Fiction

Available in English for the first time, Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s searing Catalan novel, K.L. Reich, is a central work of testimonial literature of the Nazi concentration camps. Begun immediately after Amat-Piniella’s liberation in 1945, the book is based on his own four-year internment at Mauthausen.
“When the war is over, remember all this. Remember me,” implores one of the book’s characters on his deathbed, and it is this call to bear witness that Amat-Piniella takes up in his account of the Spanish Republican fighters who were exiled in France at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and soon swept up into the German concentration camp system. As an already organized anti-fascist army, they played an important role as a nucleus of resistance within the camps, and their story is little known to English-language readers.
Because of the length of his internment, his decision to write his book as fiction, and his staggering powers of observation and recollection, Amat-Piniella’s portrayal of life in the camps is unmatched in scope and detail. It is also a compelling study of three powerful ideological movements at work at the time: anarchism, communism, and fascism, all within the desperate and brutal world of the camps.
“My book does not seek to deepen wounds or differences, but to unite people before cruelty,” said Amat-Piniella. This is an essential text as we ponder the twentieth century and its meaning to us today. This edition includes a new preface, annotations, and a translators’ note.

Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor’s family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Great Depression.

Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy’s expensive cast off clothes, and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. When Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person.

At home, Lexi finds a journal written by her older brother during the family’s journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one hat reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Waterloo, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realization that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny.

Watermelon Syrup is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities.

In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present a collection of John Riddell’s work. Riddell’s poems and short stories are a remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings. Riddell’s oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged with media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing.
Riddell is best known for his short fiction pieces “H” and “Pope Leo: El Elope,” a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol. However, his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions.
Riddell’s work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet.
With media studies increasingly turning to “media archaeology” and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (as typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for further appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.

The Foreigner (1909) tells the story of Kalman Kalmar, a young Ukrainian immigrant working in rural Saskatchewan. It addresses the themes of male maturation, cultural assimilation, and a form of “muscular Christianity” recurring in Connor’s popular Western tales. Daniel Coleman’s afterword considers the text’s departure from Connor’s established fiction formulas and provides a unique framework for understanding its depiction of difference.

Painted Fires, first published in 1925, narrates the trials and tribulations of Helmi Milander, a Finnish immigrant, during the years approaching the First World War. The novel serves as a vehicle for McClung’s social activism, especially in terms of temperance, woman suffrage, and immigration policies that favour cultural assimilation. In her afterword, Cecily Devereux situates Painted Fires in the context of McClung’s feminist fiction and her interest in contemporary questions of immigration and “naturalization.” She also considers how McClung’s representation of Helmi Milander’s story draws on popular culture narratives.

Debate still rages on about who invented baseball. But one thing is certain...it was alive and fractious in southwestern Ontario in the summer of 1949. Charlie Hodge, just finishing his last year of high school, has made the Galt Terriers’ roster and will be riding the bench with a star-studded team, many of whom had played with the major leagues.
When those seasoned pros arrive in town, big things are expected, and they don’t disappoint. There is the towering home run that Goody Rosen hits into the Grand River; the frozen baseball scheme that backfires; and the busload of promotional cooking oil hijacked just before game time. It all comes down to Game 7 in the Terriers’ semi-final series with the Brantford Red Sox, when a convicted gambler, playing centre field that night, makes one of the most controversial plays ever seen at Dickson Park.
Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, David Menary recreates that post-war season in Terrier Town through the eyes of Charlie Hodge. While Charlie is a fictional character, the other players are not. This is a story that will resonate with young and old alike, baseball fans or not. This is a team that became a vital part of the town, and the town an elemental part of the team. This is a time rapidly fading from memory — a summer of myths and legends.

