House of Anansi Press

Award-winning poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen explores her strongly personal responses to the landscape, culture, and people of Greece in this exquisitely written travel diary, which was originally published in 1978.

Originally published in 1978, beloved poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen’s first work of nonfiction explores her strongly personal responses to a complex civilization. Partly written during a trip to Greece in 1971, MacEwen moves from the urban tumult of Athens to the radiant simplicity of an island in the Aegean. In this intimate and exquisitely written travel diary, she evokes the very spirit of Greece — the exuberance of the people, the sun-drenched landscape, and the shaping power of ancient traditions and myths in modern Mediterranean life.

The first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’ prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.

Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais’ masterful series won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais’ novel to life for English-speaking readers.

A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past and an uncertain future, between the beauty of the world and the horrors of history.

During her time here, Renata becomes tormented by thirst — for justice, for pleasure, for intoxication — while all around her, festivities are going on in joint celebration of the birth of baby Vincent and the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of three days and three nights a flock of characters assembles — an entire spectrum of humanity is depicted in the grip of doubt and suffering. In this swirling, baroque fresco, Marie-Claire Blais captures the essence of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.

Reissued in a handsome A List edition, the largest collection of critical prose to date from world renowned author and poet Margaret Atwood, featuring an introduction by Lennie Goodings.

Originally published in 1982, Second Words brings together fifty of Margaret Atwood’s finest essays and reviews spanning two decades, beginning in 1962, with an introduction and commentary by the author.

With her incomparable wit and originality, Atwood discusses the process of writing and the literary life, with insightful looks at the work of such figures as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more. In several pieces, we see the development of her ideas on Canadian identity and the American dream, as well as her controversial attitudes toward feminism, sexism, and the strange mythologies imposed on men and women in contemporary North America.

Second Words remains the largest collection of Atwood’s critical prose to date.

Originally published in 1970, Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson is a collection of candid and wide-ranging interviews with Canadian writers, including Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, and more.

With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing important to you? Do writers know something special? Does he or she have any responsibility to society? The result is a fascinating and immensely readable series of conversations with famed writers at the beginning of their careers.

The A List edition will feature a new introduction by Graeme Gibson and interviews with the following authors:
Margaret Atwood
Austin Clarke
Matt Cohen
Marian Engel
Timothy Findley
Dave Godfrey
Margaret Laurence
Jack Ludwig
Alice Munro
Mordecai Richler
Scott Symons

Brilliant and still-timely analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life from Canada’s most influential philosophers, reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Potter.

Originally published in 1969, Technology and Empire offers a brilliant analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life. The author of Lament for a Nation, George Grant has been recognized as one of Canada’s most significant thinkers. In this sweeping essay collection, he reflects on the extent to which technology has shaped our modern culture.

Lisa Moore's stories are bright, emotionally engaging, tangible. She marks out the precious moments of her characters' lives against deceptively commonplace backdrops — a St. John's hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines; a half-built house "like a rib cage around a lungful of sky" - and the results linger long in the memory. The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore shows us that love, alongside desire, can sometimes come as a surprise, sometimes an ambush. She splices moments and images together so adroitly, so vividly, you'll swear you've lived them yourself. This new volume, bringing together Lisa Moore’s first two books of stories, Open and Degrees of Nakedness, is the very best way to encounter one of the finest short-story writers in the country. This edition features a brilliant new introduction by Jane Urquhart on the importance of Moore’s work.

Alone with their authoritarian father on an immense estate surrounded by a forest, a pair of siblings speak a language and inhabit a universe of their own making. When their father commits suicide, they are forced into contact with the villagers beyond the enclosure and their cloak of romance and superstition quickly falls away to reveal not only the startling truth about themselves, but the startling truth about the world to them.

Balancing naiveté with carnality, Soucy creates a powerfully gripping story where nothing is as it first seems. His surprising twists and fascination with guilt, cruelty, and violence make this story a resounding triumph.

