This novel explores the snares of individual and collective memory as they are used to justify and preserve ancestral grudges.

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I. August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a…

When one person writes “this is what happened, this is what I know,” any reader stands in for the absent “I” or “eye” of that text. This inescapable process of language, preoccupies Kearns in these brief but concentrated pieces.

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated in this comprehensive survey of myth-collecting in B.C.

A young Palestinian is befriended, then tortured and murdered by Canadian soldiers during Operation Desert Storm. Cast of 3 to 5 men.

This charming intrigue starts with an enigmatic manuscript that brings together two disparate characters. The first is an embalmer who, unable to look after the living, devotes himself to the dead. The secondis an ailing concert pianist consorting with the ghosts of his past. Their tragic encounter is brilliantly illuminated by black humor and compassion.

Traces the development of Poet laureate Bowering’s many writings through four decades.

Writing in multiple voices, with keen psychological insight, Bourguignon examines relationships, past wounds and present possibilities with raucous warmth.

Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems. “Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of…

A coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels. Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a fictionalized account of the death of his own mother.

Examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG).

Mark Killman—a feared but much admired director—hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy in a re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of the target as a wax figure. Absurd, hilarious and haunting.

In this play inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile, by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, a group of urban Egyptian hipsters engages in debates about secularism and “fundamentalism” with tragic consequences.” Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

Exposes the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror”. Cast of 4 men.

Sit your butt down and learn your three Rs: ranting, resisting, and respect. In two new plays, Canada‘s king of black comedy takes on the failing education system. Both Parents Night and The Bigger Issue are set in public-school classrooms after hours and involve confrontations between stressed-out teachers and ticked-off…

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis. After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff follows on from an earlier…

Not merely an homage to Jack Spicer, but also a tribute to his Orphic conception of the serial poem, After Jack is a palimpsestuous attempt to achieve the dark art of nekuia, to encourage the means of poetic transmission and to divine the polyphony of both Federico García Lorca and Jack Spicer as their voices interweave, transform and become inexorably entangled with a fresh and undeniably peculiar, disturbingly profane authorial voice.

Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault – the only maternal figure that he has ever known – it is evident that the life of Joseph…

Tremblay presents the powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. Together, the five Albertines provide a moving portrait of an extraordinary “ordinary” woman in this Chalmers Award-winning play. Cast of 6 women.

In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities. Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama…

A play about modern day witch-hunting. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.

Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell must risk everything to pursue each of their desires.

Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and…

Native activists and environmentally concerned vegetarians are invited to a dinner party, where irreconcilable cultural differences clash over moose roast and vegetarian lasagna. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

Portraits of the writers, musicians, artists and social activists who influenced the life and work of Blais in the 1960s.

A college student’s life changes when he chooses to sponsor a Salvadoran refugee as a class project. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Mashing up the lexicon of war with post-industrial consumerism, haute cuisine, couture, language, Eros and desire, Karasick’s sixth book is at once dark and satirical, exuberant and amorously rigorous.

Essays on poetic theory written by Canadian poets from the late 19th century to 1918.

An analysis of the controversy surrounding the death of a Native child in Alert Bay, British Columbia.

An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere…

Essays in honour of the founding director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

As Fred A. Reed travels through the Middle East, the Balkans and Asia Minor, he concludes that Turkey’s Islamists are reappropriating the culture and beliefs that 70 years of secular fundamentalism have been unable to eradicate.

Taking the theme of postmodernity one step further with 23 short stories edited by Canada’s first poet laureate: Alexis, Arnason, Atwood, Blaise, Bowering, Burnham, Cohen, Dorsey, Elliot, Farrant, Fawcett, Findley, Goto, Fraser, King, Laferrière, Mayr, Rooke, Schoemperlen, Thomas, Verdecchia and Watson.

Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.

Gwen and Ned lose their former middle-class lifestyle as they attempt to comprehend the murder of their schizophrenic daughter Karen, even seeking solace in the wry musings of the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut.

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel – written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view. The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a…

Essays that explore the ways in which poetry, visual art and critical practices encounter “the long present neoliberal moment” of the imperialist agenda of globalization.

Two plays, one on Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976–83, constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.

This perceptively poignant Governor General’s Award-nominated play by Siminovitch Prize Winner MacLeod involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to encounter, but is he the real threat to the elderly couple: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family—their home?

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.In the…

Poet, novelist, and critic Madeleine Gagnon reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts by re-examining the influences of her early life: a pious childhood in a large, rural Catholic family, a rebellious youth, and intellectual development as a feminist. A central theme is Gagnon’s struggle for women’s equality and her refusal to be categorized by her gender.

Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Asian Skies is the unsettling story of the deficiencies of love that have produced our commodified and globalized world—a perhaps not-so-divine comedy of those who don’t love enough—steeped in a clash of cultures wherein the third world seems willingly, even perversely, to offer itself up as a simulacrum of the first, while its otherness remains hidden, inaccessible.

Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep, assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an electroencephalography recording of brainwaves in sleep) turns into a line of poetry, an act of focused consciousness?

An exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood, adapted and re-crafted to the stage. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

Sharon Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully engaging the world, rewarding the reader with daily moments transformed into visions of grace.