A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara.Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of musics most celebrated sister duos, from their start as Neil Youngs protgs to Canadian indie-rock purveyors and, making their riskiest transformation yet, into mainstream pop breakouts.Coming up as grunge-loving musicians in the late '90s and early 2000s, Tegan and Sara found themselves awkwardly pushed into categories that didnt quite fit: a novelty twin sister folk act when they wanted to be taken seriously; pop when they wanted to be indie rock; and sellouts when they finally made their bid for mainstream success. As young, queer musicians who didnt see anyone else like themselves growing up (in a time where Internet access hadnt yet formed global spaces and communities for LGBTQ+ people), Tegan and Saras path to pop stardom was filled with familiar hurdles, but no clear instructions on how to navigate things like homophobic press, niche queer audiences that wanted to claim them, or sexism at every turn.Its a journey with ups and downs, but Tegan and Saras perseverancealongside a music industry and journalism world thats had to learn to confront its own biaseshas helped create a musical world today that more readily accepts and embraces queer voices. Featuring continuous sonic transformations, Tegan and Saras story is essential to Canadian music history.
As the children to a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. Told from the perspective of Laura, Living Expenses is about a point of divergence in the sisters' lives: Claire has moved to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband, Joe, remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Laura quickly encounters issues and begins the slow process of fertility treatments. Meanwhile, Claire gets involved in a venture that taps into the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters' lives, from communication to reproduction.
Country Music is a book about the stories the author listened to late at night around kitchen tables or campfires growing up in rural British Columbia. Mining these materials for a rural poetics--a country music--Koss begins to understand his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings through philosophical inquiries into what draws him continually back to these stories. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing "extractiveness"--both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. It's a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we're given.Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place akin to Kaie Kellough's Magnetic Equator, Kate Siklosi's Selvage, D.M. Bradford's Dream of No One But Myself, or Jordan Abel's Nishga.
Chasing Baseball is a book that provides a snapshot of grassroots baseball in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Played as it is in the rain and cold, on temporary diamonds that are sometimes less than ideal, baseball is still fragile in these places and an enormous group effort is needed to sustain it. The book is the story of people who love the game, the story of people who believe that baseball can flourish where it's been planted, developing according to the idiosyncrasies of each location.On one hand, baseball is baseball, and what is depicted--despite some idiosyncratic rules and an incredibly wide range of talent and experience--is not dissimilar to what one might see in North America. On the other hand, it feels different. More precarious, yes, but also more communal. This is baseball played for its own sake, played in public parks by people who have somehow fallen in love with the game or are searching for a piece of home.Written in the tradition of Dave Bidini's Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places, Chasing Baseball provides readers with a vivid picture of baseball as it is played in these places.
Cut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.
“Though the four novellas comprising Dead Writers vary tremendously in style and subject matter, they all evoke a delicious, spine-tingling sense of dread. These tales take readers on a head spinning journey through the inner workings of a cruel colonial school, all the way to a creepy contemporary vacation rental, never losing sight of the selfish, unscrupulous, and inescapable aspects of human behaviour. This is a collection that will keep you turning pages, but that will also make you wonder: Are the pages turning you?”—Allegra Hyde, author of The Last CatastropheIn this collaborative fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. A biographer surveying the career of a “haunted” literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor’s complicity in a colonial scandal: These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.
"Andrew Forbes’s exquisitely rendered prose makes The Diapause both realistic and futuristic, devastating even while it is oddly hopeful. Vast and intimate, the novel absorbs and grips. I cannot shake its central image: the strange little noodles, the mysterious worms who seem to be dancing in the moments before catastrophe."—Liz Harmer, author of Strange LoopsWhen ten-year-old Gabriel and his parents retire to his late grandfather’s disused cabin to wait out a pandemic, the big, dangerous world seems very far away, and Gabriel enjoys the freest summer of his young life. But tensions begin to surface, testing the family unit, and resulting in consequences that he will spend his life attempting to unravel.Spanning nearly a half-century, The Diapause is a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. Part White Fang, part Station Eleven, The Diapause is a novel about how the things we seek are often the things we didn’t know we’d lost.
Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city's last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon's past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of its youth in the 1950s and 1960s, to the grating difficulties of the 2015 garbage crisis and the struggle to accommodate and assimilate refugees, this is a journey through a city, and an expedition into the idea of home, that only Rima could shepherd. No matter the detours.
Winner of the 2015 Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction AwardThis is a sex book. It’s a book about fucking yourself, fucking someone you love, fucking strangers. It’s about saying words like cunt and come, and all manner of perverse verbiage. Mostly, it’s about speaking honestly about our bodies and our vulnerability, recognizing we’re all imperfect, worthy, and desirable.In this ten year anniversary edition of Hot, Wet & Shaking, Kaleigh Trace—disabled, queer, sex therapist—chronicles her journey from ignorance to bliss as she shamelessly discusses her sexual exploits and bodily negotiations. Trace’s memoirs and essays generously welcome the reader into her world, modelling a humour and radical self acceptance that can teach us all how to talk about sex, and then some.
"Jay Ritchie's poem's veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie's vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat."-Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We're Briefly GorgeousListening in Many Publics is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous, and held in common. The book expresses this vision in three long poems which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems. Using a circular structure that resists linear capitalist logics, fragmentation that attunes us to sound over sense, and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative, the poems speak to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of rehearsing different ways of being, and of returning to material truths, together. Plural, civic, and political, the poems locate themselves in the many publics that constitute our individual and social being, interrogate that which brings the subject into existence, and ultimately convey an open, hopeful sensibility in the face of the structures and systems they critique.
"Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts. It's a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for. Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she's free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It's all of humanity--grim, funny, and desperate--wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block. NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet."--
Motherhood, trauma, and familial history are woven together into a powerful collection from the award-winning author of What Became My Grieving Ceremony.Beginning with a revelation of familial sexual abuse, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People charts the impact of this revelation on the speaker. From the pain of estrangement to navigating first-time motherhood in the midst of a family crisis, Morgan explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.
Featured on 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: 2023 Fall Fiction Preview"Things used to be easier, but even in those carefree days, the rules were in place for a reason. And that reason is: so we can all agree. So we can all have the same standard applied across the board. So there is no special treatment, which no one should receive. This is why we need the rules."The stories in Avalanche combine humor with an earnest examination and indictment of white entitlement, guilt, shame, and disorientation in the wake of waking up to the reality of racism. Focusing on the perspective of white, cis, straight, and mostly middle-aged and middle-class characters, this collection shines a light on the obliviousness of white privilege, the violence of polite, quiet racism hiding just under the surface of mundane, everyday situations, and the anguished flailing of "well-intentioned white ladies" desperate to confirm their essential goodness at all costs. Westhead writes with compassion and empathy for both her frustrating and frustrated white protagonists and the racialized characters who encounter them, and uses humour not to comfortably distance white readers from the harmful behaviour of her self-absorbed protagonists, but to pull them in close to recognize—and reckon with—those familiar parts of themselves, and to become more aware of the insidious systems of white supremacy at work behind the scenes.
A novel from the dark heart of early twentieth-century Alberta, featuring a new introduction by Dr. Lily Cho.A bully cattle rancher upends the lives of everyone he encounters and a pandemic makes those lives even more precarious. A full century after its first publication, Cattle remains a story of brutality. A curious Canadian mixture of Hardy and Steinbeck,Cattle is built on the deep contradictions of a settler ideology, asking readers to not look away from the many modes of violence bound up in Canadian history.Our Throwback books also give back: a percentage of each book’s sales will be donated to a designated Canadian cultural organization. Royalties from sales of Cattle benefit Central Alberta Women’s Emergency Shelter.
Prince Edward County is no longer an "up-and-coming" wine region in Canada, having garnered international acclaim for its wineries. Oenophiles across the world should be interested in this book.Prince Edward County is a day trip from upstate New York and an attractive vacation destination for travellers from the northeastern US.
An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism. From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion's Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance. Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta's Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.