First published by Anansi in 1969, Five Legs was a breakthrough for Canadian experimental fiction, selling 1,000 copies in its first week. At the time Scott Symons wrote that "Five Legs has more potent writing in it, page for page, than any other young Canadian novel that I can think of." Or indeed any young American novel — including Pynchon and Farina.

Five Legs is the subversive tale of two guilt-ridden young men, Lucan Crackell and Felix Oswald — one a professor, the other his student — caught in the grip of the North American Protestant ethic, with its emotional web-spinning and sexual torments. Gibson captures both their mortifications and their spirited resistance to all things WASP, themselves included, in stream-of-consciousness prose that is at once fluid, disjointed, and hilarious. Essential reading for any Canlit junkie, and quite a trip. This edition features a new introduction by Sean Kane.

The much-loved, yet undervalued, final book of poems by British-Canadian poet John Thompson, is reissued in a handsome edition, featuring a new introduction by Rob Winger.

Originally published in 1978, Stilt Jack is a series of powerful soliloquies on the complexity of love and the process of living. These are made immediate through Thompson’s command of metaphor, his eye for the New Brunswick landscape, his intense, often elliptical way of transfiguring everyday things into shorthand symbols of reality. This remarkable sequence of poems is based on the ghazal, an ancient Persian poetic form which is discussed in Thompson’s introduction to the original edition of the book.

These poems more than fulfill the promise of Thompson’s first collection, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets. Stilt Jack is the last testament of a major poet at the pinnacle of his craft.

The Hockey Sweater, the title story in this 20-story collection, has become an enduring classic: a Quebec boy and Habs fan is shipped a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. It encapsulates everything you need to understand French and English Canada, told with humour and love. This edition features a new introduction.

In print for the first time since 1971, Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada has once again become relevant in a time of major political upheaval in the United States of America.

First published in 1968 by House of Anansi Press, the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada was a handbook for Americans who refused to serve as draftees in the Vietnam War and were considering immigrating to Canada. Conceived as a practical guide with information on the process, the Manual also features information on aspects of Canadian society, touching on topics like history, politics, culture, geography and climate, jobs, housing, and universities.

The Manual went through several editions from 1968–71. Today, as Americans are taking up the discussion of immigration to Canada once again, it is an invaluable record of a moment in our recent history.

Reissued for the first time in a handsome A List edition, the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning collection from one of Canada’s most profoundly inventive and eminent poets, featuring an introduction by award-winning poet Sonnet L’Abbé.

The poetry in the Governor General’s Award–winning collection Furious is charged with Erin Moure’s characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, “The Acts,” Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry.

Available for the first time in over thirty years, John Krizanc’s internationally acclaimed play redefined the limits of theatre with its haunting tale of art, sex, violence, and political intrigue in Fascist Italy.

In the late twenties the poet, war hero, and lothario Gabriele d’Annunzio waits in his opulent villa — a gift from Benito Mussolini in return for his political silence — for the arrival of the artist Tamara de Lempicka, who is to paint his portrait. What follows is a tale of art, sex, violence and the meaning of complicity in an authoritarian state. The action is directed by the reader/audience member, who decides which characters to follow and which narratives to experience.

John Krizanc’s masterpiece redefined theatre and won six L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards, six Dora Mavor Moore Awards, six Drama-Logue Awards, and six Mexican Association of Theatre Critics, and Journalists Awards for its original productions. Now available in a handsome new A List edition, Tamara is an astonishing piece of experimental art and a penetrating look into ethical choices in times of encroaching autocracy.

The A List edition of one of the major achievements in recent Quebec literature — Roch Carrier’s La Guerre trilogy is a vital, moving, and assured portrait of life in Quebec.

This volume includes:

La Guerre, Yes Sir! A surrealist fable set in rural Quebec during WWI. Canadian Literature greeted its first appearance in these terms: “It is the French-Canadian writer Roch Carrier who comes closest to the significance, power, and artistry of Faulkner at his best … He might well be able to do for French Canada what Faulkner did for the American South."

