What this book represents is, quite literally, a “slice” of (white) Australian life. By noting the patterns and parallels that emerge in a random sampling of social phenomena of widely varying types, from soap operas to political behaviour, Gaile McGregor has constructed a model that, in its challenge to uniformitarianism, is a test case in eth …

Tell el-Hesi, located in southern Israel at the juncture of the Negev Desert and the foothills of the Judean Mountains, provides an excellent opportunity for the archaeological study of the impact of a variety of physical environments on the peoples who inhabited a single site. The site has been occupied at various times from the Early Bronze Age t …

Virtually from its redaction about the sixth century A.D., the Babylonian Talmud became the rabbinic document par excellence. Through its lens almost all previous canonical rabbinic tradition was refracted. Study and mastery of the Talmud marked one as a rabbi, a “master.” This book examines the character, use and social meaning of the formaliz …

“Russian politics, like opium, seems infallibly to provoke the most fantastic dreams and imaginings on the part of the people who study them.” — E.A. Walker, British Embassy, Moscow 1931

In March 1933 the economic section of the Soviet secret police arrested six British engineers employed by the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company. The …

The history of Kitchener is unique among cities in southern Ontario. Although Kitchener shares so much of the character of the region today, its past was considerably different. Until 1916, Kitchener was Berlin, “Canada’s German capital.” Over two-thirds of the residents were of German origin; many retained strong traces of that past. These b …

Eagle Minds—a selection from the correspondence between the Canadian composer and scholar Istvan Anhalt and his American counterpart George Rochberg—is a splendid chronicle and a penetrating analysis of the swerving socio-cultural movements of a volatile half-century as observed by two highly gifted individuals.

Beginning in 1961 and spanning f …

During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani’s inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia “seduced” his readers by offering them …

"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 …

This collection of over thirty essays by both well-known and emerging writers explores what it means to “be at home” on Canada’s West Coast. Here the rainforest and the wild, stormy cost dominate one’s sense of identity, a humbling perspective shared in memoirs by individuals who come to see themselves as part of a larger ecological communi …

In June of 1962, the Canadian Pacific Railway announced a proposal to redevelop part of its reserved land in the heart of downtown Calgary. In an effort to bolster its waning revenues and to redefine its urban presence, the CPR proposed a multimillion dollar development project that included retail, office, and convention facilities, along with a m …

“So I have always walked alleys alone, with my monster face, listening through a wall for the words that might cultivate me, that are contained within the homes of ex-lovers, the ones who caught a glimpse and ran away.”

In the neon-slick streets of Thea Bowering’s imagination, monster girls and femme flâneurs roam, anthropologist’s eyes on …

There are two Icelands. One is the island in the North Sea, occupied since before the arrival of the Vikings. The other is "Western Iceland," the communities throughout North America, settled by Icelandic immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, and still maintaining strong ties to their mother country. While the prominent role of women in the de …

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of Pres …

Peigan elders Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged to a generation still bright with the traditional knowledge and deep memories of their grandparents. They lived under a paternalistic government system that denied them their language, culture, and religion. They reclaimed their heritage and shared it with the larger community receiving honours for …

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras …

Margaret Laurence's much admired Manawaka fiction—The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners—has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books a …

Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses …

Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian government’s multiculturalism policy to media representations of so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist fiction and history to postmoder …

Bridging Two Peoples tells the story of Dr. Peter E. Jones, who in 1866 became one of the first status Indians to obtain a medical doctor degree from a Canadian university. He returned to his southern Ontario reserve and was elected chief and band doctor. As secretary to the Grand Indian Council of Ontario he became a bridge between peoples, convey …

Robert Fulford called it “a remarkable glimpse of the underbelly of Toronto,” but the reviews that greeted the publication of Cabbagetown Diary in 1970 were decidedly mixed. The novel’s rowdy concoction of grit and violence and rooming-house sleaze had a strongly polarizing effect on its readers. Many admired the frankness of Butler’s depic …

Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.

Love and War in London: A Woman’s …

Shortlisted, John W. Dafoe Book Prize

Saturday, November 3, 1956
The United Nations, New York City
about 10 p.m.

Lester Pearson, Canada's foreign minister (and future prime minister) stands before the United Nations General Assembly. He is about to speak, reading from a proposal composed of seventy-eight painstakingly chosen words. These words, shape …

Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

One of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and …

Winner, Taste Canada Gold Medal for Culinary Narrative

Commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald's birth, Sir John's Table is a refreshing look at Canada's first prime minister.

