Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out …

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disapp …

Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one’s birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein’s call for syco …

In daily love letters written to her husband and soul companion, Brian, over the year following his death from brain cancer, critically acclaimed author, playwright, and jazz singer Martha Brooks leads us on a journey through grief that is both deeply personal and undeniably universal.

By turns funny, shattering, and uplifting, Brooks wrestles with …

When Joegodson Déralciné was still a small child, his parents left rural Haiti to resettle in the rapidly growing zones of Port-au-Prince. As his family entered the city in 1986, Duvalier and his dictatorship exited. Haitians, once terrorized under Duvalier’s reign, were liberated and emboldened to believe that they could take control of their …

The Little Washer of Sorrows is a collection of short stories that explores what happens when the expected and usual are replaced with elements of the rare and strange. The book’s emotional impact is created with strong, richly drawn characters facing universal issues in unusual settings. The collection is both dark and comical with engaging plot …

In 1990, Gerald Conaty was hired as senior curator of ethnology at the Glenbow Museum, with the particular mandate of improving the museum’s relationship with Aboriginal communities. That same year, the Glenbow had taken its first tentative steps toward repatriation by returning sacred objects to First Nations’ peoples. These efforts drew harsh …

“Our voices scrubbed out and forgotten. There are those who research and write about sex workers who often forget we are human.” —Amy Lebovitch

Shawna Ferris gives a voice to sex workers who are often pushed to the background, even by those who fight for them. In the name of urban safety and orderliness, street sex workers face stigma, racism …

“As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they’re gone for good?”

After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fi …

Are We There Yet? is a funny, participatory play and workshop about sexuality health education for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds. The play draws a parallel between mastering driving skills and negotiating relationships, and humorously opens a dialogue about sexuality. As teens watch and advise characters on stage, they feel as safe and free to tal …

Fear and embarrassment prevent frank and meaningful communication on the topic of sex. Participatory theatre can break the uncomfortable silence, and with over 700 performances across Canada, Jane Heather's award-winning play Are We There Yet? has been an effective tool for teaching teen sexuality since 1998. The play and accompanying educational p …

In 1926, two British women came from Cornwall to Edmonton and travelled through northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon by rail, sternwheeler, and canoe. For the women, it was a liberating experience, yet Vyvyan's narrative, supported by MacLaren and LaFramboise's insightful editorial work, reveals the imperialist attitudes under …

The return of a classic, with a new introduction by Candace Savage.

Frontier Farewell has been deemed "gracefully written" and "fully and meticulously researched," by Sharon Butala, while Canadian History Magazine called it "a great read that shatters the mythology surrounding the 'taming' of the West." A book every history buff should own, Frontier …

Gordon W. Smith, PhD, dedicated much of his life to researching Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic. A historian by training, his 1952 dissertation from Columbia University on “The Historical and Legal Background of Canada’s Arctic Claims” remains a foundational work on the topic, as does his 1966 chapter “Sovereignty in the North: The Can …

Gifford's invigorating work of metacriticism and literary history recovers the significance of the "lost generation" of writers of the 1930s and 1940s. He examines how the Personalism of anarcho-anti-authoritarian contemporaries such as Alex Comfort, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Durrell, J.F. Hendry, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas, and Henr …

When Canadians think of Saskatchewan—if they think of it at all—they think "flat and boring," a place to drive through or fly over, a gap between the bigger cities to the east and west.

Yet thanks to its damn-the-critics spirit, Saskatchewan is the birthplace of socialism, Medicare, and public funding for the arts—all essential to the national …

Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene is a collection of essays about the natural environment in a province rich in natural resources and aggressive in development goals. This is a casebook on Alberta from which emerges a far wider set of implications for North America and for the biosphere in general. The writers come from an …

“The collection of 23 essays provides an exciting snapshot of contemporary theorising on the maternal within psychoanalytic and social theory. The introduction serves as an excellent overview of this interdisciplinary field and its importance both to motherhood studies and broader feminist thinking. This book is a triumph!” —Assistant Profess …

In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the …

Buttressed by a wealth of new, collaborative research methods and technologies, the contributors of this collection examine women's writing in Canada, past and present, with 11 essays in English and 5 in French. Regenerations was born out of the inaugural conference of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory held at the Canadian Literature Cent …

With Children and Youth provides a snapshot of emerging theories and perspectives in the field of child and youth care across North America. Well-known scholars and researchers present new and innovative critical perspectives, written in a provocative manner and reflecting outside-the-box thinking.

The book examines from scholarly and practical vie …

Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …

"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains o …

The mountain parks are for all Canadians for all time and their value cannot be measured in terms of how many access roads, motels, souvenir shops and golf courses we've provided. -Bob Jordan, 1971 The Alpine Club of Canada imagined the Rockies and neighbouring ranges to the west and the north as a "climber's paradise." Through a century of adventu …

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s "National Dream."

It was a dream that came at great expense …

"The overarching theme of this volume is that Canada's Aboriginal population has reached a critical stage of transition, from a situation in the past characterized by delayed modernization, extreme socio-economic deficit, and minimal control over their demography, to a point of social, political, economic, and demographic ascendancy." -from the Pre …

Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social and political markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most powerful work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of decay, both physical and spiritual. This is a universe where m …

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of th …

This book, first published as Quand la nation débordait les frontières (Hurtubise HMH, 2004), is considered the most comprehensive analysis of Lionel Groulx's work and vision as an intellectual leader of a nationalist school that extended well beyond the borders of Québec. 

