- canadian (24)
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- essays (4)
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To Sweep the Light
A new short story by award-winning author Pasha Malla.
Set during the summer in a small town on the edge of the Arctic Circle, To Sweep the Light is a love story about solitude and companionship, proximity and distance, and the quest for intimacy between a boy and a girl.
All We Want is Everything
All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, w …
Double-Takes
Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically accla …
Hearts in the Wild
Every year, thousands of wild animals are injured or orphaned in Canada, while the habitat and very existence of others is threatened by human activity. Roxanne Willems Snopek tells the inspiring stories of some of these amazing creatures and the dedicated and compassionate people who care for them. Wildlife rescue centres help many of our urban an …
Ignite
Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran's poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into th …
The Wolsenburg Clock
In his debut novel, The Wolsenburg Clock, Vancouver Island poet Jay Ruzesky sets out to tell the multi-century history of an astronomical clock in a small Austrian city. The clock is a mechanical marvel for its time, viewed in much the same way as we treat current 3-D wonders like Avatar. As the hours and minutes tick by, the movement of the planet …
Matadora
Set in Spain and Mexico during the 1930s, Matadora tells the story of Luna Caballero Garcia, an impoverished and intrepid servant attempting to make her name in the bullring at a time when it was illegal for a girl to do so. Matadora carries readers from bohemian artistic circles in Mexico City and Andalusia to Norman Bethune's mobile blood transfu …
Living the Edges
This important and ground-breaking collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental. Here, Canadian women speak frankly about the societal barriers they encounter in their everyday lives due to social attitudes and physical and systemic inaccessibility. They bring to light the discrimination …
Edge of Flight
Edge of Flight is the toughest rock-climbing route Vanisha has ever faced. She has one last chance to conquer it before she moves to Vermont to start university.
University is a sore point for Vanisha, who yearns for a career in the outdoors but feels pressured by her mother to earn an academic degree. Trying to put school out of her mind, she heads …
Nicolai's Daughters
Compelled to fulfill her father's dying wish to find the half-sister he kept from her, Alexia arrives in her father's village of Diakofto on the edge of the Peloponnese. There she discovers a culture she knows nothing about, a country in financial crisis, and an extended family with too many secrets. The Sarinopoulos family has long been marked by …
Walls
Winner, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Shortlisted, Dolman Travel Book Award
Longlisted, Alberta Readers' Choice Award, BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
In this ambitious blend of travel an …
Some Extremely Boring Drives
From the multi-talented author of Inventory and Open Pit comes a new collection of short stories, filled with lost souls drifting through exotic locales, reinventing themselves on the fly.
Marguerite Pigeon’s gifts for quick characterization and muscular dialogue are on full display in this collection, where you will encounter competitors in an en …
The Apple House
Anglophone Imogene Jackson grew up in an English suburb on the uneasy edge of a francophone world. At the age of nineteen she quit college to marry a shoemaker from the close-knit French village of Saint-Ange-du-Lac. For ten years she has lived with her husband, Thomas, above his family's historic shoe shop, immersed in village life. When Thomas di …
Lightning Rider
When January Fournier arrives at the Foothills Hospital in Calgary, her brother Grey is barely clinging to life in intensive care after a horrible motorcycle crash. She's devastated--but things get worse when the police accuse Grey of a string of bike thefts, claims he's in no condition to dispute.
Jan decides she's the only person who can uncover t …
Gold Panner's Manual
With the economy as uncertain as ever, gold panning is making a comeback. Why not pick up a piece or two of surprisingly simple equipment and check that stream by your campsite? The techniques, the pans, the pickaxes and the educated guessing required to pan gold haven't changed much since the Klondike Gold Rush. Garnet Basque's Gold Panner's Manua …
Maidenhead
Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)
Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian mus …
A Winter Kill
Nicole Patterson is a young, green and very eager probationary constable with the Ontario Provincial Police. Although she spends much of her time breaking up bar fights, giving out traffic tickets and finding lost kids, she dreams of one day becoming a detective.