Sir John's Table traverses the colourful life of Macdonald, from his passage as a young Scottish boy in the steerage compartment aboard the Earl of …

To mark Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, the editors at Goose Lane selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story is part of this collection or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you …

Secession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erín Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself dis …

The first comprehensive history of the Aboriginal First World War experience on the battlefield and the home front. When the call to arms was heard at the outbreak of the First World War, Canada’s First Nations pledged their men and money to the Crown to honour their long-standing tradition of forming military alliances with Europeans during time …

Dr. Actions: What do you think it all means?
Dr. Thinking: I think it means that our collaboration is destined for great heights and the basking glory of inter-planetary fame and fortune.
Dr. Actions: But you said your dream was terrifying.
Dr. Thinking: Well, I’ve always been afraid of success.
Dr. Actions: Well, get over it, Blockbrain. Now …

Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer.

WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLAGIENS

Simon turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough
of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together.
Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometim …

The story of the growth and destruction of Toronto's first 'priority neighbourhood.'

From the 1840s until the Second World War, waves of newcomers who migrated to Toronto – Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American and Chinese, among others – landed in 'The Ward.' Crammed with rundown housing and immigrant-owned businesses, this area, bordered by …

Winner, City of Hamilton Arts Award, Established Artist, Writing

Beginning with an autobiographical account of the mind, Jeffery Donaldson's marvellous new collection moves from personal history to national history, concluding with "Province House," where the ghost of Sir John A. Macdonald has the last word on metaphor.

In his fourth collection, Dona …

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother...or was she?

This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside "The A," the infamous Agap …

Deathbed Dimes exposes the reality that if you can outlive your relatives, friends, and sometimes even strangers, your odds of hitting the inheritance jackpot are better than playing the lottery.

Joely Zeller is a beautiful and ambitious 32-year-old attorney who is the only daughter of a Hollywood film royal. She’s determined to build a successful …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children's Literature Nominee, 2009On Resource Link's "Best of 2008" ListCLA Children's Book of the Year Award shortlist, 20092009 KIND Children's Honor BookCanadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice, 2009"Starred ChoiceAfter his mother's death, Travis Keating and his father move to Ratchet, Newfoundland, to start a new …

The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.

It doesn’t …

Every now and then, readers find themselves fortunate enough to come across a writer whose work fits their lifestyle and belief systems so well that the relationship between writer and reader seems familial. Though geographically estranged, perhaps, it’s as if both author and reader hail from the same town, studied under the same teacher, and spe …

This book gives us an in depth look at what is happening in diverse classrooms in Canada, and how teachers are making a difference in their students’ lives. More than thirty powerful vignettes take us into the hearts and minds of exemplary educators, as they share their values, convictions, wisdom and knowledge in the classroom and beyond. You wi …

This book provides a rare and in-depth examination of the narratives, experiences, and lived realities of abused mothers—a group of women who, despite being the victims, are often criticized, vilified, and stigmatized for failing to meet dominant ideologies of what a “good mother” is/should be, because they have lived and mothered in domestic …

While there have been a number of specialized books in the field of comparative philosophy, and many in the field of comparative religion, there are few scholars who can address both disciplines. Furthermore, when these disciplines are virtually mutually exclusive, as in Western academia, a full appreciation of non-Western approaches to either reli …

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 …

Is it surprising that a man with a lifelong affinity for dogs would have been born in the Chinese astrological Year of the Dog? Richard Telekey claims that it is not, and his resulting affection for dogs has led him to years of association with them, including not just dog ownership and friendships with other dog-lovers, but a fondness for reading …

The stories of three young people who experience the tumult—in three eras—as new religions are about to be born.

Dina is a slave, a weaver for the royalty of Ancient Egypt. Summoned to the royal chamber, Dina learns she will move south with the Queen and the Pharaoh to a bountiful oasis, but far away from her family and her Jewish faith. When Mo …

A spellbinding story about chasing love, fighting family, losing friends and starting all over again, from the internationally acclaimed Lisa Moore.

Sixteen-year-old Flannery Malone has it bad. She’s been in love with Tyrone O’Rourke since the days she still believed in Santa Claus. But Tyrone has grown from a dorky kid into an outlaw graffiti a …

"May you live in interesting times." So goes the ancient Chinese curse. In Quebec, we are always living in "interesting" times. Where else in Canada, perhaps even the world, do you have official language police that patrol the highways and byways of the province looking for missing accents, illegal apostrophes and on/off switches in the wrong langu …

Inspired by the story of actual passengers on the ill-fated Lusitania, this is a novel of great adventure and suspense, including graphic novel-style illustrations.

Avis Dolphin doesn’t want to leave New York and sail to England on the Lusitania. War is raging in Europe, and the Germans threaten to sink the ship. Avis is lonely and afraid until sh …

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is not content simply to read and discuss books. Their process is a little more involved. They once kidnapped Irving Layton and took him for an excursion up a mountain. They attempted to recreate a scene of a nun swinging from a bridge-builder's broken arm in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Li …

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 …

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award

In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for captur …

Most history books make a joke of it, but Canada faced a serious military threat in the 1860s -- and came under multiple attacks by military forces based in the United States. It took the combined effort of British troops in Canada and the Canadian militia -- plus some good luck -- to repel the invaders and end the threat. The experience helped pus …