Originally published in 1935, Frederick Niven’s The Flying Years tells the history of Western Canada from the 1850s to the 1920s as witnessed by Angus Munro, a young Scot forced to emigrate to Canada when his family is evicted from their farm. Working in the isolated setting of Rocky Mountain House, Angus secretly marries a Cree woman, who dies in a measles epidemic while he is on an extended business trip. The discovery, fourteen years later, that his wife had given birth to a boy who was adopted by another Cree family and raised to be “all Indian” confirms Angus’s sympathies toward Aboriginal peoples, and he eventually becomes the Indian Agent on the reserve where his secret son lives. Angus’s ongoing negotiation of both the literal and symbolic roles of “White Father” takes place within the context of questions about race and nation, assimilation and difference, and the future of the Canadian West. Against a background of resource exploitation and western development, the novel queries the place of Aboriginal peoples in this new nation and suggests that progress brings with it a cost.
Alison Calder’s afterword examines the novel’s depiction of the paternalistic relationship between the Canadian government and Aboriginal peoples in Western Canada, and situates the novel in terms of contemporary discussions about race and biology.

From the pen of Gilbert Parker comes one of the most popular Canadian novels of the late nineteenth century. First published simultaneously in Canada and the United States in 1896, The Seats of the Mighty is set in Quebec City in 1759, against the backdrop of the conflict between the English and the French over the future of New France. Written and published after Parker's move to England, the novel attempts to romanticize French Canada without alienating his English and American readership. The novel’s enduring popularity led to a stage version in 1897 and a silent film in 1914.

Cristina Peri Rossi is one of the most acclaimed and personal voices in Hispanic letters. This volume of short stories, Panic Signs, first published in 1970 in Montevideo, Uruguay, presages the atrocities that would come with dictatorship in 1972.

The premonitory dimension is one of the striking characteristics in all the stories — a sense of impending catastrophe, sometimes hallucinatory and often graphic, leads us to undetermined places where the horrors of censorship, torture, and human bondage take place. At the same time, the stories expose the shackles that incapacitate us and deny us the acceptance of ourselves.

This elegy for freedom mourns the loss of liberty and justice while seducing us into questioning what we hold true. The metaphorical procession of images, and the craftsmanship of a narrative that continually engage us, motivate us to explore our own uncertainties and values, and offer an unquestionable opportunity to reassess today’s global conditions. Peri Rossi succeeds in creating a whirlwind of despair and self-discovery, impelling us to assess our own panic signs and so avoid being entrapped by those who hold power over us.
The translation of this powerful text will help English-speaking readers attain a more profound understanding of the complexities of Latin America’s cultural and socio-political issues.

A young girl falls asleep in the Joseph Schneider Haus and wakes up in the 1850s. At the same time, a tramp boy seeks sanctuary from a cruel master. Caught in the past, the young girl, Elizabeth Salisbury, is thrust into the drama of the tramp boy’s struggle to remain free.

Robert Fulford called it “a remarkable glimpse of the underbelly of Toronto,” but the reviews that greeted the publication of Cabbagetown Diary in 1970 were decidedly mixed. The novel’s rowdy concoction of grit and violence and rooming-house sleaze had a strongly polarizing effect on its readers. Many admired the frankness of Butler’s depiction of a sordid environment, and others deplored the obscenity of the language and the dangerous and careless ways in which his characters behave, bent as they are on downward self-transcendence. But Cabbagetown Diary was undeniably a promising debut by a young writer whose brash tone and pungent subject matter were unique in Canadian writing at that time.
The novel takes the form of a diary written by a disaffected young Toronto bartender, Michael, over the course of his four-month liaison with Terry, a naive teenager who is new to the city. Michael introduces her to his friends and his inner-city haunts, to drink and drugs, and to the nihilist politics espoused by some in his circle. With hard-bitten cynicism and flashes of dark humour, Michael relates the vicissitudes of their summer together.
This reissue of Cabbagetown Diary includes a biographical sketch by Charles Butler and an afterword by Tamas Dobozy.

W. Donald Wilson and Paul G. Socken’s translation of Aaron, by Québécois author Yves Thériault, makes this fine novel available in English for the first time.
An exploration of “otherness,” the story centres on Moishe, an Orthodox Jew and refugee from Russia, who is raising his grandson, Aaron, alone in Montreal, following the deaths of Aaron’s parents. Poverty-stricken, Moshe works as a tailor, maintains his strict adherence to Orthodoxy, and educates Aaron to follow in his path. Aaron becomes increasingly estranged from his grandfather’s ways, however, and his meeting with the militantly secular Jewish girl Viedna confirms his decision to embrace modernity, secularism, and materialism and to reject his faith entirely. The story portrays a tragically polarized situation in which neither side is able to communicate or to build an alternative world view that incorporates both tradition and modernity. Possibly Thériault’s finest novel, Aaron is a parable of our modern world and a poignant cautionary tale.