Recipient of the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award in non-fiction, t …

The Wyandot were born of two Wendat peoples encountered by the French in the first half of the seventeenth century—the otherwise named Petun and Huron—and their history is fragmented by their dispersal between Quebec, Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma. This book weaves these fragmented histories together, with a focus on the mid-eighteenth century …

The importance of energy to the functioning of any economy has meant that energy industries are amongst the most regulated of industries. What might appear to be purely private decisions are made within a complex and evolving web of government regulations.

This book provides an economic history of the petroleum industry in Alberta as well as a deta …

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple …

as if there could be no other memory a tree invisible remembering itself In as if, E.D. Blodgett takes readers on journeys of contemplation in which he re-imagines the lyric form. Each line leaves the reader breathless as it runs into the next to form a continuous cycle, a continued breath. The delicate syntax of each piece pushes one forward, ever …

would you believe me when i make consorts of alphabet runaways & stayathomes i have rounded up where they wandered all over the page Dennis Cooley masterfully extends the genre of the abecedary to explore his curiosity of the limitlessness of human communication. With linguistic wit and complexity, his poetry carries the reader through the historic …

Melissa Morelli Lacroix explores the love and longing, loss and pain, grief and healing found in the music of Frédéric Chopin, Clara Schumann, and Claude Debussy in a series of poetic cycles that respond to each composer’s work. Lacroix writes with her ear finely tuned to the music of death and decay, to the harmonies and discords of music, nat …

Geishas and samurai, manga and animé come to mind when Japan enters the conversation. While these traditional and modern images about the island nation have been widely disseminated in North America, most of us cannot imagine what everyday life is like in Japan. Tomoko Mitani's work addresses this gap with honest responses to the male-dominated so …

Sport Policy in Canada provides the first and most comprehensive analysis of the new Canadian Sport Policy adopted in 2012. In light of this new policy, the authors, top scholars in the field, provide detailed accounts of the most salient sport policies and programs, while also discussing issues and challenges facing policy makers. 
In Canada and …

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a geneti …

Marion Nicoll (1909-1985) is a widely acknowledged and important founder of Alberta art and certainly one of a dedicated few that brought abstraction into practice in the province. Her life and career is a story of determination, of dedication to her vision regardless of professional or personal challenges. Nicoll became the first woman instructor …

"There is no such thing as 'the ivory tower.' Rather, there sit side by side numerous windowless towers of knowledge, each seeming to have only a small entrance and no discernable exit." -Paul Martin Multilingual, multicultural, and vast, Canada enjoys a rich diversity of literatures. So, why does "Canadian Literature," as it has been taught, fail …

O.D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923-1941 is a lively and compelling trip through the letters, diary entries, and official memoranda of O.D. Skelton, one of the most important and influential civil servants in twentieth-century Canada.

Skelton was a towering foreign policy advisor to Canada's prime ministers and a lonely advocate for the count …

Scholar and diplomat Brian L. Evans gives us the first English-language biography of Chester A. Ronning (1894-1984): diplomat, politician, educator, and one of Canada's major public figures. This fascinating story depicts Ronning, the man who received many honours, and deepens readers' knowledge of Canada's post-World War II diplomacy and Canada-Ch …

"We're not exactly scene-stealers, so you don't hear much from us shy folk-and that's usually how we like it." -Elizabeth Zotova, "My Dear X" The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, par …

Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds undergo change. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe.

This book presents an ec …

This book contains the collected memories of Lola Rozsa - of her life and service to her family, her church, and her community as she and her husband, Ted, made their way from the tiny towns of the Depression-era, dust bowl southern plains to the burgeoning oil fields of Alberta in 1949. As Ted struggled to build his first seismic company, Lola rai …

"I wanted this to be a narrative. So finally Jean-Luc went all the way: every line in the script a quotation from somewhere else. Every blessed line. Love doesn't die. It's people who die. Love just goes away." -from "NOUVELLE VAGUE / New Wave (1990)" Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Goda …

"The contribution made by the Edmonton libraries to the sanity and support of the citizens cannot be estimated. No Annual Report can gauge things of this sort." -Annual Report of the Edmonton Public Library, 1931 The Edmonton Public Library turns 100 in 2013! Novelist, journalist, and Edmontonian Todd Babiak tells the story of EPL's birth and comin …

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ [‘Porträt einer Zunge’, 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a n …

"In the delta, water is boss, change is the only constant, and creation and destruction exist side by side." The Peace-Athabasca Delta in northern Alberta is a globally significant wetland that lies within one of the largest unfragmented landscapes in North America. Arguably the world's largest boreal inland delta, it is renowned for its biological …

In many commodity-based economies, rollercoaster boom-and-bust cycles have come to be viewed almost as an unavoidable characteristic. Framed mainly in the context of the Alberta economy, the articles in this volume explore a wide range of issues associated with the historical phenomenon of recurring periods of boom and bust, including reasons for t …