Revolt/Compassion gathers together six important works by Michael Springate: Historical Bliss, Dog and Crow, The Consolation of Philosophy, Freeport Texas, Kareena, and Kut: Shock and Awe. Written and produced over a twenty-five year period, they capture an expansive range of interests and influences, and reflect the artistic interdisciplinarity which has...

A Voluntary Crucifixion traces the story of 20th century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J MacKinnon's life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society “from the bottom up”. A Voluntary Crucifixion...

Seeker: A Sea Odyssey begins as a fairy tale dream of finding Shangri la, and transforms along the way because of unrealistic expectations and a disintegrating marriage. It's a story about venturing into an unknown and more exciting life, and the heartbreak and growth that comes with the risks. The adventure lasts six years, from the building of the Santa...

In 2019 Barbie turns 60. Never only a toy, she defines the stellar. In Plastic's Republic, Giovanna Riccio delves into Barbie's impact on female beauty highlighting how plasticity in body and persona have allowed the doll to remain top-diva. Other poems bring to life, Mattel's movers-n-shakers who created Barbie to be their in-house money maker. Riccio's...

Philipovna: The Daughter of Sorrow is a creative non-fiction based on the author's mother's surviving the holodomor [the Ukrainian starvation] in the early 1930's. It is the story of an orphan who goes to live with her aunt in a rural village in the Ukrainian countryside. The aunt swears on her dead sister's Bible that Vera Philipovna will survive no matter...

Zoe Du Plessis's story unfolds against the backdrop of 1996 South Africa, caught in the turmoil of the transition from the Apartheid regime to the first democratically elected black government. A paleoanthropologist at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, her world collapses when her lover and colleague, Dario Oldani, is killed during a fatal...

It is 1955, and the three Fayette sisters have lived their whole lives in the enchanting French Quarter of New Orleans. Though neglected by their parents, they share a close bond with one another--from afternoons in their small, shared bedroom, to trying to speak with ghosts beneath the sweeping trees in their garden. When the middle sister Constance...

Imagine that the charming, seemingly Westernized immigrant man that you fell in love with turns out to be self-centred, controlling, and cruelly manipulative-- but only when no one is around to witness this behaviour. To stop you from divorcing him, he kidnaps your infant children and leaves them in his primitive Middle Eastern village. You find that in...

Like his three siblings, 32-year-old Alfredo “Freddy Flowers” Falconi has led two lives: the idyllic one before “The Incident”--his mother's 1984 death--and the complicated one afterward. He was just eight-years-old when his father abandoned the family, and nine when his oldest brother, “Small Carm,” covered up the circumstances of Rosa Falconi's demise to...

French journalist Marc Taragon is at the apex of his career in 2007. A tenacious idealist, Taragon has spent the last thirty years attempting to bring to readers the truths about the wars and political intrigues of the region. He is unsparing in his criticism of extremists and has earned many enemies. He agrees to be interviewed in Cyprus, by a young...

Small things is a book of mini-anti-essays, part of Sky Gilbert's project to dismantle and challenge the rigid classifications of genre, thus challenging 21st century notions of truth. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, Foucault, and the post-structuralist project, the small writings in small things are story, essay, and memoir combined. They question the notion that...

Ramya immigrated to Canada from India with her husband about fifteen years ago. She typifies the first generation immigrant—a person who straddles two cultures, two countries, two continents, even perhaps two different worlds altogether.The novel has two intertwined threads of narration simultaneously unspooling. The one set in the present is about Ramya's...

Jennifer Zilm's poetry collection, The Missing Field, concerns themes of translation, preservation and the engagement with the transitory documents of everyday life, whether a snapshot of a Vancouver bus, postcards from the Middle East, lecture notes on Euripides, a van Gogh museum catalogue or marginalia in a water-damaged collection of Rilke poems.

A Rogue’s Decameron consists of ten stories—tales—that loosely follow the fabliaux style and are based within the spirit of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron: extravagance, joy and ribald humour around sex, lust, vice, death and other ‘hungers’ of human beings. Using similar framing technique as these works—a prologue, a short...

Paul, an aspiring writer in his mid-twenties, marries Carlos, a boyfriend he lived with in Guatemala; brings him Montreal, and looks forward to a life of bliss. Things go wrong from the beginning, and the trouble Carlos causes leaves Paul little time for much else—and they break up. Bill, whom Paul sees as the father he always wanted, helps him overcome his...

The Shining Fragments is a family saga about the Irish in Canada that explores the ramifications of abandonment, obsession, love, memory, and visionary power. Spanning the years 1882-1904, it follows Joseph Conlon from his early childhood in Ulster to his experiences of youth and adulthood as an immigrant. Left behind as a small boy on a Toronto...

Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros’ collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph...

Part memoir of the author's early life--including his experience as a New York City cop and a US Border Patrol agent before he became a college professor--and part polemical discussions of a host of diverse topics, from aging, religion, and war to teaching and higher learning, corporate capitalism and consumerism, technology and media, this book challenges...

Attempting to make sense of her life, and change her sad demure to a happy one, the author of In the Backyard: Relearning the Art of Aging, Dying and Making Love seeks out the help of her in-house therapist/husband, Dr. George Nemeth. The accredited psychologist's answers to the big questions provide a compassionate and humorous backdrop on to how to seize...

Learning to Miss opens with imagery of events, moments, that dream into, and imagine beyond "getting on with it." Imagining, in the next group, holds the love and empathy of an aging, experienced, self-aware observer, while the final group works some family history into the movie I make of my past, as I direct and act, having learned to miss, not kill … to...

Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a...

Hard Luck Lenny Lasante is the quintessential good son, brother, and father. He fears a calamity will derail his son's future the way his own dreams were derailed years ago and is adamant that Frankie leave home for college, but Frankie is preoccupied with thoughts of Gennaro DiCico, the son of a small-time mobster. Lenny's fears are realized when a...

In Wait, relationship and reflection are drawn on to free emotion and understanding from fear, whether it would grow in praise of passion or cooling love, or arise from being trapped by power or lost to indulgence. The poems in Wait seek to cut through the dishonesty and abuse that skew life.

Like consists of fifty poems every one of which uses the word “like.” Like is about people and things Layton likes -- or, sometimes, dislikes. In these poems, Layton expresses a gamut of emotions, from the fear of death to the peaceful contentment of watching two nesting Canadian geese. However, “like” as more than an emotionally charged verb. It is also...

Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali’s kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel...