Virtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age.

Invisible Dogs, Dempster's fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you'll die and are afraid you won't—not b …

Standing at the edge of the ship, contemplating a watery demise, Billy is called back to reality when his dead mentor Sid Diamond appears as a handpuppet. Sid forces Billy to re-enact his life as a puppet show, rekindling the passion Billy once had for puppets, people, and the dream of a life that sparkles. For anyone stuck in the middle—mid-care …

From a master poet, meditative lines running like veins through the dark grace of being alive.

Governor General's Award–winning poet Don Domanski's new collection, Bite Down Little Whisper, delves into the interconnectedness of all life with spiritual gravitas and powerful mindfulness. These are poems brimming with mythological and scientific ener …

Committing Theatre offers the first full-length historical study of political intervention theatre and theatrical spectatorship in English Canada. Building on twenty years of research and engagement in the field, this book’s historical narrative frames close-up examples of how theatre artists have intervened in and engaged with political struggl …

Anne-Marie Turza's formidable debut collection presents a landscape where anything might appear, out of myth, history, or science: microscopic creatures, the pitcher Satchel Paige, toothed whales, a man on the back of a snow bear.

These poems test the lyric affinity between silence, imagination, and the material world. Put another way, in The Quiet, …

The issue of loyalty and betrayal is dramatized through dialogue in the Governor-General's-Award-winning Three in the Back, Two in the Head, which appears to have been based on the assassination of Gerald Bull, the brilliant Canadian scientist who designed the first Star Wars system twenty years before Reagan announced his version. Bull ran afoul o …

Paul is asked to drive his wife's 93-year-old Grandpa "Bud" all the way from Calgary to his retirement trailer in Mesa, Arizona. Paul hopes to find strange, roadside diners and sleep out under the stars. Bud wants Denny's and Motel 6. Paul and Bud spend five days together, navigating the predictable turnoffs on the Interstate while discovering thei …

Historically, Canada's Constitution has been principally viewed as a federal framework or a rights bulwark. This book offers a new interpretation. The "Strategic Constitution," as proposed by Irvin Studin, is a framework for understanding the capacity of Canada to project strategic power in the world. First, Studin provides a wide-ranging audit of …

Akin to a bookkeeper’s accounting of what’s given and taken in a fraught, uncertain exchange, The Counting House goes on to record the pageantry and pedantry of courtly affection gone awry. Symbols and origins of traditional rhymes involving kings and queens serve as inventory, alongside elements of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and …

When Elsa and her family move from Iceland to Scotland, she is filled with uncontrollable joy over the new adventure she is about to begin. With her infectious energy and love for the dramatic, Elsa stands out both in her community and within her classroom, but this exuberance also targets her as an outcast. Only through the faith of a new friend a …

Living in a wild world full of unpredictable creatures—beasts, beggars, witch hunters, and actors—William's family must find a way to cope with their changing Elizabethan world. With four legs, a keen eye, and a sharp tongue, Hooker, Shakespeare's dog, tells the story of how the Stratford rogue became the world's most famous playwright. Based o …

Five classmates come together for their thirtieth high-school reunion. Some see it as a welcome trip home, while others see it as an obligation, and a few never even left. But as the night wears on, the one-time classmates start to reconnect and reminisce. And the more alcohol that’s consumed the closer the friends come to confronting their darke …

Kate possesses the makings of a gifted mathematician with an enthusiasm for exploring the mysteries of space and time. But this is the 1950s and women are routinely laughed out of scientific circles. Besides, every family has its star, and Kate's brother already holds that distinction. Hindered by prejudices against women, Kate is confined to a lif …

An unhappy orphan who finds solace in paper cut-outs of her parents, an Indian doctor who displays his medical degree in his taxi cab, and waiters who tamper with fortune cookie are some of the vibrant characters who are brought to life in this anthology of six monologues that revolve around paper. From drama to comedy to crime-thriller, Yee brings …

An original collection of four plays about unsung women from the history of the Canadian west. With theatrical twists and turns, Her Voice, Her Century takes us from an English doctor plunked into the middle of Alberta's unsettled north country, to a Canadian journalist covering the First World War, to the scandalous relationship between an Alberta …

