and Cooper would reply. In this, they were consciously following the model of the Wang River Sequence, a poetic correspondence written by the Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti over 1200 years ago. “Our poetry – separately – has always been rooted deeply in the natural world,” writes Thurston. “Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the East, to classical Chinese poetry, as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment, a no less reverential term than Nature.” The resulting twenty-one poems are reflective and richly imagistic, chronicling a single winter season as experienced by two writers on opposite Canadian coasts.

The Canadian Constitution


Adam Dodek - 2013
    The Canadian Constitution makes Canada’s Constitution readily accessible to readers for the first time. It includes the complete text of the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982 as well as a glossary of key terms, a short history of the Constitution, and a timeline of important constitutional events. The Canadian Constitution also explains how the Supreme Court of Canada works and describes the people and issues involved in leading constitutional cases.Author Adam Dodek, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, provides the only index to the Canadian Constitution as well as fascinating facts about the Supreme Court and the Constitution that have never been published before. This book is a great primer for those coming to Canada’s Constitution for the first time as well as a useful reference work for students and scholars.

Nightswimming


Janet Turpin Myers - 2013
    Travelling to the moon, she confides to her digital recorder, was like nightswimming through the black waters of the universe. Sandy is recording memories as she prefers them, at first, keeping her contact with the past, light. She speaks of summer in Muskoka where paradise was nothing more than a hill-billy get-together of forgotten cottages; where spinster twins in identical dresses held tender vigils for lost love; where a sad hippy preached peace between Dylan and swigs of vodka; and where two friends struggled with the awkward complexities of loving the same boy. These tidbits of the story, like penny candy, are sweet, and so Sandy tells them easily enough. And yet there is something more; a dark memory that must resurface so that the truth can be brought to light.

Savage: 1986-2011


Nathaniel G. Moore - 2013
    His icy father dabbles part-time in the death trade at a funeral home after working for a decade in the insurance racket. His older sister Holly is always lurking in the shadows or away at school. Nate, a creative, messy, and anxious teen, has chosen Randy Savage as his hero. As he finishes high school, the world to which Savage belongs is quickly waning in popularity, and Nate begins to see the wrestler’s downfall mirrored in his own life. Savage 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate’s nuclear family, bracketed by July 1986 – when he first saw Randy Savage in person – and the wrestler’s sudden death in May 2011. When Savage dies, Nate is freed from beliefs—once a source of beauty and escape—that had come to constrict him, fusing him to a moribund past… The novel is about the blurred lines between child and adult roles and the ever-changing landscape of interior heroism. Whether dealing with a family’s economic turbulence, the scarring effects of teenage love, or creating a new family order, Moore revisits, remasters, and repackages a twenty-five year family odyssey with guts, honesty, and love.