Late one bitterly cold winter night, she comes across the body of a young woman lying o …
Chilcotin Yarns
Getting three trucks and two horses stuck in the mud on "a good road" into BC's wild, remote interior was just the start of Bruce Watt's hilarious adventures—and it was his honeymoon, too. When the newly married Watt moved there in 1948 to take up ranching, he was a just a kid in his early 20s. He and his wife fell in love with Big Creek, three h …
To the Edge of the Sea
Alex was in harmony with the water. He taught himself to swim, and liked working the sea off Prince Edward Island as his fisherman father did, but he always yearned for something more. His brother Reggie despised it all — the water that brought death, the seasickness, and he needed to breathe the air of farms. Reggie yearned for escape. Mercy Col …
Marilyn Bell
"'My arms were tired. My legs ached. My stomach hurt in one big awful pain and I couldn't get my breath. I wanted to quit. When it gets to your stomach, marathoners say, you're through.' Marilyn Bell was through - or so it seemed." This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: sport, biography, or sports history. Marilyn B …
Stopping for Strangers
Birth, death and all the big moments in between. Shortlisted for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award
These stories about artists, lovers, brothers and strangers acutely probe love and loss, men and women together, and the family ties that bind. A father renews an old artistic rivalry with his dying son; a raucous family gathering ends in tragedy; a …
Toronto Murders
The history of Toronto is peppered with countless tales of scandals and murder. This fascinating collection of crime stories features six chilling incidents that plagued the city's residents in days gone by. Exploring deadly love affairs, mysterious disappearances, and public hangings, these true accounts will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Murder!
This is the story of the notorious, unsolved murder of the richest baronet in the British Empire, Sir Harry Oakes. The millionaire miner made his fortune from the rich mines in Northern Ontario. His wealth and lifestyle gave many a motive for murder. Rumours surrounding the murder case as well as prime details about the three suspects (including hi …
Ontario Murders
"From an early age, lying came easily to her. Everything she did was a performance, a role she played to create an illusion." - From the story of Evelyn Dick. Six chilling stories of notorious Ontario murders are recounted in this spine-tingling collection. From the pretty but dangerous Evelyn Dick to the mysterious murder of one of the Fathers of …
Plunder & Pillage
For over three hundred years, lawlessness in Canada flourished off Canada's east coast. Pirates roamed the North Atlantic, and master storyteller Harold Horwood recounts their action-filled careers, crimes and violent deaths. Privateerslicenced by governments to harass the enemyaimed to capture enemy ships and plunder their cargo.
Among the charac …
Wax Boats
In Sarah Robert’s debut collection Wax Boats, a rural island community comes to life in action-packed, evocative tales. Cougar ladies fight the BC wilderness and the inevitable extinction of their peaceful island lives. An expectant mother turns to Native traditions to guide her through a safe delivery. A Boy Scout troupe rescues their own leader …
Roadsworth
Winner, Design Edge Regional Design Award
In October 2001, paint was spilled on the streets of Montreal. A stark, primitive bike symbol, looking suspiciously like the one the city used to designate a bike path; a giant zipper, pulled open down the centre line of the street on a busy commuter route; the footprint of a giant, stomping through the city …
Social Capital, Diversity, and the Welfare State
Social capital is arguably the most critical idea to emerge in the social sciences in the last two decades. Emphasizing the importance of social networks, communication, and the symbolic and material exchanges that strengthen communities, social capital has been the subject of an expansive body of literature. Social Capital, Diversity, and the Welf …
It is Just That Your House is So Far Away
Divorced and approaching forty, Jeff Mott decides to leave his ex-wife and young daughter behind in Canada and travel to China. He starts teaching in a small town north of Beijing, and meets a young woman, Wang Bian Fu, and falls in love; however, as they get to know each other, Bian Fu's family life and emotions seem increasingly more complex and …
Gas Girls
Gigi and Lola live by one motto: love for gas, gas for cash, cash for living, living for love. Living in Zimbabwe's depressed economy, both women live day-by-day, plying their trade with the truck drivers that stop at the border.
Gigi knows the limitations of her trade, while her young protege, Lola, looks for love in every man that comes her way. L …
Dooley Takes the Fall
White Pine nominee, 2009Spinetingler Magazine Award Nominee, 2009 Canadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice, 2009A boy maybe twelve years old, on a bike, stopped next to Dooley, looked at the kid sprawled on the pavement and said, "Is he dead?""Yeah, I think so," Dooley said. In fact, he was sure of it because there was no air going into or coming …
The River Killers
Danny Swanson, Department of Fisheries and Oceans employee and ex-fisherman, isn’t exactly upset when he’s reassigned from a desk job in Ottawa to an at-sea job on the West Coast. His superiors think they’re punishing him for his indiscretions, but Danny is pleased to be back on the Pacific, reconnecting with his old fishing buddies. Revisiti …
Island of Wings
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
July, 1830. On the ten-hour sail west from the Hebrides to the islands of St. Kilda, everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil McKenzie. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders, and Lizzie, his new wife, is pregnant with their first child. As the two adjust to life on an exposed …
The Mad Trapper
When Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, was gunned down in February 1932, he went to his death without anyone knowing who he really was—most people believed the name "Albert Johnson" was an alias. He'd eluded a well-organized, well-equipped posse for seven weeks, surviving solely on wits and determination in the bitter cold of a Canadi …
Edge of Time
Someone wants Alec dead.
