Fiction
01: Best Canadian Stories
Edited by Douglas Glover
Alice Munro is back this year with a story about a young woman, ill and betrayed, who finds solace in a single kiss. Leon Rooke is magical, as always, telling of another kiss that makes fish fly. Ramona Dearing and Cynthia Flood are both concerned, more ominously, with sexual molestation and its consequences. Bill Gaston has told an outré story in gentle, mellifluous prose. In Kevin Armstrong a young man finds and loses love in a brothel, in George Bowering a professor offers his mind for sale in the local red-light district. In Charlotte Gill, a girl, finding herself pregnant, asks What kind of mother would I make? We all know the answer.
8.5 by 5.5 by 140 pages $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1188 0 ISSN 0703 9476
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Coming Attractions 01
Maggie Helwig
| Ramona Dearing writes quick, clever stories, but she’s never merely superficial. All her stories are about real people and they all develop genuine emotion. Dearing has often appeared under the Oberon imprint, but Judith McCormack is new to us. Already, however, she has a surprising assurance. Her people are deftly drawn, her world is vivid and real. Goran Simic is different. He has behind him a substantial career in his native Bosnia. He now lives in Canada, where he’s writing in a new country in a new language—and with a surprising new confidence.
8.5 by 5.5 by 151 pages, cover by Henri Matisse $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1186 6 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1185 9
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Viking Brides
Richard Cumyn
These stories all concern themselves with decisive moments in time, those moments when we choose, condemn, make amends, blunder, forgive. The way a person reacts at such times says much about his character. Too much recent Canadian fiction is merely clever, implying that this is life and there’s nothing much we can do about it. If most of these stories are hopeful, it’s not because they imply that nothing can or should be done. On the contrary, they imply that we must make choices and the choices we make are of profound moral consequence. If we can’t see that, we’ve become not only blind but also dangerous to others.
8.5 by 5.5 by 148 pages, cover by Prudence Heward $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1179 8 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1177 4
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Daughter of Strangers
Marjory Gordon
| A teenager of mixed ancestry, Amy goes on an archaeological dig with her adoptive father, a white man, on the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. She discovers what life would have been like for her among the Dene people who lived there 1600 years ago. She knows nothing about butchering caribou, preparing hides or cooking with hot stones, but her grandmother undertakes to teach her. From her Amy learns the customs of her tribe and the skills she needs for survival. This is a novel about the search for identity of a young girl living as a Dene in the white man’s world, where caribou count for nothing and motor cars and computers count for everything.
8.5 by 5.5 by 156 pages $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1182 8 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1180 4
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Entering the Landscape
Edited by Eric Henderson, Madeline Sonik
Canadian writing has always been involved with landscape. Americans conquered the land; Canadians survive in theirs. But what of the Canadian identity: in what ways has it been shaped by landscape? There’s the puritanism of such early writers as Sinclair Ross, Frederick Philip Grove, W.O. Mitchell and even Margaret Laurence: all imply that life is to be endured. But in more recent fiction there’s a growing awareness of the oneness of man and nature. One enters the landscape to come into oneself.
8.5 by 5.5 by 132 pages, cover by Jennifer Garrett $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1174 3 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1173 6
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Non-Fiction
Living Here
David Helwig
| A book of reflections and memories, Living Here considers a variety of subjects, from family history to food, from the poems of Al Purdy to the nature of the hidden god. David Helwig has no axes to grind, but he’s intensely interested in the things and people he observes, and he knows how to write about them. The Montreal Gazette spoke of the “accomplished subtlety and insight” of a previous book of essays. The same qualities are found here.
8.5 by 5.5 by 167 pages, cover by Sir Stanley Spencer $21.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1166 8 $42.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1165 1
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Drama
Night Noises
Fred Euringer
Night Noises is based on an actual event. In 1852, James Loftus Marsden, a widower and a doctor, left his five daughters in Paris in the care of a woman called Celestine Doudet. First one girl dies, then another. An investigation is launched; Celestine is charged with manslaughter. Three years later she is pardoned. The play is fictional, but based on fact. It reminds us that in many of our attitudes, particularly toward sex and sexuality, we carry the nineteenth century deep within us.
8.5 by 5.5 by 128 pages, cover by Gustav Klimt $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1172 9 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1171 2
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Poetry
American Standard
Joseph Sherman
| In this book Joseph Sherman returns to what he calls life’s miscellany. These are all mature poems, the first since the Wallenberg cycle. They deal with the complex realities of family relationships, with history and myth, with belonging and not belonging, with the certitudes that tint and stain the human condition. Sherman’s work is very polished and no word is ever wasted.
8.5 by 5.5 by 95 pages $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1176 7 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1175 0
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Bloodlines
Don Gutteridge
Don Gutteridge has grown older with the rest of us. He no longer writes about Riel or the Coppermine—though some of these early poems have been included in this book. He writes instead about his grandchildren. There are poems for Jibby (at 18 months), for Kevin (at 2 days). There’s a Christmas poem for all four. There are poems about his own childhood. There’s a poem for his father, a poem for an old friend, for whom the only reason for living is living. The subjects are simple, but the poems are not. They’re pure Gutteridge.
8.5 by 5.5 by 71 pages, cover by Paul Cézanne $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1168 2 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1167 5
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Bones about to Bloom
Shari Andrews
| Shari Andrews’ last book was an imaginative retelling of the story of her family. She traces her Danish descent from her maternal grandmother. Three generations before, in 1876, her people had settled in New Denmark. The poems drew on written archives, on the memories of people still living in the town and on the imagination of the poet. This book is freer in tone, looser and more relaxed. It’s about what makes life, in the here and now, worth living: the silk skin of summer, the opening of petals, the moon in the frozen gutter, tenderness and the love of a man. These are the consolations that make pain bearable and pleasure keen. These are the things we never forget.
8.5 by 5.5 by 60 pages $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1170 5 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1169 9
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Telling Stories
David Helwig
In Telling Stories four of David Helwig’s long history poems are brought back into print. One reviewer called Atlantic Crossings “a powerful achievement of epic proportions.” Another described The Beloved, which tells the tale of Israel’s greatest king, as “glowing with light and shivering with beautiful eroticism.” The witty and allusive Catchpenny Poems won the CBC poetry award in 1983. These are all living narratives, filled with the strangeness of the past and the mythic power of history.
8.5 by 5.5 by 154 pages, cover by Mendelson Joe $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1190 3 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1189 7
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