Floralie, Where Are You? In the second installment, Carrier reaches back to the wedding night of the Corriveau parents, whom we first meet in La Guerre, Yes Sir!. Once again, a single night expands until it becomes a world in itself. But this time it is a very different concoction, mingling desire and guilt, nightmare and fantasy, as Anthymo drives Floralie back to his village through the forest.

Is It the Sun, Philibert? In the final installment, Young Philibert hitchhikes down to Montreal to make his fortune, and meets a different world. As he scrambles from job to job, he discovers a new Quebec — urban, industrial, and dedicated finally to the death of the person.

In this moving trilogy, Roch Carrier’s savage vision comes across with great urgency and Sheila Fischman’s fluid translations sing with vivacity and grace.

The remarkable debut poetry collection from renowned bestselling novelist and Award–winning poet Paulette Jiles, reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 1973, Paulette Jiles’s first collection amazed audiences with its rare depth of texture and verbal dexterity. Her work moves through landscapes that range from Africa to Mexico to Toronto with the ease of a travelling magician. Her swift, intricate metaphors leave the reader breathless, but her work also manages to be straight, earthy, vernacular, and disturbingly perceptive.

The brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, one of the first feminist writers in Canada and the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls.

In Helen Weinzweig’s brilliant debut novel, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom — and just about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.

Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges. A satire and a rueful meditation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.

This edition features a new introduction by Jim Polk.

As a part of the launch of the new A List series, a curated selection of titles from Anansi's backlist featuring handsome new covers and introductions by well-known writers, comes Margaret Atwood's Governor General's Literary Award–winning The Circle Game, with an introduction by Suzanne Buffam.

The appearance of Margaret Atwood's first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted.

Containing many of Atwood's best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry.

The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled.

Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first.

This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as iconoclastic as ever.

These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, and unrelenting — Atwood’s poetic powers are honed to perfection in this seminal work from her early career.

The A List edition of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s enduring novel, a raw, unsentimental story of life in a small Caribbean community. Featuring a new introduction by David Chariandy

Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.

Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.

The A List edition of Michael Winter’s brilliant fictional memoir, This All Happened depicts one man’s descent from love to fury over a calendar year. Featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.

In this journal-a-clef, we are exposed to the kernel of truth that exists in each day. Told from the viewpoint of Gabriel English, This All Happened opens windows onto a richly textured, fast-paced filmic compilation of daily vignettes over one year. Gabriel’s promises and actions early in the year have their repercussions by the end.

Gabriel’s passion for Lydia Murphy leads him into paroxysms of jealousy — but he never abandons his shrewdly witty perspective on the vagaries of modern love.

The best of beloved poet Alden Nowlan's explicitly honest, direct, and insightful poetry. Now featuring an introduction by Susan Musgrave.

Alden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks to people's lives with wry observation and keen insight. Alden Nowlan Selected Poems is for Nowlan fans and new readers alike. The poems included in this volume reflect the recurring themes that illuminate Nowlan's work, and it is truly the best of his poetry. Above all, this volume is a tribute to a poet who deserves to be treasured for all time.

When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: "What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?" Her answer is "survival and victims."

Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Nick Craine’s searing graphic novel about a legendary Canadian punk band, based on the feature film by Bruce McDonald and the novel by Michael Turner.

Joe Dick, Billy Tallent, John Oxenburger, and Pipefitter are Hard Core Logo — Vancouver’s legendary, but now defunct, punk band.

Joe Dick coaxes his former bandmates to overcome personal differences and reunite for a benefit concert for their ageing punk mentor, Bucky Haight, who has been shot. But the concert’s not enough for Joe; he wants the band to hit the road again. For the Hard Cores this means the beginning of the end, and they come to realize that they can neither relive nor alter the past.

