A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American docto …

Narrative has been central to human life for millennia, and the twentieth century has been preeminently the age of the story. Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist …

Just Fine traces the mishaps and misadventures of a conflicted agoraphobe: a woman psychologically restricted to a life indoors but spiritually inclined to wander the meadows, roads, and community beyond the house and river of her youth.

Her struggle assumes historic proportions when her neighbours dream of their own escapes from the insular, predic …

In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian Ursula M. Franklin examines the impact of technology upon our lives and addresses the extraordinary changes since The Real World of Technology was first published.

In four new chapters, Franklin tackles contentious issues, such as the dilution o …

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surroun …

Atonement is Sheila Fischman's translation of Gaetan Soucy's brilliant novel, originally published in French as L'Acquittement.

Twenty years after leaving the tiny village of Saint Aldor, Louis Bapaume has come home to make amends. During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underw …

Acclaimed as a man "who inspires the world" (Maclean's) and a "nation builder" (Globe and Mail), Jean Vanier has made a difference in the lives of countless people -- including those with disabilities and the many young people who have been moved by his life's work.

Becoming Human is a modern classic that continues to resonate among the generations …

From the acclaimed author of Following the Summer and Affairs of Art come these stories that convey the betrayal that accompanies every love story, seek to dispel all illusion, and recommend malice as state of grace. In the end vengeance emerges -- hot, velvety, coursing with passion and blood, and, surprisingly, capable of forging the most lasting …

Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in Ottawa from August 18 to 23, 1996. -- Actes du 22e congrès international des sciences généalogique et héraldique à Ottawa du 18 au 23 août 1996.

George Grant's magnificent four-part meditation sums up much that is central to his own thought, including a critique of modern liberalism, an analysis of John Rawls's Theory of Justice, and insights into the larger Western philosophical tradition.

This edition contains an introduction by Grant scholar Dr Robin Lathangue.

Naked under a tattered shower curtain, fifteen-year old Tracey Berkowitz has been sitting in the back of a bus for two days, looking for her brother, Sonny, who thinks he is a dog. Tracey's stories begin to twist and intertwine truth with lies, absorbing the reader into the games and delusions she uses to escape her despair.

The Tracey Fragments is …

Vital, funny, moving and assured, La Guerre, Yes Sir! is a surrealist fable set in rural Quebec during WWI and one of the major achievements in Canadian fiction. Canadian Literature greeted its first appearance in these terms: It is the French-Canadian writer Roch Carrier who comes closest to the significance, power and artistry of Faulkner at his …

Acclaimed literary critic Hugh Kenner examines Western culture's insatiable need for stimulation encountered elsewhere - from the eighteenth century's Grand Tour, to the self-imposed exile of modernist writers, to the disembodied global journeys the Internet avails us today. Kenner brings to this fascinating study knowledge of a wide array of disci …

In his 1968 CBC Massey Lectures R. D. Laing discusses how and why we value society's notions of family over our own.

Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family.

A psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Laing wor …

It is the mid-seventies, and Shaila has returned to Bombay for her father's sixtieth birthday party. In the linked stories that follow, Shree Gatage renders an India that can only be revealed by first leaving, and then returning again -- in the end, for Shaila, for good.

In this highly accomplished first collection, Ghatage reveals a true gift for …

Winnipeg writer Katherine Martens interviewed 26 women from the Mennonite community in southern Manitoba, ranging in age from 22 to 88 years old. They had many different backgrounds, but they all had one important characteristic: all were mothers.In the course of these interviews, Martens was searching for answers to questions that affected her bot …

Writer and scholar George Steiner's Massey Lectures are just as cogent today as when he delivered them in 1974 -- perhaps even more so. He argues that Western culture's moral and emotional emptiness stems from the decay of formal religion. He examines the alternate mythologies (Marxism, etc.) and fads of irrationality (astrology, the occult). Stein …

Originally broadcast on CBC Radio's Ideas as a series of interviews, Jacques Ellul's first-person approach here makes his ideas accessible to readers looking for new ways of understanding our society, and also gives unique new insight into Ellul's life, his work, and the origins and development of his beliefs and theories.

Jacques Ellul, historian, …

"What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?"

Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary edu …

R. C. Lewontin is a prominent scientist -- a geneticist who teaches at Harvard -- yet he believes that we have placed science on a pedestal, treating it as an objective body of knowledge that transcends all other ways of knowing and all other endeavours.

Lewontin writes in this collection of essays, which began their life as CBC Radio's Massey Lectu …

A groundbreaking meditation on sexual politics, love, and human tenacity from the world-renowned pioneer of feminist writing and prophetic author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.