The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850) was one of the first books of Indigenous history written by an Indigenous author. The book blends nature writing and narrative to describe the language, religious beliefs, stories, land, work, and play of the Ojibway people. Shelley Hulan's afterword considers Copway's rhetorical strategies in framing a narrative—she considers it a form of "history, interrupted"—for a non-Indigenous readership.

A treasure chest of exceptional stories by one of Canadas classic authorsall now available in one volume.
Ernest Buckler, best known as the author of the Canadian classic, The Mountain and the Valley, never achieved the lasting fame he deserved. His first story was published in Esquire, a significant American literary magazine known for publishing leading writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis. Over the years, nearly forty more of Buckler’s short stories were published in several popular magazines, including Maclean’s where his story “The Quarrel” won first prize for fiction.
In Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler, Marta Dvořák gathers together many of those stories as well as some previously unpublished pieces. At times she has chosen to include the fuller, original versions, and has reinstated some of the lost passages that were cut from stories to fit popular magazine requirements.
Ernest Buckler’s writing is rooted in the magic of the ordinary. He celebrates the land and its community, and sensuously recreates a paradise — almost a Garden of Eden. Buckler’s American editors were right in believing that no one evoked the lost world of North Americas agrarian past better than Ernest Buckler.

In The Forest of Bourg-Marie, originally published in 1898, Toronto author and musician S. Frances Harrison draws together a highly mythologized image of Quebec society and the forms of Gothic literature that were already familiar to her English-speaking audience. It tells the story of a fourteen-year-old French Canadian who is lured to the United States by the promise of financial reward, only to be rejected by his grandfather upon his return. In doing so, the novel offers a powerful critique of the personal and cultural consequences of emigration out of Canada.
In her afterword, Cynthia Sugars considers how The Forest of Bourg-Marie reimagines the Gothic tradition from a settler Canadian perspective, turning to a French-Canadian setting with distinctly New-World overtones. Harrison’s twist on the traditional Gothic plotline offers an inversion of such Gothic motifs as the decadent aristocrat and ancestral curse by playing on questions of illegitimacy and cultural preservation.

This evocative narrative draws us into the inner life of a young Chinese peasant girl, May-ping, and her first glimmerings of youthful love and idealism under the Maoist regime in China. As she grows into a mature woman, she becomes increasingly aware of the strife around her.
An intelligent girl born into a Poor-Class family in a small village in rural China, she is, because of the Maoist policy towards such families, able to pursue her dream of going to university. To her surprise, urban snobbery and “student thought-spying” at university make it essential for her to hide her real thoughts. Such self-protection becomes especially necessary once her idealistic boyfriend Dan — a secret boyfriend because young people were forbidden to be romantically involved — is sent to a labour camp for his outspoken ways.
In her village, she learns that everything has value except the lives of girls and women. One of her childhood friends, a landowner’s daughter who because of her family’s Landlord Class, is not allowed to go to university drowns herself when forced to face an arranged marriage. Hua-Hua, a shy and gentle neighbour, hangs herself after her husband beats her brutally for not bearing him a son.
May-ping manages to survive the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Communist party who feels outside the system and keeps her inner self intact. Her story reveals how political change during the Maoist regime left its mark on ordinary people.
Employing stories within stories, the narrator carries the reader to a mythological realm to images of the resilient water lilies and the nurturing lily pond.

First published in 1947, In Due Season broke new ground with its fictional representation of women and of Indigenous people. Set during the dustbowl 1930s, this tersely narrated prize-winning novel follows Lina Ashley, a determined solo female homesteader who takes her family from drought-ridden southern Alberta to a new life in the Peace River region. Here her daughter Poppy grows up in a community characterized by harmonious interactions between the local Métis and newly arrived European settlers. Still, there is tension between mother and daughter when Poppy becomes involved with a Métis lover. This novel expands the patriarchal canon of Canadian prairie fiction by depicting the agency of a successful female settler and, as noted by Dorothy Livesay, was “one of the first, if not the first Canadian novel wherein the plight of the Native Indian and the Métis is honestly and painfully recorded.” The afterword by Carole Gerson and Janice Dowson provides substantial information about author Christine van der Mark and situates her under-acknowledged book within the contexts of Canadian social, literary, and publishing history.