A collection that careens from Ancient Greece to the Klondike Gold Rush, for readers of A. S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood. "It is the part that is missing that I am drawn to, that I try to pin down. My gaze is always divided by what is here and what is no longer here. That, for me, is where the deepest pleasure lies, where the sweet overcomes the bitter."A couple coping with a recent loss are tasked with taking stock of a late biology enthusiast's hoard. A support worker dedicated to rehabilitating young women suffering from, among other things, a certain unexpected effect of the climate apocalypse faces a truth that shatters the illusion separating her work and her personal life. An archaeologist formerly working in Syria struggles with her decision to flee from unrest, while the people she has left behind face an uncertain fate. In Jennifer Falkner's richly imagined first collection, past and present glancingly converge, making the familiar outlines of myth, history, and everyday life seem suddenly strange. With spare, elegant prose, Falkner introduces the reader to those whose narratives are written in the language of empty space. Above Discovery is a stunning debut collection from an author to watch.
Experimental blending of visual poetry and traditional verse.Visual / experimental poetry by a woman in a field dominated by men.Timely discussions of personhood, belonging, human rights, ancestry, our relationship with / working with the land.By interrogating and plundering the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this work forms a feminist interrogation of patriarchal, colonial, and legal scripts of being and personhood.A poetic wrestling with foundational nation-state documents in North America, similar to Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Declaration” (Wade in the Water, Graywolf) and the United States’ Declaration of Independence.Siklosi asks what humans can stand to learn from listening to the trees talk to one another, from tapping into the languages under our feet and above our heads. Readers are certainly interested in this topic in both fiction and nonfiction, as evidenced by the massive success of books ranging from Finding the Mother Tree and The Hidden Life of Trees to The Overstory and Greenwood.Exploration of the rich history of women's handicraft as a feminist poetic praxis. Ecocritical and feminist in tone, and with a healthy dollop of social justice, Selvage would appeal to anyone interested in poetry that blurs boundaries across different genres and formats, those who enjoy some politics with their poetry, as well as those who enjoy poems about nature and our precarious place within it.
Minimalist poetry for maximalist times.Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstees first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She cant remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairsand yet, when she turns the knob, the door wont open. She cant tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and herdreams. Worse still, she cant ignore the very real tapping sound nowcominginsistently, violentlythreatening to break through her bedroom wall.With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jacksons work, and in the style of Herta Mller and Daisy Johnson, Tearis both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.
The perfect marriage of literary and speculative fiction for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and NK Jemisin.When Freya Tanangco was ten, she dreamed of her mother's death right before it happened. That's when she realized she was a veker, someone with enhanced mental abilities and who is scorned as a result. Freya's adult life has been spent in hiding: from the troubled literary legacy created by her author father, and from the scrutiny of a society in which vekers often meet with violence.When her prophetic dreams take a dangerous turn, Freya finds herself increasingly forced to sacrifice her own anonymity-and the fragile safety that comes with it-in order to protect those around her.Interwoven with themes of Filipino Canadian and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, The Quiet Is Loud is an intergenerational tale of familial love and betrayal, and what happens when we refuse to let others tell our stories for us.
Flower and flour. Coral and choral. Lashes and luscious.Frost & Pollen is a poetry collection in two acts: "e;Bloom & Martyr"e; is a sensuous walk through a menacing garden of flowers and desire, while "e;Foliage"e; retells the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the point of view of the Green Knight, the mysterious figure who teases and torments Gawain. By turns earthy and lush, and punctuated by dark and unsettling undercurrents, these poems converge into an engaging yet evasive feminine exploration of nature and sexuality.
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022For readers who love Mark Haddon, Miriam Toews, and Sally RooneyPaisley Ratchford is trying to keep it together, but in eight weeks, the Toronto apartment building she lives in will be demolished. A last-ditch effort to reclaim her abandoned childhood home on Amherst Island plunges Paisley into memories of growing up in the tight-knit community, and into the obsessive compulsive disorder that has only ever offered a semblance of control. Her compulsion to count in sets of eight had little effect on thwarting bullies, her fathers bad luck, and her mothers mental illnessall of which return to haunt her.When help arrives in the form of Paisleys old classmate and tormentor Garnet Mulligan, her predicament only worsens. For a shot at a future, Paisley needs to stare down her past, including all the habits that have stopped her from thriving. At Last Countis a wise and often laugh-out-loud funny tale that proves we dont always need to believe everything our brain tells us.
