Stephen Reid has grown old in prison and seen more than his share of its solitude, its vicious cycles, and its subculture relationships. He has participated in the economics of contraband, the incredible escapes, the intimacies of torture, the miscarriages of justice, and witnessed the innocent souls whose childhood destinies doomed them to prison …

Evocative and superbly rakish, these essays are a generous diagnosis of the often offbeat worlds of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through the real life adventures of Susan Musgrave. Equally at home recounting the lore of her outlaw husband Stephen Reid, or interpreting the arcane rituals of her teenage girls, Musgrave brings …

A revised and updated edition of a collection of personal essays that illuminate what life is like for those who live with mental illness, and how it impacts their family members.

More than 4 million Canadians and 57 million Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and yet there are still considerable stigmas and a great deal of misunders …

In her best-selling first book, Home: Tales of a Heritage Farm (2005), Anny Scoones introduced readers to historic Glamorgan Farm. In Home and Away, Anny presents more stories about the joys and sorrows, excitements and mishaps and also takes readers farther afield, sharing with them her travels to other parts of Canada, to New York and to such pla …

Living is a process of continuous transformation: we have been embryos, children, adolescents, thin, fat, sick, better again. And as humans, we are always at odds with at least one part of our bodies. Have we inherited the family nose? Is there nothing to be done for our finicky stomach or our limp hair?

In the Flesh is an intelligent, witty, and pr …

What happens when a lifelong gardener finally realizes that he must collaborate with Mother Nature rather than work against her in order to achieve his dream of creating the perfect garden? In this delightful and thoughtful narrative journey of horticultural discovery, Bill Terry asks how and even why we garden, and to what end?

These are personal …

Universal stories of longing and belonging.

Our quest for origin and, by extension, identity is universal to the human experience. For the twenty-five contributors to Somebody’s Child, the topic of adoption is not—and perhaps never can be—a neutral issue. With unique courage, each of them discusses their experience of the adoption process. Som …

More than 100 wildly delicious recipes that use North America’s original red meat, from bison rancher and award-winning food writer Jennifer Bain.

Buffalo Girl Cooks Bison is the first comprehensive contemporary bison cookbook for a general North American market. With more than 100 well-tested, delectable recipes, Bain ensures that you’ll have p …

Global Chorus is a remarkable, illustrated collection of 365 daily meditations around some very large and increasingly crucial themes:

“Do you think that humanity can “nd a way past the current global environmental and social crises? Will we be able to create the conditions necessary for our own survival as well as that of other species on the p …

Canada is a vast country defined by its untamed wilderness, diverse ecologies, and natural beauty. It is a country associated with nature and exploration on the most fundamental level, whose people each have a story to tell of their experiences with the landscape. With Moon and Sun: Essays on Nature, Thistledown Press brings readers a series of int …

What happens when a 56-year-old fiction writer decides to ditch it all and attend professional pastry chef school for a year? In writing that brings to mind the work of journalist/chef Michael Ruhlman, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School tells the story of eleven months of whipping, spreading and creaming in the pursuit of perfection. …

The Light Through the Trees is a remarkable and deeply wise reflection on land, farming, a sense of place, connecting with nature and what it means to live on this earth. As a third-generation farmer, the author’s roots go deep into the land but her work also captures her thoughts on such current issues as the environment, environmental identity …

Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. She looks back on her mother’s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty su …

In a series of reflections focused on his hard-working Mennonite family and touching on childhood exploits from shoplifting and go-kart racing to the fear of dying (which arises during the rehearsal for a school Christmas concert), Lloyd Ratzlaff takes readers on a journey from youth to philosophical maturity. Combining elegy and joyful nostalgia i …

The essays in this inaugural volume were commissioned from a number of outstanding writers (many of them national prize winners). Some are professional naturalists, others are poets, filmmakers, dancers, philosophers, activists. All write with passion, originality and humour about the natural world, our place within it, and our impact upon it. The …

Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent twenty-five years as a forestry field worker, planting trees, marking cutblock boundaries and timber-cruising. In Ground-Truthing, he combines this experience with his perspective as a poet and artist to guide us through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Scie …

Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron's film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To s …

"What's for dinner?" has always been a complicated question. The locavore movement has politicized food and challenged us to rethink the answer in new and radical ways.

These days, questions about where our food comes from have moved beyond 100-mile-dieters into the mainstream. Celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters, alternative food gurus su …

Can a case be made for reading literature in the digital age? Does literature still matter in this era of instant information? Is it even possible to advocate for serious, sustained reading with all manner of social media distracting us, fragmenting our concentration, and demanding short, rapid communication?

In The Edge of the Precipice, Paul Socke …

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 …

We Have Impact is a collection of short essays on design and society. The book was conceived as an exercise in both thinking and framing design into a poetic system of language and verse. The contents and its aggressive periodicity are braided into a single written design project. We Have Impact addresses how the problem of design itself has been o …

Do you remember the invasion of Newfoundland’s hydroponic cucumber? How about New Brunswick’s ill-fated space-age sports car? In this dynamic collection, Dan Soucoup follows the money trail up the political ladder to deliver the dirt on the most devastating failed business ventures, political scandals, and industry fiascos in Atlantic Canadian …

These essays are forays into what Wordsworth called the "hiding places" of the creative impulse. Sometimes in aphoristic form, this selection of meditations on the arts of poetry and teaching functions as an indirect self-portrait and probes the poet’s Irish heritage. For Brownlow, there is a fruitful tension between scholarship and poetry; too o …

In February 1956, a remarkable young woman named Christina McCall began her working life as an editorial secretary at Maclean's magazine. It was a legendary time there, when the likes of Pierre Berton, Robert Fulford, June Callwood, Peter Gzowski, and Peter C. Newman graced the magazine's pages. McCall would come to join that illustrious group, and …

What is real reconciliation? This collection of essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from across Canada welcomes readers into a timely, healing conversation—one we've longed for but, before now, have had a hard time approaching.