This volume comprises a reprinting and gloss of the original text of the 1933 Communist play Eight Men Speak. The play was banned by the Toronto police after its first performance, banned by the Winnipeg police shortly thereafter and subsequently banned by the Canadian Post Office. The play can be considered as one stage–the published text–of a …

A virus has plagued the city and residents are quarantined. Curfews have been imposed and rumours of government corruption abound. Bureaucratic red tape is creating a food crisis. Laurel and her parents are imprisoned in the basement of their stately home, relying on the generosity of their former gardener, Cheater, for information and supplies. Wh …

In a Catholic high school in Scarborough, Ontario, amidst low-income housing, difficult race relations, and poverty, a young woman struggles to find her sexual identity. In this sincere portrayal of high-school kids pitting the voice of God and thousands of years of scripture against the voice of their own bodies, Kilt Pins cheekily asks "Is your k …

These poems lead the reader into a world that reveals a balancing act between the familiar and known, the mysterious and wild. Some poems are narrative, some imagistic meditations, and some are small, playful pieces that edge into wisdom: “Here, here, you sing and now / Between me and what I see / lives eternity.” Throughout there is a unifying …

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For …

A young soldier goes to Afghanistan, another to Passchendaele. A family splits in two when a Protestant falls in love with a Catholic; one hundred and twenty years later, it could happen all over again for a whole new set of reasons.

From the University of Alberta's inaugural Lee Playwright-in-Residence.

Iris Trimble is trying to hold it all together. She may very well fly off the face of the earth if she doesn't hang on to the kitchen counter. At least that's how she feels after her mother, Bernice, a lively, recently widowed fifty-nine-year-old breaks the news that she has Alzheimer's. In an effort to cope with the stress, Iris makes her mother's …

From playwright Adam Seelig, founder and director of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto, comes a new play of timely absurdity: Ubu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun. This anti-musical is the result of intoxicatingly driving Alfred Jarry's 1896 merde-filled masterpiece Ubu Roi head-first into the internationally renowned antics, absurdities and ob …

A chilling psychological thriller, Little One is the haunting story of adopted siblings Aaron and Claire—one the definition of normal, the other deeply disturbed and unpredictable—and the strange lives of their neighbours, a man and his mail-order bride.

In Other People’s Children, wealthy young power couple Ben and Ilana hire Sati, a live-in …

In this breathtaking collection of poems, Pamela Porter invokes the twin mysteries of love and loss to illumine the heart burdened by grief, yet comforted and renewed by the beauty of the natural world. In the long poem “Atonement,” Porter takes us into a human drama, rich with astonishments: “There was no snow, but you could say the snow bur …

Elora Dixon is a vibrant, middle-aged lawyer and disability-rights activist who has never walked a step in her life. A neuromuscular disease left her with a curved spine and a reliance on around-the-clock care. Nonetheless, she is an inexorable force when chance pits her against the notorious Julian Summer, who is in town promoting his internationa …

"Man in Scrubs" follows the story of a queer black nurse who is getting awfully tired of being put in a box. He's queer, not gay, and he'll tell you the difference. He's always been an outcast, and constantly finds himself at the bottom of any and every hierarchy. With his patience waning, he confronts what it means to be an outsider, and, more imp …

When Olivia loses control at her fiftieth birthday party, her four best friends decide to intervene once and for all, much to the irritation of Olivia and her lover, Norma. But is she the only one battling a demon? Or do each of these women face an addiction of one kind or another? Five @ Fifty is a raw and darkly comedic portrayal of turning fifty …

The turmoil in Max's life was set in motion by Sylvia, an elusive figure who enters his life and charges Max with the task of finding Tommy Jade, a Chinese immigrant from the 1920s. Dragged further into the history of the Chinese-Canadian struggle for redress and into the lives of those involved, Max discovers that not only is his life in danger, b …

Fat-back & Molasses is a collection of favourite old recipes from Newfoundland & Labrador.

In addition to the homespun recipes, this book contains sketches and stories that also give a deep insight into the culture and life of a people very much in communion with nature and the joy of life.

