Mordecai: The Life & Times


Charles Foran - 2010
    It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" — the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate — warts and all.

The Flame


Leonard Cohen - 2018
    Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”

The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant


Michel Tremblay - 1978
    The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant—only one of them, “the fat woman,” is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circus-arena, confessional and battleground to her extended family, with ancient roots in both rural Quebec and the primordial land of the Saskatchewan Cree, stands an immaculately kept but seemingly empty house where the fates, Rose, Mauve, Violet and their mother Florence, only ever fleetingly and uncertainly glimpsed by those in a state of emotional extremis, are knitting the booties of what will become the children of a whole new nation.In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay allows his imagination free reign, fictionalizing the lives of his beloved characters, dramatized so brilliantly in his plays and remembered so poignantly in his memoirs.“The fat woman” both is and is not Michel Tremblay’s mother—her extended family and neighbours more than a symbol of a colonized people: abandoned and mocked by France; conquered and exploited by England; abused and terrorized by the Church; and forced into a war by Canada supporting the very powers that have crushed their spirit and twisted their souls since time immemorial. This is a “divine comedy” of the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people caught up by circumstances that span the range of the ridiculous to the sublime.

Morningside World Of Stuart Mclean


Stuart McLean - 1989
    Funny and charming, poignant and nostalgic, McLean's essays illuminate a world most of us take for granted. Among Stuart's favourites in this collection are:- the shocking truth about household dust- the importance of hardware stores- the sad, true tale of Anne, the street lady- an ode to the Popsicle, "one of the world's most perfect foods"- the story of the greatest game of Monopoly ever played.

Inside


Alix Ohlin - 2012
    Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.

Rotten Perfect Mouth


Eva H.D. - 2015
    These poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are plangent, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats and travel and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva H.D. is drawn to. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with vibrant immediacy.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed - A 30-minute Chapter-by-Chapter Summary


Instaread Summaries - 2014
    We read every chapter and summarize it in one or two paragraphs so you can get the information contained in the book at a much faster rate. This is an InstaRead Summary of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. Below is a preview of the earlier sections of the summary: Prologue The year is 1995. Cheryl, the narrator and author of the story, explains that she was 26 years old when at the lowest point of her life she began her solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. She describes the trail as being 2,663 miles long and two feet wide, stretching from Mexico to Canada and including nine mountain ranges. She has embarked on her journey just 38 days before in an effort to find herself. As she stops to rest at the peak of a mountain, one of her hiking boots tumbles away down the mountain and into some trees far below. Realizing the other is of no use to her anymore, she tosses it out into the trees as well. She reflects on her situation and decides that though she is alone, battered and bruised, shoeless, and at least days from the next supply stop, she must walk on. Part One: The Ten Thousand Things Chapter One: The Ten Thousand Things Cheryl reflects on when her journey actually began and decides that it truly began a over four years ago, on the day that she had learned her forty-five year-old mother was going to die of advanced stage lung cancer. She recalls being at the Mayo clinic with her mother and stepfather on the day of the diagnosis and cursing the smaller town doctors that had given the same diagnosis in the weeks leading up to the visit to Mayo.  She had wanted them to be wrong. Angry at her absent older sister and younger brother, and refusing to believe that her extremely health-conscious, non-smoking mother could possibly have cancer, she argues with the doctor, then crumbles at the news that her mother has a year, at most, to live. She describes the deep love and devotion of her mother to her and her two siblings. Pregnant at nineteen, her mother had married her father only to find out within three short days that he was brutal and abusive. Her mother left him several times, but not permanently until she was twenty-eight years old. A single mother of three, her mother worked all the time, but never seemed to get ahead. She sugar-coated poverty for her children, making games out of their plight and dating an interesting slew of men. Her mother finally met Eddie, a man eight years her junior, and he married her and took on the roles of husband and father with ease. After a disabling accident and settlement, the couple bought forty acres of land an hour and half from Duluth, Minnesota...