These reflective and personal pieces come from journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, f …

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT Anthology
Winner of a 2015 Silver Independent Publisher Book Award

At no other time in history have lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) relationships and families been more visible or numerous. A Family by Any Other Name recognizes and celebrates this advance by exploring what “family …

The Gay]Grey Moose is a collection of essays presenting a comprehensive view of English poetry in Canada from the early colonial period to the Post-Modern era. From a wide range of poets, this book provides fresh contexts for viewing and discussing three centuries of English Canadian poetry. Both national and regional in its orientation, it seeks t …

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 …

Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent.

A Nigerian immigrant to Senegal explores the increasing influence of China across the region, a Kenyan student activist writes of exile in Kampala, a Liberian scientist shares her diary of the Ebola crisis, a Nigerian journalist travels to the north to meet a com …

In 1965, Tom Wolfe famously asked of Marshall McLuhan: "Suppose he is the oracle of the modern times--what if he is right?" Fifty years later, McLuhan's biographer Douglas Coupland, McLuhan's sons, and sixteen scholars explore the many ways in which McLuhan's predictions have come true. 

Home front. It’s hard to separate that word from war. In the First and Second World Wars, the home front was a clear entity and location: if you weren’t on the frontlines, you were on the home front. But during current times of peacekeeping, peacemaking and armed interventions, the notion of home front seems to comprise only those who are in so …

Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze Medal

One size fits all does not apply to pregnancy and childbirth. Each one is different, unique, and comes with its share of pleasure and pain. But how does one prepare for an unexpected loss of a pregnancy or hoped-for baby? In How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting, writers share their …

When Hermes handed over to Apollo his finest invention, the lyre, in exchange for promotion to the status of messenger of the gods, he relinquished the creativity that gave life to his words.
The trade-off proved frustrating: Hermes chafed under the obligation to deliver the ideas and words of others and resorted to all manner of ruses in order to …

Many promote Reconciliation as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration …

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 Crow Who Tampered With Time blossoms with essays that find radiance and coherence in a world (both natural and human) which formal religious dogma has forgotten. A visionary humility, and an original, engaging voice make these essays and recollections both accessible and wonder-filled. It begins with Vernon Leo Kuhn "who lived in this world for …

It has been fashionable to view the Classical past as a thing dead and frozen, scarcely accessible and certainly of no relevance to current international affairs. It has also been fashionable to over-sensationalize the past, and draw conclusions that are hard to justify in the light of the available evidence. The essays in this book explore aspects …

The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form.

Important thinkers whose Massey Lectures are lamentably out of …

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 …

A collection of articles that examine many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced, and continue to face, in Canada. Sections include: Profiles of Aboriginal Women; Identity; Territory; Activism; Confronting Colonialism; the Canadian Legal System; and Indigenous Knowledges. Photographs and poetry are also included. "This volume brings us …

Backwater Mystic Blues is a suite of intimate essays that summon the secret hiding spots, makeshift rafts and uncomplicated childhood joys that lay the foundations for adult philosophy. Lloyd Ratzlaff is in tune with the vivid simplicities of the sensuous world and the honour of unassuming people. These essays assemble the disguises shaped by relig …

Since 9/11, national governments in the global North have struggled to govern populations and manage cross-border traffic without building new barriers to trade. What does citizenship mean in an era of heightened tension between global capitalism and the nation-state? Building on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and an examination of national bo …

What hidden evasions and exclusions lie behind the subtle perfection of the BLT? What is the etymology of the croissant? Why did we drink all that Bud Lite Lime? What did you do to my face? This collection of writing by Jonah Campbell-metalhead, misanthrope, unrepentant good eater-explores both the finest and most furtive of culinary pleasures. Foo …

The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.

Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new …

The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form.

This is the second volume of recovered lectures, a follow-on to …

Arresting Hope reminds us that prisons are not only places of punishment, marginalization, and trauma, but that they can also be places of hope, blessing even, where people with difficult lived experiences can begin to compose stories full of healing, anticipation, communication, education, connection, and community. The book tells a story about wo …

In the midst of the sweep of history, it’s easy to anticipate that the events of twenty-five years ago might soon be lost to memory. We might forget why any of it mattered. In such conditions, it’s the responsibility of those of us who, among other things, write for the record, to use the occasion of a significant anniversary to ensure there a …

Immortalized in words and song, the symbol of the great, untreaded Wilderness, the shores surrounding Lake Superior rustle with stories of gregarious legend, unlikely heroes, quiet sorrow, and unmatched feats of bravery and adventure. From the earliest European records of the world's largest body of fresh, open water, to the ghostly anecdotes of th …

When Winnipeg's Cy Gonick started the magazine Canadian Dimension in 1963 to provide a home for the thinking and analysis of mostly young leftists engaged in Canadian economic, social, cultural, artistic and political issues, he had no grand plan. But Canadian Dimension was welcomed by intellectuals, scholars and students, and it proved enduring. H …

Food coach and nutrition educator Wendy McCallum has worked with many families to find successful strategies for clean eating, featuring affordable real food that everyone enjoys. This approach leads to gradual weight loss -- that stays off -- and increased energy, all while eating healthier, tastier meals.

There's no shortage of popular approaches …