Fiction
Coming Attractions 00
Edited by Maggie Helwig
Two of the three writers in this book grew up overseas, Christine Erwin in Hong Kong, Vivette Kady in South Africa. “Some of the most bruising and dazzling experiences of my life,” Erwin reflects, “happened before I was seventeen,” when she came to Canada. The outsider is a major figure in most of her stories, as he is in Vivette Kady’s work. Kady’s stories are set in South Africa, where life is troubled, painful and disturbing. Timothy Taylor lives in Vancouver, where his people are preoccupied with personal loss. They cling to small objects, a watch say, or a small root, as if they were vehicles of grace.
8.5 by 5.5 by 160 pages, cover by Emily Carr
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1151 4
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The Truth Is
Mary Soderstrom
 | This is a new collection of stories from Mary Soderstrom. There’s Sylvie, a supermarket cashier caught up in the Montreal underworld. There’s Frances McLaughlin, who wants to know the truth, however painful. There’s Pomona Herzog, a fighter even in her old age. There are fourteen stories in all, some sad, some comforting. They all deal with women who confront the truth, whatever the cost. Mary Soderstrom’s last book was “a gem of a collection” (Toronto Globe); her work has “the grace and sweep of the finest novels” (Ottawa Citizen).
8.5 by 5.5 by 168 pages, cover by L.L. Fitzgerald
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1160 6
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1159 0
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Blind Spot
Len Gasparini
All these stories take place at street level, where things are what they are. From hustlers to hitch-hikers to kids in the schoolyard, the characters bring back the days of Len Gasparini’s youth, spent mostly in Windsor, a working-class city on the U.S. border. A straight young guy becomes the buddy of an older black man. A black kid and a white create a friendship in the city’s back alleys. Later stories take us to the southern States and Peru. This is a harsh world and it gets along without illusions, but it’s a real world and a very human one.
8.5 by 5.5 by 128 pages, cover by Brian Sytnyk
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1155 2
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Sitting on the Stairs
Don Bailey
 | Don Bailey knows all about loneliness. He knows all about isolation and he knows all about alienation. But this isn’t really what he writes about. What he writes about are those moments when a man—it’s usually a man—feels real, feels alive, feels important. So, though the hero of these stories lives a life that most people would consider reason for despair, the stories themselves are essentially upbeat. Erich Fromm once said that freedom from fear comes only to those who offer their hand in comfort to another. So it could be said that what these stories are about is father-hood.
8.5 by 5.5 by 144 pages, cover by Noreen Mallory
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1158 3
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1157 6
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Non-Fiction
A Fly on the Curtain
Fred Euringer
The early years of the Stratford Festival, summer stock at its craziest in the nineteen-fifties, the Canadian theatre coming to life. Fred Euringer saw all these things with a sharp eye, and his new book looks back at them with delight. His accounts of Tyrone Guthrie, Michael Langham, Christopher Plummer and Donald Sutherland, as they were known to a working actor and director, are both amusing and acute. This is what the great days were really like.
8.5 by 5.5 by 219 pages, cover by Egon Schiele
$24.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1142 2
$45.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1141 5
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Navigating without a Compass
Douglas Ord
 | Where do people with a passing interest in art get their idea of its proper nature? So begins Douglas Ord’s exploration of the public meaning of art in Canada. This exploration takes him first to a discussion of the value of talking about art at all (with excursions to Verdun, to the Champs Elysées and to Expo 67). Then to the National Gallery, the Musée d’art contemporain, the Art Gallery of Ontario and an exhibition of contemporary art at a small Canadian art school. Ord, the Toronto Globe declared, “is a highly sophisticated writer dealing with profound issues.”
8.5 by 5.5 by 176 pages, cover by David Milne
$21.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1146 0
$42.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1145 3
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Poetry
This Human Day
David Helwig
This book follows the seasons of human life, moving from the streets of Montreal, through dramatic moments in human history, to the serenity of life in the countryside of Prince Edward Island, where David Helwig now lives. It’s full of tenderness for the surfaces of the earth and its human presences. Some of the poems are simple in their visual precision; others explore the possibilities of complex rhymes and rhythms. All its intensities are true.
8.5 by 5.5 by 108 pages, cover by Pablo Picasso
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1144 6
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1143 9
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Burning Bush
Elizabeth Brewster
 | In this book, Elizabeth Brewster is building bridges: between Cain and Abel, between Isaac and Rebecca, between winter and spring, between the humblest bush and God’s word. Before God made the world, the universe was filled with light. To make room for creation, he stored some of the light in clay pots. But the pots broke and shattered into fragments. Only men and women can collect the fragments and repair the broken vessels. Only men and women can make the world safe again.
8.5 by 5.5 by 121 pages, cover by Piet Mondriaan
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1139 2
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Of Time & Toronto
Raymond Souster
Raymond Souster has been known as the poet of Toronto for a whole generation of readers. He’s the poet of the daily life of the city—the chance encounters on the subway, the panhandlers, the drunks, the lovers who make the life of the streets what it is. He’s also, however, the poet of the past and readers watch for his continuing series of Pictures from a Long-Lost World. This book ends with a fine example of this form, a long poem about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Everyone knows about Harpers Ferry and John Brown’s body, but seldom before has the story been told with such eloquence, such vigour and such compassion.
8.5 by 5.5 by 109 pages, cover by Amedeo Modigliani
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1138 5
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1137 8
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