House of Anansi Press

In his wildly ambitious and darkly funny debut novel, Jonathan Garfinkel probes the fractured nature of identity, the necessity of lies, and the bloody legacy of the Soviet Empire.  

Spanning generations, continents, and cultures, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is an electric tale about a nation trying to emerge from the shadow of the Soviet Union to embrace Western democracy. Driven by a complexly plotted mystery that leads from Moscow to Toronto to Tbilisi, punctuated by wild car chases and drunken jazz reveries, and featuring an eccentric cast of characters including Georgian performance artists, Chechen warlords, and KGB spies, Garfinkel delivers a story that questions the price of freedom and laughs at the answer.  

With exhilarating prose reminiscent of Rachel Kushner and more twists than a John le Carré thriller, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is a daring, nuanced, and spectacularly entertaining novel by an exceptional talent.

Winner, 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
The highly anticipated debut collection from acclaimed poet Sanna Wani.

In Sanna Wani’s poems, each verse is ode and elegy. The body is the page, time is a friend, and every voice, a soul. Sharply political and frequently magical, these often-intimate poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. From concrete to confessional, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe river in Canada to the Zabarwan mountains in Kashmir, My Grief, the Sun undoes genre, listens carefully to the planet’s breathing, addresses an endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

2016 Governor General's Literary Award Winner

2017 Raymond Souster Award Finalist

Governor General’s Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton returns with a collection of laments and celebrations that reflect on our struggle to believe in the future of a world that continues to disappoint us. The poet challenges the boundaries of sleep and even death in these meditations on what lies just beneath the surface of contemporary life. These are poems that trouble over the idea of failure even as they continually recommit to the present moment. This is fierce music performed in a minor key.

The twenty-second Munk Debate pits acclaimed journalist, professor, and ordained minister Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg against renowned actor and writer Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor and author Jordan Peterson to debate the implications of political correctness and freedom of speech.

Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate, and the free exchange of ideas? Or, by confronting head-on the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalized groups are we creating a more equitable and just society? For some the argument is clear. Political correctness is stifling the free and open debate that fuels our democracy. It is also needlessly dividing one group from another and promoting social conflict. Others insist that creating public spaces and norms that give voice to previously marginalized groups broadens the scope of free speech. The drive towards inclusion over exclusion is essential to creating healthy, diverse societies in an era of rapid social change.

The twenty-first semi-annual Munk Debate pits award-winning journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr. and influential author and blogger Andrew Sullivan against former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and bestselling author and editor Kimberley Strassel to debate the current crisis of American democracy.

“Our country is now as close to crossing the line from democracy to autocracy as it has been in our lifetimes.” — E. J. Dionne, Jr.

It is the public debate of the moment: is Donald Trump precipitating a crisis of American democracy? For some the answer is an emphatic “yes.” Trump’s disregard for the institutions and political norms of U.S. democracy is imperiling the Republic. The sooner his presidency collapses the sooner the healing can begin and the ship of state righted. For others Trump is not the villain in this drama. Rather, his young presidency is the conduit, not the cause, of Americans’ deep-seated anger towards a privileged and self-dealing Washington elite. Trump’s disruption of politics as usual is what America needs to start the process of restoring democracy by the people, for the people.

A writer’s witty and surprisingly optimistic account of learning to live with Parkinson’s disease. 

When he was sixty-five, François Gravel was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, upending the old age he had imagined for himself. As a way of contemplating his new life with a degenerative illness, he turned to what he knew best and loved most: writing. Gravel immersed himself in research on Parkinson’s, exploring its medical history and treatments and paying close attention to the changes he experienced, all in service of learning how to best manage his symptoms throughout the advancement of this incurable disease. 

With a lightness of touch that belies a difficult subject (he imagines Dr. Parkinson as a military man who has set up camp in his brain), Gravel shares what he has learned in a memoir that is at once charming, serious, and moving. He writes, “For a long time, I believed that Parkinson’s was a disease. Now, I realize it’s a philosophy course.” Colonel Parkinson in Charge is, in some ways, the companion text for this course, engaging with and demystifying a daunting subject to help readers better understand life with Parkinson’s disease.

A refreshing look at the inevitability of uncertainty and how it can help make the hard parts of life more manageable.

