Jonny Appleseed


Joshua Whitehead - 2018
    Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.

The Torontonians


Phyllis Brett Young - 2007
    The banal finality of this event triggers an introspective voyage through the events of her life and how she became who she is: wife of business executive Rick, citizen of the suburb of Rowanwood, mother to two accomplished daughters in university. Before Betty Friedan coined the term feminine mystique, The Torontonians told a classic feminist story of suburban ennui and existential self-discovery, tracing a detailed portrait of femininity in the 1950s through the eyes of its perceptive and thoughtful heroine. The book is also a unique contemporary meditation on community and social ties from a time when Canada's major cities were just beginning to spread out into suburban sprawl.

The Last High


Daniel Kalla - 2020
    Dr. Julie Rees, a toxicologist and ER doctor, is stunned when her emergency room is flooded with teenagers from the same party, all on the verge of death. Julie knows the world of opioids inside and out, and she recognizes that there’s nothing typical about these cases. She suspects the teens took—or were given—fentanyl. But why did they succumb so quickly? Detective Anson Chen is determined to find out. He and Julie race to track down the supplier of the deadly drugs. But the trail of suspects leads everywhere, from unscrupulous street dealers to ruthless gang leaders who hide behind legitimate business fronts and the walls of their mansions. As Anson and Julie follow clues through the drug underworld, Julie finds herself haunted by memories of her troubled past—and the lover she lost to addiction. When other overdoses fill the ER—and the morgue—Julie realizes that something even more sinister than the ongoing fentanyl crisis is devastating the streets. And the body count is rapidly rising. A gripping thriller, The Last High explores the perfect storm of greed, addiction, and crime behind the malignant spread of fentanyl, a deadly drug that is killing people faster than any known epidemic.

Top Girls


Caryl Churchill - 1982
    Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed as 'the best British play ever from a woman dramatist' by The Guardian.

She Would Be King


Wayétu Moore - 2018
    Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.

Translations


Brian Friel - 1981
    The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local community, from a semi-literate young farmer to and elderly polygot autodidact who reads and quotes Homer in the orginal.In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the Britsh Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes ofr cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the unexperctedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and harmless. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationshiops of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.

The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged)


Adam Long - 1994
    The playtext is reproduced here with footnotes which will be of no help to anyone and a letter from the authors to the Queen.

The Gum Thief


Douglas Coupland - 2007
    In Douglas Coupland's ingenious new novel--sort of a Clerks meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf--we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged aisles associate at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger's co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she's never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right.These two retail workers then strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly, horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief reveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life.Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them ...and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.

Soft Science


Franny Choi - 2019
    A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

The Laramie Project


Moisés Kaufman - 2001
    But for the people of Laramie–both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him–the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation.

Boundless


Jillian Tamaki - 2017
    An anonymous music file surfaces on the internet and a cult springs up in its wake. A group of city animals briefly open their minds to us. Helen finds her clothes growing baggy, her shoes looser, and as she shrinks, the world around her recedes. A lifetime of romantic relationships are charted against the rise and fall of the celebrity cast of a classic film.Jillian Tamaki brings her characteristic blend of realism and humor to her first collection of short stories. Boundless explores the lives of women and how the expectations of others influence their real and virtual selves. Mixing objective reality, speculative fiction, out-and-out fantasy, and a deep understanding of the contemporary world's contradictions, Tamaki shows herself to be a short story talent equal to her peers Adrian Tomine and Eleanor Davis. Tamaki's styles shift from story to story, each delicately setting the mood for her characters' inner turmoil: thick chunky blocks of ink become hyper-realist detailing which become brushy drawings of plants, all effortlessly rendered in Tamaki's distinctive hand.

The Good Woman of Setzuan


Bertolt Brecht - 1953
    The Good Woman of Setzuan, written during Brecht's exile and set in Communist China, is a parable of a young woman torn between obligation and reality, between love and practicality, and between her own needs and those of her friends and neighbors.Adhering closely to the original German text, this is a performance-friendly translation of one of Brecht's most popular plays.

Fugitive Pieces


Anne Michaels - 1996
    His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.   As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest


Dale Wasserman - 1970
    w. inset. Kirk Douglas played on Broadway as a charming rogue who contrives to serve a short sentence in an airy mental institution rather in a prison. This, he learns, was a mistake. He clashes with the head nurse, a fierce artinet. Quickly, he takes over the yard and accomplishes what the medical profession has been unable to do for twelve years; he makes a presumed deaf and dumb Indian talk. He leads others out of introversion, stages a revolt so that they can s

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf


Ntozake ShangeNtozake Shange - 1975
    Brown.From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.