For anyone who's been let down by life and love, these poems reveal that the most important person one can fall in love with is oneself.

    I believe everyone should understand that we all go through things in life, it's all about how we react and recover from them. If you've felt as though you didn't have a voice in a situation, or you weren't sure if you'd get through it "fluid." may be the book for you.

    Her poems are intimate and real. They speak of lovers, friends, family, and self, with a powerful emotional honesty that makes you smile in self-recognition. My Song for Him Who Never Sang to Me is Merrit's first book.

    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.

    Tonnes of snow carried 13 members of two guided backcountry skiing groups down the 37-degree incline of a run called La Traviata and buried them. After a frantic hour of digging by remaining group members, an unthinkable outcome became reality. Seven people were dead.The tragedy made international news, splashing photos of the seven dead Canadian and US skiers on television screens and the pages of newspapers. The official analysis did not specifically note guide error as a contributing factor in the accident. This interpretation has been insufficient for some of the victims' families, the public and some members of the guiding community.Why did the guiding team seemingly ignore a particularly troublesome snowpack? Why were two groups travelling so close together? Were the guides adhering to best practices for terrain selection and snow stability evaluation? What motivated them to go there?"Buried" is the assistant guide's story. It renders an answerable truth about what happened by delving deep into the human factors that played into putting people in harm's way. The story begins buried metres deep in snow, and through care-filled reflection emerges slowly like spring after a long winter, nurturing a hopeful, courageous dialogue for all who make journeys through the mountains of their life. The story illustrates the peace that comes from accountability and the growth that results from understanding.

    But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices. With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility. One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.

    It is just a very small square in the enormous circle that connects us all.I am the story.I am the poems.And you are my muse.

    T. Bunker. Now eighty-three-years-old and dying, Bunker wants to tell his side of the story, the story of his affair with Estela, Andrés's mother. As a child Andrés knew Bunker as the "Captain of the Sleepers"--so called because he transported back to Vieques those who had died on the mainland but wished to be buried at home. But what really happened between Bunker and Estela, and between Estela and her one true love, a leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement? What did Andrés witness, and what were the real circumstances of his mother's mysterious death?Beautifully translated by Edith Grossman, Captain of the Sleepers is a startling tale of remembrance and reality, and Mayra Montero's finest book yet.

    Unable to commit suicide, she hires a professional killer and contracts him to kill her, by her choice and on her terms. In an effort to dissuade her from death, her killer elicits from her stories about her travels. In this reversal of Sheherazade, who saves her life through a continuous story, Restlessness becomes a story about how to avoid story, a travel book about how to evade travel, a manual for how to stay put.

    Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance and redemptive power.Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. “My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough,” he writes, “as the same cat crouches.”Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.

    But as young men, the boys couldn’t be more different — where seventeen-year-old Will is headstrong and rugged, able to hold his own in the woods or in a fight, Owen, three years his junior, is literary and sensitive. What worries their mother Mary, however, is the prophecy told to her by a local woman upon Will’s birth: “that her first-born would be a powerful man and have much respect — but his brother would be even greater, yet destroy the legacy by rashness, and the Jameson dynasty [would] not go beyond that second boy.” She tries to laugh it off, but the prophecy becomes a part of local legend and hangs over the heads of the boys like a dark cloud.When their father dies in a freak accident and the management of the Jameson tracts and company falters, Will, as the true inheritor of his father’s “shrewd mind and fists to match,” quits school to take over. He’s a strong leader of men, but perhaps too strong at times, and dies while clearing a log jam during a run. Reggie Glidden, Will’s best friend and the Push of the Jameson team, takes Owen under his wing, searching for any small sign that the younger boy has his brother’s qualities. But Owen knows his limitations and, after his brother’s death and then rejection by the girl of his dreams, Lula Brower, he joins the army and heads off to war hoping to get himself killed. Instead, he returns a decorated war hero.Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia — the wife of Reggie Glidden — and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town’s gossip and hypocrisy despite the innocence of their relationship. But for the community, it’s as if taking Owen Jameson — and therefore the whole Jameson family — down a peg or two will give them control over their changing world. Inexorably, Owen and Camellia are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance, and a sensational trial.At the same time, realizing his destiny, Owen takes over the family business and begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in fierce ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him.With The Friends of Meager Fortune, award-winning author David Adams Richards continues his exploration of New Brunswick’s Miramichi Valley, both the hard lives and experiences that emerge from that particular soil and the universal human matters that concern us all: the work of the hands and the heart; the nature of true greatness and true weakness; the relentlessness of fate and the good and evil that men and women do. It is a devastating portrait of a society, but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world — one that cements David Adams Richards’ place as the finest novelist at work in Canada today.

    After growing up in an Irish Catholic household, he was sent to a grammar school run by priests, from which he eventually emerged unscathed. A combination of O Levels and rock ’n’ roll led him into the bowels of Manchester’s club land, where he worked alongside strippers and Chinese strongman acts while revising the War of Jenkin’s Ear.Testosterone and guilt struggled for mastery in his lapsing Catholic chest and trousers until testosterone won and, with guilt still on his back like Quasimodo’s hump, he toured the dancehalls of Northern England in a VW panel van, taking rock ’n’ roll to one-horse towns where the horse had bolted.Warm, nostalgic and very funny, Mike Harding’s memoir of his early life in post-war Manchester is as idiosyncratic and engaging as the man himself.

    Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet.

    What it will be like to live in a world where growth is over? Economist and resource analyst Jeff Rubin is certain that the world's governments are getting it wrong. Instead of moving us toward economic recovery, measures being taken around the globe right now are digging us into a deeper hole. Both politicians and economists are missing the fact that the real engine of economic growth has always been cheap, abundant fuel and resources. But that era is over. The end of cheap oil, Rubin argues, signals the end of growth--and the end of easy answers to renewing prosperity. Rubin's own equation is clear: with China and India sucking up the lion's share of the world's ever more limited resources, the rest of us will have to make do with less. But is this all bad? Can less actually be more? Rubin points out that there is no research to show that people living in countries with hard-charging economies are happier, and plenty of research to show that some of the most contented people on the planet live in places with no-growth or slow-growth GDPs. But it doesn't matter whether it's bad or good, it's the new reality: our world is not only about to get smaller, our day-to-day lives are about to be a whole lot different.

    The magnificent and long-awaited biography of the beloved writer who gave us the Manawaka novels, including The Diviners and The Stone Angel.