Biblioasis – serie

When Sprinting from the Graveyard was published in 1997, Goran Simic's poems were severely altered out of the fear that they might offend "Western sensibilities." These newly translated poems restore all that is offensive, despairing and necessary to our understanding of war by capturing the poems' original power and humanity. In addition, this collection contains both previously unpublished poems, written "under the candlelight" of the siege, and new poems returning to the sniper's alleys and bunkers of Sarajevo. From Sarajevo, With Sorrow is a disturbingly resonant, timely and important collection.

First published in 1969, Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada remains as refreshing, innovative and important today as it has in every previous incarnation. Sophisticated, playful, crafted, sly, self-referential and extremely funny, it marks the beginning of a long and important, if unfortunately under appreciated, career by one of Canada's best humorists and innovative story-tellers.

"Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher ...His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world. " --Naomi Klein "[Mark Kingwell] illuminates on almost every page. " --Los Angeles Times "Kingwell's musings on angling inevitably lead to in-depth essays on the inherent nature of and reasoning for various aspects of fishing, such as casting, killing, patience, and outdoorsmanship...[Catch and Release is] filled with a sense of joy and awe. " --Publishers Weekly Taking seriously the idea that baseball is a study in failure--a very successful batter manages a hit only three of every ten attempts--Harper's Magazine contributing editor Mark Kingwell explores ways in which the game teaches us lessons on fragility, contingency, and community. Weaving elements of memoir, philosophical reflection, sports writing, and humour, the book serves as an unofficial follow-up to Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life, which won over readers by offering an intelligent but accessible look into the deep waters of angling. Never pretentious, always entertaining, Fail Better is set to be the homerun non-fiction title of the spring.Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author or co-author of eighteen books, including the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), and Glenn Gould (2009). In addition to many scholarly articles, his writing has appeared in more than forty mainstream magazines and newspapers. His most recent books are the essay collections Unruly Voices (2012) and Measure Yourself Against the Earth (2015).

A CBC BOOKS MUST-READ NONFICTION BOOK FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTHNominated for the Toronto Book AwardSmartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen of the country’s rail lines were denied secure positions and prohibited from bringing their families to Canada, and it was their struggle against the racist Dominion that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.

My Town brings together more than 70 snapshots of the people and places that have called Windsor home. More than this, they have made Windsor, for better and for worse, the city it is today. Some of these faces you will recognize; others will have slipped beneath the radar. Marty has sought them out and made their stories his own.

First published in 1972, Going Down Slow is an intense and very funny novel about one mans attempt to maintain his sanity, and his sense of humour, in the face of mounting odds. Metcalf's young hero, David Appleby, a young school teacher just over from Britain, is pitted against small-mindedness, prejudice, and temptations that are generations old. The writing is, as one would expect of anything by Metcalf, of the highest order. Going Down Slow is a sharp and biting satire, and an unforgettable novel.

In the foreword to his "The Collected Short Fiction", Bruce Jay Friedman wrote: 'In her late years, my mother confessed to me that she had dropped me on my head when I was two. As I've grown older, I've come to believe that her presumably innocent mistake resulted in the 'tilted' quality I've been accused of having in my work.'We can now add to the stories in "The Collected Short Fiction" the splendidly tilted fictions in "Three Balconies", vintage Friedman all. In these stories Friedman returns to the Jewish suburbs of New York he explored with his characteristic wit and charm in his earlier stories and novels, streets where Jew and Gentile duke it out time and again, though often each remains uncertain of the reason.In these pages you'll meet Jacob, who as a junior counselor at summer camp wakes up his young charges at midnight to tell them that their parents have been executed by the Nazis, and Alexander Kahn, a failed novelist turned journalist who breaks the law within site of the prison warden, so taken is he with the camaraderie he's discovered in the joint when compared with the thin gruel of companionship he's experienced outside.You'll meet Harry, the once famous screenwriter, and a moral man who 'lacks a moral follow through.' And in the title novella, the tragic and great Beau DeVyne, perhaps the most memorable of Friedman's characters to date.In sumptuously simple language - the language of the street, the bar, the store, the office - Friedman gives us a collection of moral fables that explore friendship and faith and failure unswervingly, yet with compassion and humor.

"Dawdler." "Layabout." "Shit-heel." "Loser." For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, which is to say ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. Mark Kingwell's introductory essay offers a playful defence of the idler as homo superior, while Joshua Glenn's glossary playfully explores the etymology and history of hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases, while offering both a corrective to popular misconceptions about idling and a foundation for a new mode of thinking about working and not working. The Idler's Glossary is destined to become The Devil's Dictionary for the idling classes, necessary reading for any and all who wish to introduce more truly "free" time into their daily lives.

A memoir that chronicles unflinchingly the destructiveness of bipolar disorder - an illness that infiltrates thinking, feeling and acting in ways that change the very fabric of identity, of the life story one is telling oneself; however, The Lily Pond is equally searching in its exploration of the psyche's resources in healing and reknitting that story.

Rebecca Rosenblum's Once is a fiercely original and assured debut, a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twenty-somethings -- students, office techies, waitresses, warehouse labourers, street hustlers -- who inhabit them. These are stories grounded in the all-too-real comedy and tragedy of jobs and friendships and romances, books and buses and bodies.

Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2012 "Glover is a master of narrative structure." --Wall Street Journal In the tradition of E.M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence--and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live? Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover's take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age.Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. Praise for Douglas Glover "A master of narrative structure." - Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, Wall Street Journal "So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ...the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker "Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ...a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly "A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail "Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's "Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune "Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

FINALIST FOR THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE "C.P. Boyko's second offering is brilliantly bold. Playful and dire and scholarly all at once, Psychology may well be the most audaciously original collection of Canadian fiction, ever. Mr. Mustard alone is worth the price of admission."--Bill Gaston, author of Mount Appetite "Very revealing."--Hubert T. Ross, PhD, PsyD, DPsy Psychologists are people we admire and resent. At best, they're compassionate detectives of the human soul, healers and diagnosticians, assessing the internal machinations that structure our lives and behavior. At worst, however, they're smug, hyper-educated, bombastic, yappy, socially deaf, thrice-divorced and twice-separated spouse-swapping cat-torturing perverts. Plus, they're all in this book. And so are their patients. C.P. Boyko's Psychology and Other Stories is replete with analysts, attorneys, criminals, Freudians, wardens, and self-help gurus. From Dr.Pringle's treatment-resisting young patient in "Reaction-Formation" to the philandering forensic psychiatrist of "The Blood-Brain Barrier," Psychology is a droll dissection of industry archetypes--as well as a brilliant study of mental illness, mental health, and the people who try to tell them apart.