Fiction
04: Best Canadian Stories
Edited by Douglas Glover
Best Canadian Stories, launched nearly 35 years ago, has become a Canadian literary institution. Each edition places the work of established writers like Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant next to the work of newcomers. Over the years, many of these newcomers have become household names in their own right. Names like Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Rudy Wiebe come to mind. Merna Summers and Margaret Gibson both first appeared in this series. This year we feature new work by eleven writers. Read them and place your bets.
8.5 by 5.5 by 176 pages, cover by Eduard Vuillard $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1255 9 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1254 2 ISSN 0703 9476
|  |
Contributors: Adam Lewis Schroeder, Mark Jarman, Ven Begamudré, Patrick Lane, Steven Heighton, Sharon English, Murray Pomerance, Stephen Henighan, Kelly Watt, Kenneth J. Harvey, Christy Ann Conlin
“The arrival, late in the fall each year, of this Oberon collection is always cause for fanfare”—Quill & Quire
“A literary institution”—Ottawa Citizen
Coming Attractions 04
Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
 | Coming Attractions was first published in 1980. In the 24 years since then it has introduced the work of some 72 writers, many of whom have since become famous. The best known of these is probably Rohinton Mistry, but the list also includes Lisa Moore, Diane Schoemperlen, Bonnie Burnard, Dennis Bock and Frances Itani—an astonishing array of talent. This year we feature three new writers: Neil Smith was born in Montreal and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize. Jaspreet Singh grew up in Kashmir. Maureen Bilerman, who lives in Fredericton, recently won the New Brunswick Literary Competition.
8.5 by 5.5 by 144 pages, cover by David Helwig $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1257 3 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1256 6
|
New writers who first appeared in Coming Attractions include Rohinton Mistry, Diane Schoemperlen, Lisa Moore, Timothy Taylor, Frances Itani, Bonnie Burnard, Dennis Bock, Sharon Butala, Steven Heighton, Mary Swan, Caroline Adderson, Linda Svendsen, Gayla Reid.
“Reading Coming Attractions is like test-driving the year’s new cars”—London Free Press
“Coming Attractions is a who’s who of our best young writers” —The Fiddlehead.
Off Centre
Caroline Shepard
Post-modern society is full of people who are searching for a new way to live. The people in these stories are the same. They’re trying to find their way in a world where barriers have come down and where a new sense of identity and new beliefs is what they are looking for. People are struggling to be honest and true to themselves in a world without standards or recognized ways of doing things, ways of saying yes and saying no.
8.5 by 5.5 by 152 pages, cover by Gustav Klimt $19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1263 4 $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1261 0
|  |
Caroline Shepard was born in Winnipeg, but has lived since then in Ontario, Quebec, the USA, the UK and Africa. She has been a yoga teacher in Montreal, a volunteer in Botswana and, more recently, a programme officer for Africa at the CUSO head office in Ottawa. Themes of uprootedness, of disconnection and the disruption of expectations, are central to her writing. She now lives in Ottawa with her husband Parker Duchemin, where she is working on her second novel.
Non-Fiction
The Enamoured Knight
Douglas Glover
 | We think of Don Quixote in terms of windmills and impossible dreams. But Cervantes has been called the first modern novelist. Why? What is a novel anyway? Is this, as Dostoevsky said, the saddest book ever written? To these questions Douglas Glover offers answers, though perhaps not the ones you’d expect. The Enamoured Knight is Glover’s first book since he won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
8.5 by 5.5 by 194 pages, cover by Honoré Daumier $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1249 8 $45.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1248 1
|
Douglas Glover is the author of four story collections and four novels, including the critically acclaimed The Life and Times of Captain N, as well as a collection of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. His stories have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories, and his criticism has appeared in the Globe and Mail, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World and Los Angeles Times. He has been the editor of Best Canadian Stories since 1996. His most recent novel, Elle, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2003.
The Art of Desire
Edited by Bruce Stone
Douglas Glover won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction a year ago. Glover’s fiction is complex and strange, challenging as well as beautiful. The essays collected here are meant to help readers navigate the complexities of Glover’s literary terrain. Taken together, they deal with the total oeuvre, suggesting something of the scope of Glover’s work and the range of his vision, which is limited only by the imaginative capacity of his audience. In Glover, readers are uplifted by being introduced to other possibilities of being, transcending the common, the ordinary and the familiar.
8.5 by 5.5 by 194 pages, cover by James Ensor $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1260 3 $45.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1258 0
|  |
Contributors include Bruce Stone, Stephen Henighan, Louis K. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Phil Tabakow, Lawrence Mathews, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand.
A Black Mark: The Japanese-Canadians in World War II
Mary Taylor
 | There have been several academic studies of the plight of our Japanese-Canadian citizens during the Second World War, but this is the first book to confront the issue squarely as a human reality. Young Canadians know very little about this chapter of their past. It’s time they learned. Prime Minister Lester Pearson called it a black mark in Canadian history. Few who read this book will fail to agree.
8.5 by 5.5 by 194 pages $21.95 (paper) 194 pages ISBN 978 0 7780 1267 2 $42.95 (cloth) 194 pages ISBN 978 0 7780 1266 5
Currently out of stock.
|
Mary Taylor was born and brought up in Scotland, where she studied philosophy at Glasgow University. After graduate work at Radcliffe, she was posted to India by the British Commonwealth service. There she met and married her husband, a Canadian diplomat. Since then she has lived in France, Russia, Belgium and Japan. If Only I Had Known, a cultural study drawn from her years in Japan, was first published in 1998 and is being reissued in French.