Someone who can invade innocent bystanders, bending their will to his, forcing them to murder. Someone who can travel through multiple dimensions, has powers beyond Earthly experience, and knows everything Alec knows.
How do you fight someone like that?
Riley is a target too. And like Alec, a target of more than just someon …
Sanctuary
Winner, Design Edge Regional Design Award
Shortlisted, Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award
Authentic. Original. Inimitable. Mary Majka was one of Canada's great pioneering environmentalists. She was best known as a television host, a conservationist, and a driving force behind the internationally acclaimed Marys Point Western Hemispheric …
He Was Some Kind of a Man
He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red R …
Pigeon English
"Pigeon English is a triumph." -- Emma Donoghue, author of Room
Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the 2011 Guardian First Book Award
Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku is the second best runner in the whole of Year 7. Harri races through his new life in England in his Adidas trainers - blissfully unaware of the threats around him. With equal …
Spit Delaney's Island
Jack Hodgins‘ first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print — in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award, Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career. Hodgin …
Nothing But Net
The Cape Breton Grizzly Bears are a bad news basketball team--they haven't won a single game all season. But the rules say a team from their region has to play in the Nova Scotia Invitational Tournament in Halifax, and they're it.
Their "star" player is the harebrained Chip Carson, whose constant scheming and practical jokes keep his coach and te …
Country Roads of Alberta
Experience Alberta's heritage and the outdoors in Country Roads of Alberta, an intriguing photographic guidebook that takes you to places off the beaten track.
Alberta's scenery is as diverse as its topography. Fringed along its western edge by high mountains, the land descends through foothills to stretch into undulating plains sculpted by ancient …
Stolen
The sound of the river, ever-present, had finally intruded on his consciousness. If Nate was playing by himself outside, that damn river was too close for comfort. Instantly forgetting everything else, John hurried to the door, pushed it right open, stepped to the edge.
John Quarry is on vacation with his small son, Nate, when a tragedy occurs: duri …
Charged
Craig is raising his little brother while his mother and her drug-dealing boyfriend ruin their lives. Manda's parents are teetering on the edge of divorce. How will Craig and Manda learn to let go of their anger and find the courage to move into adulthood when they see only flaws in their parents?
Extreme Edge
Jay is determined to make his name by climbing a tough rock face known as "The Wall" -- solo. No partner, no ropes, no equipment. Little does Jay suspect that it's his own life that will one day hang in the balance.
In this exciting rock-climbing adventure, Kellerhals-Stewart looks at the desire to break barriers and the questionable role of the m …
Ravenna Gets
Winner, 2011 ReLit Award
From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse “ction.”
In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living ro …
The Porcupinity of the Stars
Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the alw …
Roy & Me
Maurice Yacowar challenges genre and form in Roy & Me, a cross between memoir and fiction, truth and distortion. It is the exploration of Yacowar’s relationship with Roy Farran—soldier, politician, author, mentor—and his conflict with Farran’s anti-Semitic past. Best known for his service with the British Special Air Service during World Wa …
Sandra Beck
No writer in Canada today is more in love with the English, and French, languages than John Lavery. That love is gloriously requited. In inventive, incantatory prose, Sandra Beck, his long-awaited first novel, paints a very unusual portrait of a lady. This is a book about many things: the struggling antics of adolescence, the banal delusions of sol …
The New Entrepreneurs
In The New Entrepreneurs, author and venture capitalist Andrew Heintzman introduces us to the innovative business leaders who are at the forefront of the green economy. From forestry, water, and energy to transportation and agriculture, Heintzman profiles the enterprises that are developing cutting-edge, clean-tech products and innovations for expo …
Stroll
What is the 'Toronto look'? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Shawn Micallef has been examining T …