Search

Part nature guide, part self-help column, and all love letter to the more-than-human world, Utter, Earth is an exercise in wonder. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach. A light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of hitchhiker's guide to the more-than-human world—Isaac Yuen's Utter, Earth is a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet's riotous wonders. In a time of dirges and elegies for the natural world, Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Highlighting life that once was, still is, and all that we stand to lose, this living and lively mini encyclopedia (complete with glossary) shines the spotlight on the motley, fantastical, and astonishing denizens with whom we share this planet.

Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in lettersDrawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman's critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between classical and contemporary literature, and music, book and literary history, shifting seamlessly from the close reading of a poem to the consideration of the life and oeuvre of an artist.In these thirty-four selected essays, Whiteman demonstrates the cohesion of his varied body of work, which ranges from essays on such poets as Sappho, Goethe, Samuel Beckett, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen and Philip Larkin, to insightful readings of the biographers and translators of such great writers as Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Work to Be Done is an erudite and eclectic tour of Whiteman's finest critical investigations.

The flashpoint topic of energy conservation and protection is shared around the world. In Reimagining Fire, environmentally conscientious writers, poets, and artists share their perspectives about our world's impending energy transition. To envision this transition, editor Eveline Kolijn connected these artists and writers with a network of experts from the Canadian Energy Futures Lab, along with representatives from towns, rural communities, and First Nations. The oil-producing province of Alberta serves as a microcosm for the challenges and opportunities that the world faces in decarbonizing society, an intriguing fact that makes the Alberta Story a Global Story.

A wide-ranging anthology of personal essays from diverse voices about their relationships to the fibre arts.Sometimes, the reliability of a knit stitch, the steady rocking of a quilting needle, the solid structure of a loom, is all you have. During the pandemic, fiber arts newbies discovered and lapsed crafters rediscovered that picking up some sticks and string or a needle and thread was the perfect way to reduce stress, quell anxiety, and foster creativity, an antidote to endless hours of doom-scrolling.Chances are you or someone close to you is currently in an ecstatic relationship with yarn, thread, or fabric. As we struggle with the pressures, anxieties, and impacts of daily life, fiber arts—knitting, crocheting, embroidery, weaving, beading, sewing, quilting, textiles—can be an antidote, a mirror and a metaphor for so many of life's challenges. Part time machine, part meditation app, the simple act of working with one's hands instantly reduces the overwhelming scope of living to a human scale and the present moment.In this nonfiction anthology, writers and artists from different backgrounds explore their complex relationships to fiber arts and the intersection of creative practice and identity, technology, climate change, trauma, politics, chronic illness, and disability. In answer to the mainstream craft space's tendency to centre the perspectives and careers of white women, Sharp Notions showcases Black, Indigenous, South-Asian, Chinese, and queer artists and makers and the cultural traditions of craft in diasporic communities. Accompanied by full-colour photographs throughout, these powerful essays challenge the traditional view of crafting and examine the role, purpose, joy, and necessity of craft amid the alienation of contemporary life.This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Selected by editor Marcello Di Cintio, the 2024 edition of Best Canadian Essays showcases the best Canadian nonfiction writing published in 2022.Featuring:Lyndsie Bourgon • Nicole Boyce • Robert Colman • Daniel Allen Cox • Acadia Currah • Sadiqa de Meijer • Gabrielle Drolet • Hamed Esmaeilion • Kate Gies • David Huebert • Jenny Hwang • Fiona Tinwei Lam • Kyo Maclear • Sandy Pool

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions such as... • Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and Atwood's other beloved works. • How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? • How can we live on our planet? • Is it true? And is it fair? • What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood's views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.