From the pen of hugely talented Canadian comic artist and illustrator Nick Craine comes a searing rendition of those Hard Core days and nights. In this graphic take on the story originally conceived by Michael Turner and made into a critically acclaimed film by Bruce McDonald, Craine pits the legendary Hard Cores against a collage-like backdrop of bars, hotel rooms, the road, and the Canadian Prairies.

Featuring a new introduction by Lynn Crosbie and a tear-out guitar chord book, Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks weaves together a patchwork narrative of found art, dialogue, songs, and incidental bystanders. Craine skillfully renders his own unique cover-version of this cult film classic in graphic novel form.

Originally published in 1971,The Bush Garden features Northrop Frye’s timeless essays on Canadian literature and painting, and an introduction by bestselling author Lisa Moore.

In this cogent collection of essays written between 1943 and 1969, formidable literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye explores the Canadian imagination through the lens of the country’s artistic output: prose, poetry, and paintings. Frye offers insightful commentary on the works that shaped a “Canadian sensibility,” and includes a comprehensive survey of the landscape of Canadian poetry throughout the 1950s, including astute criticism of the work of E. J. Pratt, Robert Service, Irving Layton, and many others.

Written with clarity and precision,The Bush Garden is a significant cache of literary criticism that traces a pivotal moment in the country’s cultural history and the evolution of Frye’s thinking at various stages of his career. These essays are evidence of Frye’s brilliance, and cemented his reputation as Canada’s — and the world’s — foremost literary critic.

Civil Elegies is Dennis Lee's uncompromising exploration of citizenship, both Canadian and human. Eli Mandel has called Civil Elegies one of the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country. It was the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 1972. This edition features a new introduction by noted academic Nick Mount, who places this important collection in the context of Canadian literature and Lee’s career.

The fascinating story of Toronto’s experimental Rochdale College’s rise and fall, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Toronto’s Rochdale College began as an experiment in living and learning, and ended as a symbol of the flower-child sixties, a financial and social controversy. In his well-researched and entertaining account, David Sharpe tells the fascinating story of the college’s seven-year rise and fall.

Sharpe examines the contradictions of the Age of Aquarius squeezed into one stark skyscraper on Bloor Street in Toronto. He looks at the financing and the internal government of the college, as well as its creative achievements over the years and its contribution to the community. Rochdale: The Runaway College provides a lively, detailed picture of the day-to-day life of the college residents: the peace parties and joyful live-ins, as well as the police raids and the drug overdoses of the dark days.

Now available after over four decades, the first collection of short fiction from bestselling author and Barbadian-born Canadian luminary Austin Clarke — winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Book Award for his novel The Polished Hoe — is a vital, lyrical, and provocative exploration of the Black immigrant experience in Canada.

Originally issued in 1971, Austin Clarke’s first published collection of eleven remarkable stories showcases his groundbreaking approach to chronicling the Caribbean diaspora experience in Canada. Characters move through the mire of working life, of establishing a home for themselves, of reconciling with what and who they left behind — all the while contending with a place in which their bone-chilling reception is both social and atmospheric. In lyrical, often racy, and wholly unforgettable prose, Clarke portrays a set of provocative, scintillating portraits of the psychological realities faced by people of colour in a society so often lauded for its geniality and openness.

Originally published in 1998, Lynn Crosbie brought her unique voice to the forefront of Canadian poetry with this important collection of verse. Hers is a world of Shakespeare, skinheads, and centurions; and hers is a life stripped to the basics and then reconstructed with relish, every brick scrutinized meticulously.

In Queen Rat her language is urban, but her soul is universal as she explores that which makes up everything.

Featuring a new introduction by poet and musician Michael Turner.

Available for the first time in more than fifteen years, this collection from celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard is a provocative investigation of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire.

Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.

Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard — recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The collection is now available in a handsome A List edition with a new introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure.

A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor.

Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love. Translated into seven languages, Kamouraska won the Paris book prize and was made into a landmark feature film by Claude Jutra. This edition features a brilliant new introduction by Noah Richler.

A classic of Canadian literature, here is the A List edition of Daphne Marlatt’s utterly original novel about rescuing a forgotten woman from obscurity. Featuring a new introduced by celebrated author Lynn Crosbie.

Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards’s life.

In this exceptional collection of original essays, twenty-five celebrated writers share one of their most intimate and life-changing experiences: giving birth. Moving, uniquely honest, and transformative, Great Expectations takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey like no other: Lynn Coady relates the painful memory of her teenage pregnancy and the anguish of having to give up her newborn for adoption; Peter Behrens expresses a father’s feeling of utter helplessness and incomparable joy during the birth of his first child; Christy Ann Conlin describes pregnancy and birth at age forty; Afua Cooper reflects upon the immigrant’s experience of three pregnancies and childbirths in a new land with foreign, and evolving, customs; Anne Fleming contemplates her partner’s artificial insemination and the birth of a beautiful girl; and Jaclyn Moriarty transcribes her grandmother’s and her mother’s birth stories, along with her own, to create a tender oral history spanning three generations.

Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the way we live now. George Grant explores the fate of traditional values in modern education, social behaviour, and religion, and offers his insights into some of the most contentious ethical deliberations of the past half-century.

In essays ranging in content from classical philosophy to the morals of euthanasia, Technology and Justice showcases Grant’s stimulating commentary on the meaning of the North American experience.

First published in 1972, Columbus and the Fat Lady introduced readers to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Matt Cohen’s skewed and hilarious worldview. By turns funny, surreal, wistful, savagely satirical, and brilliantly inventive, the stories in this collection intrigue and surprise the reader with their unexpected language and plots. He conjures up images that are both absurd and perceptive. From Sir Galahad as a schoolteacher to Christopher Columbus as a carnival attraction, these stories feature the improbable with strength and virtuosity. This collection is a foray into the jungles of life on this planet and the tangled but fascinating interiors of the human head.

The A List edition of Leo McKay’s superb collection. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Like This takes you inside small-town Nova Scotia to expose the troubles that lie at its heart.

Set in a fictional town called Albion Mines, (the old name for author Leo McKay's home town of Stellarton), Like This offers a gripping, and at times frightening, look at small-town Nova Scotia life. These superb stories are startling and often disturbing, filled with complexity and power. McKay portrays characters with astonishing depth and dead-on emotional rightness. The world is not fair in these stories. There is pain, abuse, solitude; but somehow there is also hope.

Featuring a new introduction by Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Lynn Coady.

First published in 1970, The Honeyman Festival chronicles one night in the life of Minn Burge, a woman in her mid-thirties who is torn between affection for her family and the need for a life in which impulse and intelligence can once again find play.

Pregnant with her fourth child, and unable to take refuge in facile resolutions, Minn interrogates her life with a razor-edge passion in which many readers will find they too are involved.

This groundbreaking novel by one of Canada’s most beloved novelists is now available in a beautifully packaged A List edition, featuring an introduction by novelist and short story writer Caroline Adderson.

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Bear, an atmospheric novel set in the Mediterranean where it is discovered that she who travels alone does not necessarily travel best.

Originally published in 1973, Monodromos is one of Marian Engel’s most accomplished novels — intensely readable, sensitive, and assured. Its story concerns Audrey Moore, a thirty-six-year-old woman who travels to Cyprus, the island once sacred to Aphrodite. Staying with her estranged husband, a has-been concert pianist, Audrey is troubled by memories of her past as she attempts to fathom the rich cultural confusion of a place that has changed hands a hundred times since Cleopatra presented it to Anthony. Her deepening involvement with island life, with a lover and a circle of expatriates, artists, and doubtful acquaintances, provide many insights, but she also has a sense that this place, for her, is a one-way street — monodromos in Greek.