In this collection of poems, Inge Israel works through Samuel Beckett's letters, his biographies and his actual plays and novels to probe the imagination that created his artistic works. Arguably the pre-eminent avant-garde and most influential writer of the 20th century and a legend in his own time, Beckett presents many glaring paradoxes.

Beckett …

Sara Peters' visionary debut collection is a book about obsessions — about desire, violence, sex, beauty, and cruelty, about how they lace through our days, leaving us changed. In these startling poems of mystery and terror, we meet remarkable characters enduring unspeakable things, confronting the raw reality of existence through fearless candor …

Two old friends become puppeteers, each performing with the same beloved folk characters, Franz and Schnitzel. Fipsi, ambitious and naive, aligns herself with the rule government, the Common Good. Carl, headstrong and outspoken, is forced underground as his satirical shows parody the censorship and oppression of the Common Good.

Canada's foremost literary critic looks at the politics of irony in modern writing and explains how it relates to imperial history, how it impacts upon personal memories, how it speaks from the margin, and how it indirectly teaches us to resist presumptuous authority. Funny, informed and emotionally engaging, Grandchild of Empire, an extension of t …

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 …

This collection of poems takes us on a journey — a very personal journey of Pamela Porter's own — to Africa and South America, those corners of the world the news reports never seem to cover: to Angola's thirty-year-long civil war, a landscape overrun with poverty, AIDS, and infant mortality; and to the struggles of ordinary people still haunte …

The brilliant new collection from Michael Crummey, bestselling author of Galore.

Michael Crummey’s first collection in a decade has something for everyone: Love and marriage and airport grief; how not to get laid in a Newfoundland mining town; total immersion baptism; the grand machinery of decay; migrant music and invisible crowns and mortifying …

Set in the final days of the first millennium, Mad Boy Chronicle hauls the Hamlet story howling back to its origins. Join the Mad Boy as he sets out in fierce pursuit of his destiny, in a world where wolves, elves, spirits, and Jesus Christ all compete for the future of humanity.

How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes’ new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes com …

Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Thr …

One of Canada's most evocative modern painters, Cree artist Dale Auger was a gifted interpreter of First Nations culture, using the cross-cultural medium of art to portray scenes from the everyday to the sacred and dissemble stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. Medicine Paint is a collection of Auger's best work, reproduced in glorious full colour …

The selections in this survey of the narrative and lyric poets of Confederation and the later nineteenth century have been chosen to remind readers of the distances and diversities involved as Canadians struggled toward nationhood. Along with essays on Sangster and Mair, the first poets consciously writing of the Canadian scene and the Canadian ide …

It's a Friday afternoon in the big city and, in six different offices, six different stories are unfolding at the same time. However, they are all connected somehow, from the figure skater on the ledge, to the novelist in the closet. A madcap race towards quitting time.

A celebration of British Columbia’s coastal cuisine with recipes and fork-lore from the region’s farmers, artisans, fishers, foragers, and chefs.

The Butcher, the Baker, the Wine and Cheese Maker By the Sea is a tribute to the remarkable innovators and culinary leaders who make up Canada’s west coast food culture.

Discover some of the most dive …

In this poignant meditation on the uneasy relationship between science and the human spirit, a group of women aged nineteen to sixty-three with HER2-related breast cancer are recruited for a clinical drug trial. For some of them the trial is renewed hope; others feel it’s a weary last resort. For Dr. Danielle Pearce, the research scientist in cha …

When Joey enters puberty, his father Jake finds himself in a morally ambiguous position. Joey is severely disabled, but he still has the same sexual desires as any seventeen-year-old boy, only he can’t do anything to relieve the tension. Jake is a widower whose life is devoted to his son, but when he suddenly develops a serious medical condition, …

In Communion, a recovering alcoholic and her estranged daughter try to negotiate a new relationship in spite of vastly different lifestyles; Was Spring tells the story of three women who suffered a tragic accident years ago; and Small Things explores how the little differences keep us from understanding each other.

At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her.

In the sleepy town of Pontypool, Ontario, no one is safe from an epidemic so devastating it will leave you literally speechless.

Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods (1919) has been out of print since its first and only edition in 1927. This critical edition not only revives the work for readers and scholars alike, it also provides historical context for Aikins’s often overlooked contributions to theatre in the 1920s and presents research on the different staging techni …