A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer's son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmationthrough religious, cosmic, chemical and other meansof a world beyond their own. It's a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age."e;A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mysticalas if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."e;Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers
Winner of the 2022 ReLit AwardsFinalist for the 2022 Trillium Book AwardA Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue, for fans of Alice Munro and Shirley JacksonThe small southern Ontario town known as The Pump lies at the crossroads of this world's violence?a tainted water supply, an apathetic municipal government, the Gothic decay of rural domesticity?and another's.In Hegele's interconnected stories, no one is immune to The Pump's sacrificial games. Lighthouse dwellers, Boy Scouts, queer church camp leaders, love-sick and sick-sick writers, nine-year-old hunters, art-eaters?each must navigate the swamp of their own morality while living on land that is always slowly (and sometimes very quickly) killing them."An inescapable, ferocious dream of a book. Good luck getting out.??John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments"[The] writing is beautiful... Nightmarish and yet somehow fantastical."?This Magazine
Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbaniteSend Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood.These essays touch on the major milestones of raising children, from giving birth (and having approximately a million hands in your vagina) and taking your beautiful newborn home (and feeling like youve stolen your baby from the hospital), to lying to kids about the Tooth Fairy and mastering the subtle art of beating children at board games. Plus the pitfalls of online culture and the #winemom phenomenon, and the unattainable expectations placed on mothers today.Written from the perspective of an always tired, often anxious, and reluctant suburbanite who is doing her damn best, these essays articulate one womans experience in order to help mothers of all kinds process the wildly variable, deeply different ways in which being a mom changes our lives.Easily the most validating book youll read this year.Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books
For fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell, the stories in Francine Cunninghams debut collection God Isnt Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunninghams characters are presented with moments of choicesome for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to Gods office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his trucks song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own.Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunninghams stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human natureand that redemption can arise where we least expect it.
A visually and lyrically beautiful debut that celebrates the landscapes we take for granted. Harbour Grids is a long poem in four parts that investigates ideas of community and belonging. Beginning as a meditation on the surface of New York Harbor, the poem radiates outward through issues of labour, location, history, belonging, and subjectivity. How do we experience our complex relations to the world we live in? Harbour Grids seeks to answer this question by combining Stephen Ratcliffes attention to daily observation and formal repetition, Lyn Hejinians investigations of the linguistic structures, Larry Eigners textural sense of language and compositional space of the page, and Juliana Spahrs ethical attention to the ways we inhabit the world.
Lyrical realism meets family drama meets sparkling global folktale.Joan, a half-Chinese English conversation teacher unmoored in Europe, flees Budapest for a fresh start. Stepping off the train in Bratislava, she meets Milan, a proud Roma teenager, and they strike up a friendship. Milan helps Joan settle into the city, and in turn, Joan introduces him to Adriana, who has traveled to lay the memory of her dead mother to rest. They form an unlikely trio, bound by love and luck into something like family.At the crossroads of the power of youthful hope and the startling magic of coincidence,Where the Silver River Endsdelves deep into mixed-race identity, systemic oppression, family reconciliation, and what happens when we gather the courage to slip out of the current and make our own way in the world.
A grossly inaccurate "e;memoir"e; about Canadian folk legends.Henry Adam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene-and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, including honest accounts of the folklorist's myriad trials and tribulations. This experimental and genre-defying book mixes the adventurous energies of Alan Lomax and Stompin' Tom, the intertextual conceptualism of Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the searing intensity of Elizabeth Smart and Chris Kraus."e;Comically entertaining, presented with 'performative verve', as novelist Jacob Wren puts it."e;-Atlantic Books Today"e;This book is cracking me up-and I don't even like football-but it is just so well written."e;-Robert Dayton, author of The Canadian Romantic
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