The LSAT Trainer: A Remarkable Self-Study Guide for the Self-Driven Student


Mike Kim - 2013
    The LSAT Trainer. Your LSAT score is the most important part of the law school admissions process. It is far more important than your essays, your recommendations, your GPA, where you went to college, or where you come from. A top LSAT score can open doors for you that would be virtually impossible to open otherwise. Most people are capable of drastically improving their scores with the right preparation. Most people score about the same on the actual exam as they do on their first diagnostic. The LSAT Trainer is the most advanced and effective LSAT learning system ever developed. No other book has ever explained the LSAT with as much depth and clarity, or presented strategies that are as simple, intuitive, and effective. But that's not what makes The LSAT Trainer truly special... Other books are designed to help you understand The LSAT. And that's what we expect our academic books to do. But the LSAT is not a test of what you know. Arguably, a super-smart eighth grader with no advanced training but great reading skills and common sense can get a perfect score on the exam. The LSAT is a test of how you think. The LSAT Trainer is a workbook--it is specifically designed to help you get better and better at thinking through and solving LSAT questions. Lessons and strategies are carefully combined with pinpointed drills and hundreds of real LSAT problems to help you transform what you read about into what you can do. Other books can help you understand the LSAT. The LSAT Trainer will help you get better at it.

Brown Girl in the Ring


Nalo Hopkinson - 1998
    The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

The Epic of Gilgamish


Reginald Campbell Thompson - 1970
    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

The Gallery of Lost Species


Nina Berkhout - 2015
    While the beautiful Viv is forced by the girls' overbearing mother to compete in child beauty pageants, plain-looking Edith follows in her father's footsteps: collecting oddities, studying coins, and reading from old books.When Viv rebels against her mother's expectations, Edith finds herself torn between a desire to help her sister and pursuing her own love for a boy who might love her sister more than he loves her. When Edith accepts a job at the National Gallery of Canada, she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo who is searching for a bird many believe to be extinct. Navigating her way through Vivienne's dark landscape while trying to win Liam's heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined; they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life.The Gallery of Lost Species is about finding solace in unexpected places - in works of art, in people, and in animals that the world has forgotten.

The Sky Is Falling: A Novel


Caroline Adderson - 2010
    a physician''s wife and mother of a teenage son, opens her morning newspaper and is shocked to see a familiar face on the front page. Sonia, a lost friend accused of terrorism, has just been released after twenty years in prison. It all comes flooding back to Jane, how twenty years before her life took a very different course.At nineteen, Jane rents a room in a shared student house with a mismatched trio of idealists: Sonia, who yearns to save the world''s children from nuclear war; the Marxist-leaning Dieter; and the anarcho-feminist-pacifist Pete. A bookish misfit, her radical housemates quickly draw Jane into NAG!, a non-violent, anti-nuclear direct action group.To Jane,who is studying Russian and Russian literature, her compatriots, with their utopian dreams and youthful pathos, soon seem Chekhovian to her.Meanwhile, NAG! plans its most ambitious action, crossing the border into the United States to chain themselves to the Boeing factory fence. Tension increases as the group mounts each successive protest, until a bomb explodes and changes everything.The Sky Is Falling deftly intertwines themes of first love, sexual confusion, and the dread of nuclear disaster with the comical infighting of a cast of well-meaning political activists, and the timelessness of the great Russian classics. A story for our own age of paranoia and terror, Caroline Adderson's witty, accomplished novel returns the reader to another fearful era, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the end of world seemed inevitable.

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club


Megan Gail Coles - 2019
    Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection


James Crews - 2019
    Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.

The Cremation of Sam McGee


Robert W. Service - 1986
    Evoking both the spare beauty and the mournful solitude of the Yukon landscape, Harrison's paintings proved the perfect match for Service's masterpiece about a doomed prospector adrift in a harsh land. Harrison's Illustrator's Notes on each page enhanced both poem and illustrations by adding valuable historical background. Upon its original publication, many recognized the book as an innovative approach to illustrating poetry for children. For years The Cremation of Sam McGee has stood out as a publishing landmark, losing none of its appeal both as a read-aloud and as a work of art. Kids Can Press proudly publishes this deluxe hardcover twentieth anniversary edition -- complete with a spot-varnished cover, new cover art and heavy coated stock -- of a book that remains as entrancing as a night sky alive with the vibrant glow of the Northern Lights.