Selected by editor Mireille Silcoff, the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Essays showcases the best Canadian nonfiction writing published in 2021.“Our current, tumultuous age” writes editor Mireille Silcoff, “is an important time for essayists, because in moments of great change, it's good to have chroniclers with the presence of mind to step back and assess.” Silcoff's selections for Best Canadian Essays 2023 do just that. In examinations of identity—personal, familial, racial, and cultural—and investigations of the far-reaching shockwaves of war; in mediations on illness and health, belonging and alienation, parents and children; in unexpected arguments about novel-writing, Donald Trump, and the Filet-O-Fish sandwich, the essays gathered here chart all kinds of boundaries, comprising, as Silcoff terms it, “a small bid for understanding that a border, a line drawn, need not be only the beginning or the end of something. That a frontier can be a place—indeed is the best place—for a conversation between sides to begin.”Featuring works by:Jamaluddin Aram • Sharon Butala • Kunal Chaudhary • Christopher Cheung • Emma Gilchrist • Michelle Good • Paul Howe • Jane Hu • Heather Jessup • Chafic LaRochelle • Stephen Marche • Kathy Page • Tom Rachman • M.E. Rogan • Allan Stratton • Sarmishta Subramanian

Richard Wagamese, one of Canada's most celebrated Indigenous authors and storytellers, was a writer of breathtaking honesty and inspiration. Always striving to be a better, stronger person, Wagamese shared his journey through writing, encouraging others to do the same. Following the success of Embers, which has sold almost seventy thousand copies since its release in 2016, this new collection of Wagamese's non-fiction works, with an introduction by editor Drew Hayden Taylor, brings together more of the prolific author's short writings, many for the first time in print, and celebrates his ability to inspire. Drawing from Wagamese's essays and columns, along with preserved social media and blog posts, this beautifully designed volume is a tribute to Wagamese's literary legacy.

Instant New York Times Bestseller “Truly, there's no shame in taking a break from books during the pandemic. But if you're feeling ready to reach out, try starting with Goodbye, Again. Take my word for it — let Jonny Sun into your life.”---Janet W. Lee, NPRThe wonderfully original author of Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Toogives us a collection of touching and hilarious personal essays, stories, poems—accompanied by his trademark illustrations—covering topics such as mental health, happiness, and what it means to belong. Jonny Sun is back with a collection of essays and other writings in his unique, funny, and heartfelt style. The pieces range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners.Jonny's honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression will connect deeply with his fans as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world. It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 The thirteenth installment of Canada's annual volume of essays showcases diverse nonfiction writing from across the country. “The exceptional essay,” writes editor Bruce Whiteman, “derives from a passionate feeling, love and anger being perhaps its upper and lower limits, coexisting with a desire for truth, and it aims for the radiance of what is.” In the 2021 edition of Best Canadian Essays, Whiteman's selections seek truth in all the places it may be found, from walks in brambled woods and ancient cities to memories of childhoods that shape a life; to analyses of artifacts both legislative and cultural that advance equality long overdue; to reports from the field that articulate the poetry of the present, the invisibility of the poor, the social contours and consuming mental contagions of the ongoing pandemic. Drawn from leading magazines and journals published in 2020, the fifteen essays gathered here brilliantly illuminate what is. Featuring work by: Neil Besner Catherine Bush Yvonne Blomer Jenna Butler Elizabeth Dauphinee Eva-Lynn Jagoe Mark Kingwell Frances Koziar Hilary Morgan V. Leathem Stephanie Nolen Kevin Patterson Soraya Roberts Ian Waddell Sheila Watt-Cloutier Joyce Wayne Rob Winger

Finalist for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardTo devote oneself to the study of beauty is to offer footnotes to the universe for all the places and all the moments that one observes beauty. I can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch.Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty.Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human existence. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.Eloquent and meditative in its approach, beauty, here, beyond base expectations of frivolity and superficiality, is conceived of as a thing to recover.Where Things Touch is an exploration of an essential human pleasure, a necessary freedom by which to challenge what we know of ourselves and the world we inhabit.2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Jury Citation:'Tapestry-like in form, Orang's lyrical poetic essay stitches together an exploration of beauty and aesthetics that is woven with humility and relationality to other. Her immense sense of craft and confidence make for breath stopping moments, over and over, while at the same time filling the senses with powerful and piercing revelation.'Reading,'she writes,'is a kind of ecological activity'– and it is a privilege to situate yourself within Orang's topographies of love.'

The twelfth installment of Best Canadian Essays speaks with striking prescience to our contemporary moment. “This book—like most that have found their way into the world this fall—began life in the Before Times,” writes editor Sarmishta Subramanian. Written and first published by leading magazines and journals in 2019, the essays selected here speak with striking prescience to our contemporary moment. From health concerns both global and individual; to decisions about how much of ourselves we should share, online and in person; to surveillance capitalism and cancel culture, public and private concerns intertwine throughout Best Canadian Essays 2020. Just as our current challenges in public health, policing, and justice require researchers, lawmakers, and citizen groups, writes Subramanian, they also require writers. Here she presents sixteen, “essaying in the French sense of the word to think it through.” Featuring work by: James Brooke-Smith • Larissa Diakiw • Jenny Ferguson • Wayne Grady • Alexandra Kimball • Amorina Kingdon • Andy Lamey • Michael LaPointe • Benjamin Leszcz • Alanna Mitchell • Alexandra Molotkow • Jeremy Narby • Andrew Nikiforuk • Michelle Orange • Christina Sharpe • Carl Wilson

A Perfect Offering illuminates the dark recesses of trauma—the sudden loss of a child, surviving sexual assault, the legacy of residential schools, enduring war and imprisonment, living with chronic illness—and shines with the imperfect grace and resilience of the human heart. Some of the 31 stories will shock and disorient. Others will inspire and comfort. All are illustrative and compelling. The contributors include Jennifer Finney Boylan, trans activist and a regular contributor to The New York Times; Captain Trevor Greene, who was attacked by an axe-wielding teenager near Kandahar; author of Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat; Jules Arita Koostachin, band member of Attawapiskat First Nation; and Paul Watson, awarded Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. For others, this will be their first publication.'This emotionally honest book is simultaneously brutal, beautiful and deeply inspiring.'—Jennifer Meeropol, granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg'This book will break your heart right open.'—Mike Downie, Co-Founder of The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund'These shared stories resonate with deep feeling, wisdom and courage.'—Award-wining novelist Camilla Gibb

The eleventh installment of Canada's annual volume of essays showcases diverse nonfiction writing from across the country. Culled from leading Canadian magazines and journals, Best Canadian Essays 2019 contains award-winning and award-nominated nonfiction articles that are topical and engaging and have their finger on the pulse of our contemporary psyches.

With intimacy and humour award-winning poet Ariel Gordon walks us through the streets of Winnipeg and into the urban forest that is, to her, the city's heart. Along the way she shares with us the lives of these urban trees, from the grackles and cankerworms of the spring, to the flush of mushrooms on stumps in the summer and through to the red-stemmed dogwood of the winter. After grounding us in native elms and ashes, Gordon travels to BC's northern Rockies, to Banff National Park and a cattle farm in rural Manitoba, and helps us to consider what we expect of nature. Whether it is the effects of climate change on the urban forest or foraging in the city, Dutch elm disease in the trees or squirrels in the living room, Gordon delves into our relationships with the natural world with heart and style. In the end, the essays circle back to the forest, where the weather is always better and where the reader can see how to remake even the trees that are lost.

Witty and painfully honest essays about perfection vs. reality: “Hilarious…[an] incredibly distinctive voice.” —Emma Gannon, bestselling author of Olive From the author of the popular newsletter That's What She Said, Nobody Cares is a candid personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your twenties and thirties. As she shares her hard-won insights from screwing up, growing up, and trying to find her own path, Anne T. Donahue offers all the honesty, laughs, and reassurance of a late-night phone call with your best friend. Whether she's giving a signature pep talk, railing against summer, or describing her own mental health struggles, Anne reminds us that failure is normal, saying no to things is liberating, and we're all a bunch of beautiful disasters—and she wouldn't have it any other way. “Her essays about the less photogenic moments of her life contain their own sort of beauty, the kind that comes from failing and persevering. From breaking down her anxiety disorder to getting in touch with helpful and well-deserved female rage, Donahue is as inspiring as she is droll.” ―Vulture “Frank, funny, observations.” —Cosmopolitan “I don't know how anyone could read her and not immediately fall in love.” —Scaachi Koul, author of One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Lebowitz highlights the parables, fables and myths we humans created in order to weave meaning into our lives and to which we return for comfort.” —Atlantic Books TodayOn April 10th, 1815, Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted. The resulting build-up of ash in the stratosphere altered weather patterns and led, in 1816, to a year without summer. Instead, there were June snowstorms, food shortages, epidemics, inventions, and the proliferation of new cults and religious revivals. Hauntingly meaningful in today's climate crisis, Lebowitz's lyric essay charts the events and effects of that apocalyptic year. Weaving together history, mythology, and memoir, The Year of No Summer ruminates on weather, war, and our search for God and meaning in times of disaster.

The verb esperar means to wait. It also means to hope.—“The Past Was a Small Notebook, Much Scribbled-Upon”, Cora Siré Waiting, that most human of experiences, saturates all of our lives. We spend part of each day waiting—for birth, death, appointments, acceptance, forgiveness, redemption. This collection of thirty-two personal essays is as much about hope as it is about waiting. Featuring literary voices from the renowned to the emerging, this anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction will resonate with anyone who has ever had to wait. Contributors: Samantha Albert, Rona Altrows, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Weyman Chan, Rebecca Danos, Patti Edgar, John Graham-Pole, Leslie Greentree, Edythe Anstey Hanen, Vivian Hansen, Jane Harris, Richard Harrison, Elizabeth Haynes, Lee Kvern, Anne Lévesque, Margaret Macpherson, Alice Major, Wendy McGrath, Stuart Ian McKay, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Susan Olding, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Kathy Seifert, Cora Siré, Steven Ross Smith, Anne Sorbie, Glen Sorestad, Kelly S. Thompson, Robin van Eck, Aritha van Herk

Bla_K is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_K explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

The second print edition of the popular, award-winning, online publication -- a handsomely art-directed digest magazine that mixes art, photography and literature with pop culture, comix and reporting on the news of the day. Hazlitt #2 is a grim but playful take on the idea of a summer reading issue. Featuring Heather O'Neill, Tao Lin, Lorrie Moore, Daniel Galera, Owen Pallett, Richard Maxwell, Mary Jo Bang and many more. What's inside:· Heather O'Neill sets her house on fire· Tao Lin on your body as vessel or spaceship· The Black Notes of Owen Pallett· Franz Kafka's Josef K. is channeled through Justin Bieber· Nick Hune-Brown on the horrors of teenage embarrassment · Ebola: Nature's most perfect killing machine· Linda Besner on arts funding in the U.S. and Canada· Eating the Heart of Richard Maxwell—talking with the innovative playwright and theatre director· How to be a Woman, or, Lorrie Moore as the mother you never had· The Life They Planned For You: aerial photography by Christoph Gielen· Poetry by Mary Jo Bang and David Hernandez· New Brazilian fiction by Daniel Galera and Fernanda Torres Also featuring art from Julia Dault, Stephen Appleby-Barr, Kristin Cammermeyer, Lorne Bridgman, and Marman and Borins. General Editor: Chris FreyArt Director: Jeremy Laing

For over a quarter century, many readers have agreed with legendary publisher Jack McClelland, who said, “I have never before encountered a book journal as engaging as BC BookWorld.” But over several decades, the populist style of BC BookWorld has tended to overshadow its literary value and its essentially educational agenda. Here in The Best of BC BookWorld is a sampling of articles that entertain, enlighten, educate and provoke. About half are by Alan Twigg, who has written the majority of the newspaper since its inception in 1987. Other contributors include Jane Rule, George Woodcock, W.P. Kinsella, Stephen Vizinczey, broadcaster Mark Forsythe, biographer Joan Givner and BookWorld's designer and cartoonist David Lester. There is something for everyone here: from early explorers of the Pacific Slope, to essays about literature, to BC authors who have written about the Holocaust.

The popular, award-winning, online magazine launches its inaugural eBook edition--a groundbreaking, handsomely art directed, colour magazine that creatively mixes art, photography and literature with pop culture, politics and design. Featuring George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, filmmaker Xavier Dolan, Joseph and Amanda Boyden, among many others, Hazlitt #1 combines the eclecticism and literary taste of The Believer and Granta with the sophisticated art and design sensibilities of magazines such as Monocle and Apartamento. Strikingly art directed by acclaimed clothing designer Jeremy Laing, Hazlitt #1 includes new works alongside some of the greatest hits from the web magazine, illustrated with originally commissioned art and photography throughout.

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time. Afflictions & Departures begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s—the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Madeline Sonik's parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse. These essays are as incisive as they are moving, and leave the reader with a sense of history as it was lived, not as it is codified in countless textbooks. Praise for Afflictions & Departures: “Startlingly original, Madeline Sonik's moving story of her childhood defies all our expectations of memoir. She captures crystalline moments of childhood memory and links them in a daisy-chain with corresponding events of the tumultuous societal change taking place outside her home. It is North America in the 1960s and 70s and her letter-perfect, child's-eye view of the world brings back that time with such intensity that the reader can almost smell and taste it. Droll, tragic, and absolutely compelling, Afflictions and Departures is a visceral portrayal of a family imploding.” (Jury, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction) “Her memory is dustless, capacious, uncanny. With a storyteller's skill and a poet's depth of vision, she recreates her childhood with one eye on her family and the other on the larger world. Significant cultural markers sit side-by-side with the small, painful intensities of her childhood. This memoir is crammed with pathos, yet is written with a light touch. I adore the narrator who never falls into self-pity or narcissism. The clarity of her vision makes the prose gleam and transforms autobiography into art.” (Lorna Crozier, author of Small Beneath the Sky) “From the patchwork craziness of a sixties and seventies suburban childhood, Madeline Sonik has fashioned a singular coming-of-age story in which the age itself assumes a starring role. Sharply observed, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Afflictions & Departures is a wise, tender, and beautifully written book.” (Susan Olding, author of Pathologies: a life in essays)

Living is a process of continuous transformation: we have been embryos, children, adolescents, thin, fat, sick, better again. And as humans, we are always at odds with at least one part of our bodies. Have we inherited the family nose? Is there nothing to be done for our finicky stomach or our limp hair? In the Flesh is an intelligent, witty, and provocative look at how we think about—and live within—our bodies. The editors and writers in this collection describe, in many voices, what human bodies feel now. Each author's candid essay focuses on one part of the body, and explores its function, its meanings, and the role it has played in his or her life. Written from both the male and female perspectives, contributors include Caroline Adderson, André Alexis, Taiaiake Alfred, Brian Brett, Trevor Cole, Dede Crane, Lorna Crozier, Candace Fertile, Stephen Gauer, Julian Gunn, Heather Kuttai, Susan Olding, Kate Pullinger, Merilyn Simonds, Richard Steel, Madeleine Thien, Sue Thomas, and Margaret Thompson.

Celebrated writers reveal surprising truths about the joys, challenges, and importance of finding the words, in this special fundraising anthology for PEN Canada. In Finding the Words, thirty-one well-known writers share deeply personal discoveries and stories that will surprise, delight, and stir the mind and heart. By turns inspiring, provocative, witty, and compelling, these diverse and original pieces explore home, exile, and the search for a place to belong; community, creativity, celebrity, and the many forms power can take. Among the pieces in the anthology: Diana Athill and Alice Munro discuss the consequences of writing about other people; Gord Downie meditates on what it means to be a songwriter by considering one of his own songwriting heroes; Guy Gavriel Kay reflects on how his relationship with his own readers continues to change; Elizabeth Hay searches for inspiration in the fallow period between books; Rawi Hage meditates on writing rooted in the universal experience of exile; Pasha Malla and Moez Surani present a funny and confounding list of “rules for writers” solicited from non-writers; Heather O'Neill tells the story of an illiterate and underage wannabe gangster in mid-century Montreal; Michael Winter pieces together court transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources to take us into the dark heart of a real-life Newfoundland crime story. Proceeds from this volume will go to PEN Canada in support of its vital work in defence of freedom of expression and on behalf of writers around the world who have been silenced. Finding the Words Contributors List:Diana AthillTash AwDavid Bezmozgis Joseph Boyden David Chariandy Denise ChongKaren Connelly Alain de Botton Emma Donoghue Gord Downie Marina Endicott Stacey May Fowles Rawi Hage Elizabeth Hay Steven Heighton Lee Henderson Guy Gavriel Kay Mark Kingwell Martha Kuwee Kumsa Annabel Lyon Linden MacIntyre Pasha Malla Lisa Moore Alice Munro Stephanie Nolen Heather O'Neill Richard Poplak Moez Surani Miguel Syjuco Madeleine Thien Michael Winter With cover design and illustration by Sethwww.pencanada.ca

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.

The idea for Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told came up between Carol Shields and longtime friend Marjorie Anderson over lunch. It appeared that after decades of feminism, the “women's network” still wasn't able to prevent women being caught off-guard by life. There remained subjects women just didn't talk about, or felt they couldn't talk about. Holes existed in the fabric of women's discourse, and they needed examining.They asked thirty-four women to write about moments in life that had taken them by surprise or experiences that received too little discussion, and then they compiled these pieces into a book. It became an instant number one bestseller, a book clubs'favourite and a runaway success. Dropped Threads, says Anderson,'tapped into a powerful need to share personal stories about life's defining moments of surprise and silence.'Readers recognized themselves in these honest and intimate stories; there was something universal in these deeply personal accounts. Other stories and suggestions poured in. Dropped Threads would clearly be an ongoing project.Like the first volume, Dropped Threads 2 features stories by well-known novelists and journalists such as Jane Urquhart, Susan Swan and Shelagh Rogers, but also many excellent new writers including teachers, mothers, a civil servant, a therapist. This triumphant follow-up received a starred first review in Quill and Quire magazine, which called it “compassionate and unflinching.” The book deals with such difficult topics as loss, depression, disease, widowhood, violence, and coming to terms with death. Several stories address some of the darker sides of motherhood:- A mother describes how, while sleep-deprived and in a miserable marriage, she is shocked to find infanticide crossing her mind.- Another woman recounts a memory of her alcoholic mother demanding the children prove their loyalty in a terrifying way.- A woman desperate for children refers to the bleak truth as:'Another Christmas of feeling barren.'Narrating the fertility treatment she undergoes, the hopes dashed, she is amusing in retrospect and yet brutally honest.While they deal with loss and trauma, the pieces show the path to some kind of acceptance, showing the authors'determination to learn from pain and pass on the wisdom gained. The volume also covers the rewards of learning to be a parent, choosing to remain single, or fitting in as a lesbian parent. It explores how women feel when something is missing in a friendship, how they experience discrimination, relationship challenges, and other emotions less easily defined but just as close to the bone:- Alison Wearing in “My Life as a Shadow” subtly describes allowing her personality to be subsumed by her boyfriend's.- Pamela Mala Sinha tells how, after suffering a brutal attack, she felt self-hatred and a longing for retribution.- Dana McNairn talks of her uncomfortable marriage to a man from a different social background:'I wanted to fit in with this strange, wondrous family who never raised their voices, never swore and never threw things at one another.'Humour, a confiding tone, and beautiful writing elevate and enliven even the darkest stories. Details bring scenes vividly to life, so we feel we are in the room with Barbara Defago when the doctor tells her she has breast cancer, coolly dividing her life into a'before and after.'Lucid, reflective and poignant, Dropped Threads 2 is for anyone interested in women's true stories.