In Italy, as in most Western cultures, the 1960s was a dynamic and turbulent decade of social change. Dacia Maraini, in this short story collection, explores the vexing, tragic, and often humorous experiences of women living in modern urban Italy.
With a style as lean as Samuel Beckett’s, and a love of the absurd that rivals Eugène Ionesco, Maraini’s stories are both poignant and wickedly funny. The writer’s ironic lens zooms in to examining sexual relations, working conditions, women’s issues, and family dynamics, illuminating the lives of an entire generation. With classic existential angst, Maraini’s characters are often profoundly dissatisfied with their situations, but also ill-equipped to initiate any real change. This feminist version of the absurd is deliciously wry and terrible. The stories have a real bite.
Originally published as Mio marito in 1968, this is the first English translation of My Husband.

“Don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.” —Thomas King, in this volume

Read, Listen, Tell brings together an extraordinary range of Indigenous stories from across Turtle Island (North America). From short fiction to as-told-to narratives, from illustrated stories to personal essays, these stories celebrate the strength of heritage and the liveliness of innovation. Ranging in tone from humorous to defiant to triumphant, the stories explore core concepts in Indigenous literary expression, such as the relations between land, language, and community, the variety of narrative forms, and the continuities between oral and written forms of expression. Rich in insight and bold in execution, the stories proclaim the diversity, vitality, and depth of Indigenous writing.

Building on two decades of scholarly work to centre Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, the book transforms literary method while respecting and honouring Indigenous histories and peoples of these lands. It includes stories by acclaimed writers
like Thomas King, Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, and Eden Robinson, a new generation of emergent writers, and writers and storytellers who have often been excluded from the canon, such as French- and Spanish-language Indigenous authors, Indigenous authors from Mexico, Chicana/o authors, Indigenous-language authors, works in translation, and “lost“ or underappreciated texts.

In a place and time when Indigenous people often have to contend with representations that marginalize or devalue their intellectual and cultural heritage, this collection is a testament to Indigenous resilience and creativity. It shows that the ways in which we read, listen, and tell play key roles in how we establish relationships with one another, and how we might share knowledges across cultures, languages, and social spaces.

Both an adventure-laced captivity tale and an impassioned denunciation of the marginalization of Indigenous culture in the face of European colonial expansion, Douglas Smith Huyghue’s Argimou (1847) is the first Canadian novel to describe the fall of eighteenth-century Fort Beauséjour and the expulsion of the Acadians. Its integration of the untamed New Brunswick landscape into the narrative, including a dramatic finale that takes place over the reversing falls in Saint John, intensifies a sense of the heroic proportions of the novel's protagonist, Argimou.

Even if read as an escapist romance and captivity tale, Argimou captures for posterity a sense of the Tantramar mists, boundless forests, and majestic waters informing the topographical character of pre-Victorian New Brunswick. Its snapshot of the human suffering occasioned by the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians, and its appeal to Victorian readers to pay attention to the increasingly disenfranchised state of Indigenous peoples, make the novel a valuable contribution to early Canadian fiction.

Situating the novel in its eighteenth-century historical and geographical context, the afterword to this new edition foregrounds the author's skilful adaptation of historical-fiction conventions popularized by Sir Walter Scott and additionally highlights his social concern for the fate of Indigenous cultures in nineteenth-century Maritime Canada.

Quebec author An Antane Kapesh's two books, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976) and Qu'as-tu fait de mon pays? (1979), are among the foregrounding works by Indigenous women in Canada. This English translation of these works, each page presented facing the revised Innu text, makes them available for the first time to a broader readership.


In I Am a Damn Savage, Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders – like herself – were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system. What Have You Done to My Country? is a fictional account by a young boy of the arrival of les Polichinelles (referring to White settlers) and their subsequent assault on the land and on native language and culture.


Through these stories Antane Kapesh asserts that settler society will eventually have to take responsibility and recognize its faults, and accept that the Innu – as well as all the other nations – are not going anywhere, that they are not a problem settlers can make disappear.