In 1903, eighteen years after leading the Métis Army against the Northwest Expeditionary Force and the Northwest Mounted Police at Fish Creek, Duck Lake and Batoche, Louis Riel’s Adjutant General Gabriel Dumont dictated his memoirs to a group of friends, one of whom is thought to have written Dumont’s stories…

Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show is a flamboyant epic, constructed as a series of tableaux, about the struggles of the Métis in the Canadian West. It is a multilayered and entertaining saga with a rodeo vibe, loosely based on Buffalo Bill’s legendary outdoor travelling show. In 1885, following the hanging…

This revealing memoir by the former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians describes the long journey towards resolution for the historic injustice that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II. Gaman – Perseverance details the intense negotiations that took place in…

This first book-length study of Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.

Why is it so difficult to stay present in the moment? Murakami's poems, written in response to her open call on the Internet, search airport departures and arrivals for a handhold on the fleeting present. Working within and wriggling out of the constraint of 14 lines, the poems explore how…

What would happen if the Messiah was a woman, and not the man people have always taken her to be? What if she showed up in rural America, instead of riding triumphantly into Jerusalem? If she preached moral license, not repentance?All of that does happen, and more, in this startlingly…

The apple of Momma Lou’s eye, Gideon embodies his parents’ hope for a brighter future for their family. College educated with the tireless support and sacrifice of his parents, he was to be the one to break free of the ghetto, to enjoy an integrated family life with his newfound…

The eponymous first part of mclennan’s new book consists of fifty “gifts” each centred around words, phrases, or “glyphs” of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were…

As Morris Panych’s latest comedy opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: “These are the last few days of my childhood.” The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day’s school drill. For Iris, there remain a…

Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.In “glengarry: open field (a postscripted journal)” the poet discovers that “the earth remembers every…

Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rémi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and…

While panhandling outside a coffee shop, Johnny, a Cree woman who lives on the streets, is shocked to recognize a face from her childhood, which was spent in a First Nations residential school. Desperate to hear the man acknowledge the terrible abuse he inflicted on her and other children at…

If, as Robert Creeley said, “form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form? Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences? Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future? Is the imagination of “our”…

From his wheelchair in a nursing home, the aging Conrad Aiken recalls his long, stormy friendship with Malcolm Lowry. When Aiken is 40, Lowry’s father pays him to tutor the young Malcolm. But the protegé becomes Aiken’s friend, and, gradually, a real literary contender. Mercer’s powerful play reveals the shifts…

Gordon was always an odd little child, given his penchant for setting the neighbours’ sheds on fire with their pets locked inside and his fascination with the funeral rituals at the church across the way. Home-schooled in the evenings within the bounds of a somewhat limited curriculum of drunken impromptu…

Gracie is a dramatic monologue that tells the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States.As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving with her mother, brother, and sisters from her community…

An unforgettable tale of healing and forgiveness When Graziana’s violent stalker dies in a car crash, the abrupt news and its resulting catharsis land her in hospital. Her eight-year-old, the willful and creative Hazel, suddenly becomes the ward of Grandpa “Grumpy” Herman, while her mother embarks on a necessary path…

Specially edited, updated, revised and rewritten by the author, and for the first time complete in one volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, first published in 1988, as well as A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron, both of which were first…

For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms…

Colin Browne’s exciting new work Ground Water received a glowing review in The Georgia Straight (June 6-13, 2002 issue). In all map making, one begins with the representation of ‘ground’ and ‘water,’ and what grows or is constructed on these representations is rendered by a series of conventional symbols-the ‘elements…

David McFadden has set for himself, in this sequence of one hundred poems, a task both breathtaking in its scope and stunning in its accomplishment. By echoing with his gypsy guitar the troubadour tradition of the Languedoc, the great sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the redefinitions of beauty and…