R's Boat


Lisa Robertson - 2010
    In R's Boat, she brings us to the crossroads of poetry, theory, the body, and cultural criticism. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.Praise for Lisa Robertson's The Men:"In The Men, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."-Village Voice"Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice. . . . Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia."-Boston Review

The Tiny Wife


Andrew Kaufman - 2010
    The thief then leaves, and the patrons all survive, but strange things soon begin to happen to them: One survivor’s tattoo jumps off her ankle and chases her around; another wakes up to find that she’s made of candy; and Stacey Hinterland discovers that she’s shrinking, incrementally, a little every day, and nothing that her husband or son do can reverse the process. The Tiny Wife is a fable about losing yourself in circumstances and finding yourself in the the love of another.

Stones


Timothy Findley - 1981
    In Stones, Findley exposes the sharp changes in the traditional institutions of love, marriage, and family through a vivid terrain of images and insightful stories. Reflecting our changing times with stunning clarity, the tales reveal the menacing and enigmatic aspects of our daily lives.

Away from Everywhere


Chad Pelley - 2009
    Both tender and bold in its delivery, Away from Everywhere cuts no corners in telling the story of their crushing childhood, the reasons the brothers become different men, and the unthinkable act of love that tears them apart. Part warped love story, part family tragedy, Away from Everywhere is a heart-stomping pageturner.This novel has been adapted into a film starring Jason Priestley, Shawn Doyle, and Joanne Kelly.Winner of the ArtsNL CBC Emerging Artist of the Year award.Shortlisted for the Canadian Authors’ Association Emerging Writer of the Year award.Shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award

Crow Winter


Karen McBride - 2019
    A name that has a certain weight on the tongue—a taste. Like lit sage in a windowless room or aluminum foil on a metal filling.Trickster. Storyteller. Shape-shifter. An ancient troublemaker with the power to do great things, only he doesn’t want to put in the work.Since coming home to Spirit Bear Point First Nation, Hazel Ellis has been dreaming of an old crow. He tells her he’s here to help her, save her. From what, exactly? Sure, her dad’s been dead for almost two years and she hasn’t quite reconciled that grief, but is that worth the time of an Algonquin demigod?Soon Hazel learns that there’s more at play than just her own sadness and doubt. The quarry that’s been lying unsullied for over a century on her father’s property is stirring the old magic that crosses the boundaries between this world and the next. With the aid of Nanabush, Hazel must unravel a web of deceit that, if left untouched, could destroy her family and her home on both sides of the Medicine Wheel.

Coke Machine Glow


Gordon Downie - 2001
    Simultaneously, Vintage Canada is delighted to publish Downie's first book of poetry, under the same title. It will also contain the lyrics to the sixteen songs on the record.Coke Machine Glow is a rich, haunting collection that reveals both the public and private selves of one of Canada's most enigmatic musicians. In poetry that is urban, gritty and political, as well as romantic, nostalgic and whimsical, Downie allows us a glimpse inside his world. With his acute and observing eye, he gives us snapshots of his life, both on the road and at home; he writes of loneliness and isolation; of longing and desire; of the present and the past; of dreams and nightmares; love lost and love of family. Ultimately, this book is about the distances that bridge and separate us.Layered and deceptively simple, imbued with Downie's wit, insight, anger, compassion and rock 'n'roll edge, Coke Machine Glow is a remarkable debut. With its publication, Gordon Downie becomes a part of the wonderful literary tradition of Canadian songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who are also poets.

Visiting Hours


Shane L. Koyczan - 2013
    Includes a 5 track cd/ep featuring performances by Shane. Currently in a 2nd edition and going to a corrected and remastered 3rd edition available at end of summer 2007. Voted to *Best Books of 2005* lists in the Guardian (UK) and Globe and Mail newspapers.

Confidence: Stories


Russell Smith - 2015
    There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind.Russell Smith is the author of Girl Crazy and How Insensitive. Confidence, recently longlisted for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, is his US debut.

Cargo of Orchids


Susan Musgrave - 2000
    Her work as a translator draws her into an underworld of family-controlled drug cartels operating out of South America, and she falls in love with a son in one such family. Pregnant, she is kidnapped to an island off the coast of Colombia and slowly tricked into a dependence on cocaine. Her narrative - violent and bizarre, but also riveting, erotic and filled with the heady flamboyance of orchids - runs parallel to her account of life in "Death Clinic," as Death Row is called at the Heaven Valley Facility for Women. It is a moving story of friendship amongst three female inmates - portrayed with devastating wit - who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner.Cargo of Orchids swings through comedy and tragedy to shed a gradual, eerie light on the questions of guilt and innocence and moral ambiguity that lie at its heart.Excerpt from Cargo of Orchids:"Despite the freight of anger she carries, Rainy seems so frail it is hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears. Rainy gave birth to twins and six months later left them on the railway tracks. She claims it prejudiced the jury. If she'd smothered them or driven them off a pier, it would have been more socially acceptable.-- But abandoning your kids on the tracks wasn't in fashion. She wishes now she'd gone out drinking for the evening instead, but she didn't have enough money to hire a babysitter and pay for the beer."

Away


Jane Urquhart - 1993
    The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.

The Lightkeeper's Daughters


Jean E. Pendziwol - 2017
    No longer able to linger over her beloved books or gaze at the paintings that move her spirit, she fills the void with music and memories of her family—a past that suddenly becomes all too present when her late father's journals are found amid the ruins of an old shipwreck.With the help of Morgan, a delinquent teenager performing community service, Elizabeth goes through the diaries, a journey through time that brings the two women closer together. Entry by entry, these unlikely friends are drawn deep into a world far removed from their own—to Porphyry Island on Lake Superior, where Elizabeth’s father manned the lighthouse seventy years before.As the words on these musty pages come alive, Elizabeth and Morgan begin to realize that their fates are connected to the isolated island in ways they never dreamed. While the discovery of Morgan's connection sheds light onto her own family mysteries, the faded pages of the journals hold more questions than answers for Elizabeth, and threaten the very core of who she is.

The Outside Circle: A Graphic Novel


Patti Laboucane-Benson - 2015
    One night, Pete and his mother’s boyfriend, Dennis, get into a big fight, which sends Dennis to the morgue and Pete to jail. Initially, Pete keeps up ties to his crew, until a jail brawl forces him to realize the negative influence he has become on Joey, which encourages him to begin a process of rehabilitation that includes traditional Aboriginal healing circles and ceremonies.Powerful, courageous, and deeply moving, The Outside Circle is drawn from the author’s twenty years of work and research on healing and reconciliation of gang-affiliated or incarcerated Aboriginal men.

All My Puny Sorrows


Miriam Toews - 2014
    In her most passionate novel yet, she brings us the riveting story of two sisters, and a love that illuminates life.You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking. But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.

Ten Little Indians


Sherman Alexie - 2003
    In 'The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above', an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child. In 'Do You Know Where I Am?' two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that has profound moral consequences for the rest of their lives together. In 'What You Pawn I Will Redeem', a homeless Indian man must raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the fancy dance outfit stolen from his grandmother fifty years earlier.Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candour that cut to the heart of the human experience.

The Heaviness of Things That Float


Jennifer Manuel - 2016
    This is a place where truth and myth are deeply intertwined and stories are “like organisms all their own, life upon life, the way moss grows around poplar trunks and barnacles atop crab shells, the way golden chanterelles spring from hemlock needles. They spread in the cove with the kelp and the eelgrass, and in the rainforest with the lichen, the cedars, the swordferns. They pelt down inside raindrops, erode thick slabs of driftwood, puddle the old logging road that these days led to nowhere.”Only weeks from retirement, Bernadette finds herself unsettled, with no immediate family of her own—how does she fit into the world? Her fears are complicated by the role she has played within their community: a keeper of secrets in a place “too small for secrets.” And then a shocking announcement crackles over the VHF radio of the remote medical outpost: Chase Charlie, the young man that Bernadette loves like a son, is missing. The community is thrown into upheaval, and with the surface broken, raw dysfunction, pain and truths float to the light.