When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as …

From the author of the award-winning The Sisters Brothers comes a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld.

A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their lo …

Governor General's Award Winner

Tenth Anniverary Edition, with a new preface

Our society, John Ralston Saul argues in his 1995 CBC Massey Lectures, is only superficially based on the individual and democracy. Increasingly it is conformist and corporatist, a society in which legitimacy lies with specialist or interest groups and decisions are made th …

In his national bestselling 1988 CBC Massey Lectures, Noam Chomsky inquires into the nature of the media in a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control. Specific cases are illustrated in detail, using the U.S. media primarily but also media in other so …

Reissued in a handsome A List edition, the largest collection of critical prose to date from world renowned author and poet Margaret Atwood, featuring an introduction by Lennie Goodings.

Originally published in 1982, Second Words brings together fifty of Margaret Atwood’s finest essays and reviews spanning two decades, beginning in 1962, with an i …

Conor Cruise O'Brien, respected journalist, diplomat and statesman, considers threats to the Enlightenment tradition from which modern society derives threats he considers serious enough that the tradition and its institutions might not survive even a third of the next millennium.

Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear, The Discarded Tools of Modern Man, A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Science in the Service of Man, The Future That Can Be Demanded Now, The Free Man in a Cybernetic …

Is democracy as we know it in danger? More and more we confront one another as aggrieved groups rather than as free citizens. Deepening cynicism, the growth of corrosive individualism, statism, and the loss of civil society are warning signs that democracy may be incapable of satisfying the yearnings it itself unleashes - yearnings for freedom, fai …

In the stifling heat of summer in a northern Canadian mining town, Marie, a young teacher, is fascinated by her new friend Corrine, a waitress who is determined to squeeze every drop of experience and sensation from life.

As summer ends, Marie marries an immigrant from Eastern Europe. She has chosen Ervant because she senses -- or hopes -- that desp …

A New York Times Notable Book

What forms will capitalism take in the twenty-first century? To answer this question, noted economist and social philosopher Robert Heilbroner looks beyond economic theory to the social and political problems of modern economic society.

In this sweeping examination of the past, present, and possible future, Heilbroner …

In the forthright style that has earned him a reputation for controversy, theologian Gregory Baum presents the Faith and Justice movement in the churches -- especially the Roman Catholic Church -- together with the considerable opposition to it. He discusses why many Christians are becoming activists, turning their faith into deeds by working for t …

In her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures Doris Lessing addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions, and inherited structures of unquestioned belief.

The Nobel Prize-winning author of more than thirty books, Doris Lessing is one of our most challenging and importan …

For more than fifteen years, iconoclastic thinker Ivan Illich refused to be interviewed. Finally, in 1988, CBC's David Cayley persuaded Illich to record a conversation. This first interview led to additional sessoins that continued until 1992 and are now gathered in Ivan Illich in Conversation.

In these fascinating conversations, which range over a …

In his 1964 CBC Massey Lectures C. B. Macpherson examines the rival ideas of democracy - the communist, Third World, and Western-liberal variants - and their impact on one another. He suggests that the West need not fear any challenge to liberal democracy if it is prepared to re-examine and alter its own values.

In Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor focuses on the key modern concept of self-fulfillment, often attacked as the central support of what Christopher Lasch has called the culture of narcissism. To Taylor, self-fulfillment, although often expressed in self-centered ways, isn't necessarily a rejection of traditional values and social commitment; i …

Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the w …

Brilliant and still-timely analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life from Canada’s most influential philosophers, reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Potter.

Originally published in 1969, Technology and Empire offers a brilliant analysis of the implications of technology …

In nineteenth-century Quebec a woman plots the murder of her husband after the death of their child. After brewing a poison, she is arrested, denounced as a witch, and in a devastating conclusion, released from her terrifying obsessions.

A son returns after an absence of two years to find both his mother and family friend Wiff trying to sustain his father, Jacob. A heart attack has forced Jacob out of work, and he can't reconcile himself to his frightening situation. The characters all discover something about themselves under this pressure of imminent death.

Of the Fields, Lately w …

From Bridgehead, the trading company owned by OXFAM-Canada which promotes economic justice through fair trade with the developing world, comes a cookbook with a difference. Recipes combine easily available ingredients including spices and nuts, coffees an

The fascinating story of Toronto’s experimental Rochdale College’s rise and fall, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Toronto’s Rochdale College began as an experiment in living and learning, and ended as a symbol of the flower-child sixties, a financial and social controversy. In his well-researched and entertaining account, David Shar …