Poetry
Adagios: Orestes’ Lament
Judith Fitzgerald
The second in a four-part epic, this book is a lament, set in the framework of the Homeric story of the Oresteia, for the horrors of the twentieth century. As Judith Fitzgerald puts it, the Adagios, when complete, will articulate, through the voices of the four speakers, the wreckage and ruin of modern civilization. On the strength of Iphigenia’s Song, the first part, Judith Fitzgerald was awarded one of the prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowships.
8.5 by 5.5 by 52 pages, cover by Egon Schiele $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1244 3 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1243 6
|  |
Judith Fitzgerald has been a literary journalist—at the Globe and Mail (where she won the Fiona Mee Award), Ottawa Citizen, Windsor Star, Kingston Whig-Standard and Toronto Star —a music critic, writer-in-residence at the Hamilton Public Library, Laurentian University and the University of Windsor, and the author of seventeen collections of poetry. Rapturous Chronicles was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award, River was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and her Selected Poems received a Writers’ Choice Award and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. She was recently awarded a Chalmers Arts Foundation poetry fellowship, and is currently working on Electra’s Benison (Book Three of her Adagios quartet) and The Art and Craft of the Words and Music of Leonard Cohen, Master of Song.
Crucible
Shari Andrews
 | St. Catherine of Siena was famous in the Middle Ages for her holiness of life and skill in diplomacy. Her correspondence with popes and princes was published in 1860, and Shari Andrews has drawn on these letters to write a vivid account of Catherine’s life. The story begins with the girl’s childhood and adolescence and goes on to deal with her pivotal role in the history of the Church and the politics of the day. Shari Andrews’ most recent collection of poetry, Bones about to Bloom, was published by Oberon Press in 2001.
8.5 by 5.5 by 112 pages $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1253 5 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1252 8
|
Shari Andrews is of Danish descent through her maternal grandmother, whose great-grandparents settled in New Denmark in 1876. Her first book of poems, The Stone Cloak, was an imaginative retelling of their story. It was followed in 2001 by Bones about to Bloom, a broader collection about the consolations of life in the here and now that was awarded a Bailey Prize by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. Shari Andrews lives with her husband in New Maryland, NB.
Collected Poems 2
Elizabeth Brewster
This second volume of the Collected Poems contains all the work that first appeared as In Search of Eros and Sometimes I Think of Moving, both of which have long been out of print. Elizabeth Brewster uses feeling and irony, compassion and insight to convey her wonder at the mystery of the universe and her pleasure in being part of it. Her poems often appear in school textbooks and the author herself was recently awarded the Order of Canada.
8.5 by 5.5 by 200 pages, cover by Egon Schiele $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1247 4 $45.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1246 7
|  |
Elizabeth Brewster was born in New Brunswick, but since 1972 has lived in Saskatoon, where she is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published five books of fiction, two volumes of autobiography and twenty collections of poetry. An earlier collection, Footnotes to the Book of Job, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of New Brunswick, the E.J. Pratt Award and the President’s Medal, as well as the Saskatchewan Lifetime Achievement Award. In the last three years she has turned eighty years of age, converted to Judaism and become a member of the Order of Canada.
Something More Miraculous
Don Gutteridge
 | These are a grandfather’s poems. They tell of a grandchild embracing the exuberance of blade and bevelled air on a winter rink, of a youngster finding heaven in the effortless air of first snow, of summer boyhood (when we laid our bodies nude and needy in the warm sand), of Sundays when Jesus cruised the lake looking for fish and sin, of remembered hunger for a girl’s flesh (till in the truth and tuck of her loving she soothed you to satiety). “I shall not rage against the dying,” the poet says, “for more than most I’ve had my say.”
8.5 by 4.5 by 56 pages, cover art by Silverthorne Designs $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1251 1 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1250 4
|
Don Gutteridge is best known as a poet. He began with books about such Canadian heroes as Louis Riel and Samuel Hearne. Then he wrote a book about the legendary Indian chief known as Tecumseh. Later still, he wrote about his own childhood in Lambton County. His last two books have had as their central subject the life of the poet as grandfather. For many years Don Gutteridge has lived in London.
Collected Poems Volume Ten: 1996-00
Raymond Souster
This tenth volume of Souster’s Collected Poems contains the complete text of Close to Home, which was published in 1996, and Of Time & Toronto, which first appeared four years later. Here is the celebrated poem about the RidoutJarvis duel in muddy York, as well as the long poem about the death of the poet’s mother. Here are the poems that have come to speak for the city that Raymond Souster has made his own: poems about drunks, lovers and panhandlers. They’re all here, between the covers of one book.
8.5 by 5.5 by 240 pages $27.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1265 8 $49.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1264 1
|  |
Raymond Souster is one of Canada’s best-known poets. He began his career before the end of the war and later, through Contact, got to know people like Olson, Creeley and Cid Corman. With Ron Everson, Ralph Gustafson and Louis Dudek, he founded the League of Canadian Poets. The Governor General’s Award came in 1964, for The Colour of the Times. Since then he has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as ten volumes of Collected Poems.
“This series should find a place on the shelves of every Canadian library”—Quill & Quire
“Souster’s importance to Canadian poetry cannot be overestimated”—Malahat Review
“A huge and impressive body of work”—Books in Canada
Copyright © Oberon Press, 2025 |