Showing titles in Canadian

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated.

Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumps in her beat-up old car and speeds away. When she pulls up to the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park, where nothing turns into even more of nothing, she decides it just might be the new life she's looking for. At the center of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playing kind of guy. Hazel loves him to death. He spends his days fixing cars, while Hazel spends hers working at the town’s thrift shop. Evenings they spend with Spiney and Sissy, playing cards or drinking at Old Joe’s.

Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a 3,000-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction.

Many authors have been accused of betraying their loved ones by turning them into fictional characters. In The Treacherous Imagination, Robert McGill examines the ethics of writing such stories. He argues that while fiction has long appealed to audiences with its narratives of private life, contemporary autobiographical fiction channels a widespread ambivalence about the value of telling all in a confessional age - an age in which fiction has an unprecedented power to leave people feeling libeled or exposed when they recognize themselves in it.

Need Machine clamors through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumor. Honest, irreverent, and sharply indifferent, this audiobook will "hogtie you with awe."

Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty. Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human existence. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.

Reverse engineering the word, meme splicing, morpheme replacement therapy, phonetic modifications: These are some of the techniques in play throughout Reading the Bible Backwards, the lyrical thought experiments that make up this eagerly anticipated new collection of poems by Robert Priest. By throwing the Bible and other cultural narratives on the turntable and spinning them backwards, Priest unleashes surprisingly new but strangely familiar music and meaning. Whether the movements are sideways, inverted, or omni-directional, his satire has never been sharper—or darker.

An urban couple are on a getaway to visit her father at his vast rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man staying there instead. They ask him to leave . . . and with a click on your device, you choose what happens next. When it’s revealed that the colonial rights to this entire property are actually up for grabs, you must continue to decide how the story unfolds. Inheritance is an interactive audio-drama specially adapted from the award-winning and published stage play, replete with all of the same humor and suspense as the live production.

Kate Braddock, a sexually ambiguous ex-Spacer, isolates herself on Luna. After detecting a faster-than-light ship en route to Earth several years ago, she now conducts geophysical surveys for a mineral resources consortium. One day, she and a young intern, Mary Atteberry, discover an anomaly in the dust near the Mare Marginis that is clearly unnatural, and clearly alien.

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone is the final installment in Service's trilogy of Yukon verse. Conceived while returning to the Yukon via the daunting Edmonton Trail, and completed in his little cabin in Dawson City, this volume contains 50 new poems of life, love, and hardship in the North.

Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing.

Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet. Narcy’s verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 America.

A sorrow has taken root in my heart, and although it hurts every day I know there is a place where we laugh together under an open sky. To that sanctuary, I am travelling. This is that story. Stanley Park is a collection of 35 poems from parables author Sapphira Olson charting the story of two lovers through history as they are separated and then reunited all within the island of Stanley Park in Vancouver. Olson weaves a beautiful and poignant narrative through a progression of emotional poetry taking the listener on a journey of hope driven by love.

Stella's world was one of misery and despair, wandering the streets of Victoria, BC, cold, wet and hungry. She had adapted to street-life, but on most days, she would rather be dead. Living amongst the nameless, faceless and placeless tribe of the homeless, Stella's very existence depended on the generosity of strangers. She never spoke of her past, determined to keep her life-story a secret. Faced with constant hunger, Stella begged and pushed her trolley filled with junk, trying to remain invisible as she moved from alcove to park bench and back again, clinging to anonymity.

Long listed for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Lemon is the story of a teenaged girl with the numbers against her: Three mothers, one deadbeat dad, one cancer-riddled protégé, two friends, one tree-hugging stepbrother, and a 60 percent average. The adults in her life are all mired in self-centeredness and the other kids are busy getting high, and she just can't be bothered to fit in.

Once an amusing extrovert with a reputation as a prankster, Mr. Rosen is entering his senior years as a stoic, thirty-year converted introvert who hates change, has little to no interest in people and is more than content to have his wife sit in the navigator's seat of his life. Since becoming a practising introvert, there have been almost no changes in his life, and for the few that there were, his wife had walked him through them, including the recent move to a much smaller home in a lower/middle-class neighbourhood.

The Precipice is the sweeping story of Lucy Cameron, a young woman who seems destined to live and die in small-town Ontario. Into this place of monotony and petty incidents, of spiteful gossip and rigid moralism, appears Stephen Lassiter. Stephen is a Princeton-educated engineer from a wealthy New York family and Lucy's antithesis. Despite the chasm of their differences, they fall in love, marry, and begin life together in New York during the distressing years of the Second World War. It is a life that will nearly break Lucy in heart and spirit.

Dark night of the soul, spirituality, ascension. These were all new concepts to KR. A whole new world had opened up to him. Willing to explore this new world, KR embraced the future with an open mind. And then there was Theresa, the catalyst that awakened him, sending him on a quest for answers that led him to a juncture of two paths, where anything could be manifested.

New Brunswick, 1934: Pearly Everlasting ist fünfzehn und in einem Holzfällercamp mitten im Wald aufgewachsen – zusammen mit dem Bären Bruno, der seit ihrer Geburt ein Teil der Familie ist. Doch dann beschuldigt man Bruno, einen Mann getötet zu haben. Er wird weggebracht, niemand weiß, wohin. Verzweifelt und entschlossen macht Pearly sich zu Fuß auf den Weg durch die tief verschneite kanadische Landschaft, um Bruno zu suchen.

Membering Austin Clarke reflects on the life and writing of Austin Clarke, whose depictions of Black life in Canada enlarged our understanding of what Canadian literature looks like. Despite being one of Canada's most widely published, and most richly awarded writers, Austin Clarke (1934-2016) is not a household name. This collection addresses Clarke's marginalization in Canadian literature by demonstrating that his writing on Black diasporic life and the immigrant experience is a foundational, if untold, part of the story of CanLit.