“Gill—high level of comfort with uncertainty,” a producer once noted. But Gill Deacon’s comfort level is put to the test over the course of an illness that is as mysterious as it is debilitating. During this time of not knowing, Deacon investigates the nature of uncertainty itself and demonstrates how we can choose to draw on our innate resilience and learn to thrive in an ever-changing world. She reminds us that, like comedy improvisation and jazz music, beautiful things can result from the unpredictable and unplanned. While providing evidence of the beauty in not knowing, she makes a clear and compelling case that uncertainty is a condition we are built for. In fact, our best shot at creativity, innovation, and human connection occurs when we radically embrace the uncertainty we habitually struggle against.

This thoughtful examination of uncertainty by a warm and wise fellow traveller is a balm that can soothe us in troubling times.

“Dark family secrets, the lore of the sea, and a tender, protective friendship between women all converge in The Speed of Mercy, an unusual and surprising story set in idyllic rural Nova Scotia. With subtle humour, Conlin picks the locks on the long-closed doors of two families and bares the ugly, painful skeletons everyone knew were there but chose to hide.” — Sylvia D. Hamilton, author of And I Alone Escaped To Tell You

The Speed of Mercy captures the unbearable cost of childhood betrayal and what happens when history is suppressed, our past is forgotten — yet finding the truth can change the future. Christy Ann Conlin rips into the myths and stereotypes about older women and those on the edge of conventional society to reveal the timeless gift of mercy in this feminist tour de force.

“Christy Ann Conlin is a conjurer: of place, people, and the haunting past. I was instantly caught up in the darkly mysterious world and indelible characters she has brought to life. Gripping, suspenseful, and lyrically written, The Speed of Mercy caught me by the throat and didn’t let go.” — Alix Ohlin, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Dual Citizens

The unlikely story of a bunch of small-town Canadian punks who conquered the global music industry.

After punk found commercial success in the ’90s, with bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and Blink-182, a new wave of punk bands emerged, each embodying the DIY spirit of the movement in their own way. While Southern California remained the spiritual home of punk rock in the early 2000s, an unexpected influx of eager punks from Canada took the world by storm, changing the genre forever.

Drawing on exclusive interviews and personal stories from nine artists of the era, In Too Deep explores how Canada became the improbable birthplace of a new age of punk icons. Covering the rowdy punk rock of Gob and Sum 41, the arena-sized ambitions of Simple Plan and Marianas Trench, the reinvention of the popstar by Avril Lavigne and Fefe Dobson, and the quest to bring hardcore into the mainstream by Billy Talent, Silverstein, and Alexisonfire, In Too Deep traces the evolution of a music scene that challenged notions of who and what should be considered punk while helping to define Millennial culture as some of their generation’s first superstars.

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks

Deft with matters both low- and highbrow (here are stories about 80s big-hair bands and the lasting, theological value of the Rocky series; here, too are stories contemplating critical theory and fine art), Life Is About Losing Everything speaks with manic yet grave authority about risking and losing everything, and then sorting through the remains to discover what is beautiful, what is trash, and what, ultimately, belongs.

David French's first play is a classic in Canadian drama. The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.

Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.

From the bestselling author of Firewater comes a moving tribute to an older brother that traverses the thresholds of memoir, fiction, and fantasy and reimagines what could have been.

When Harold Johnson returns to his childhood home in a northern Indigenous community for his brother Clifford’s funeral, the first thing his eyes fall on is a chair. It stands on three legs, the fourth broken off and missing. So begins a journey through the past, a retrieval of recollections of his silent, powerful Swedish father; his formidable Cree mother; and his brother Clifford, a precocious young boy who is drawn to the mysterious workings of the universe. As the night unfolds, memories of Clifford surface in Harold’s mind’s eye. Memory, fiction, and fantasy collide, and Clifford comes to life as the scientist he was meant to be, culminating in his discovery of the Grand Unified Theory.

Exquisitely crafted, funny, visionary, and wholly moving, Clifford is an extraordinary work that embraces myriad forms of storytelling. To read it is to be immersed in a home, a family, a community, the wider world, the entire cosmos.

A fresh look at a complex pope with a simple agenda: radically reforming the Catholic Church.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the consummate disruptor, disrupting archaic modes of church governance, disrupting our collective spiritual complacency in the face of new challenges to our human flourishing while at the same time remaining deeply faithful to the organic traditions of the church. He is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but beyond that he is a universal leader with commanding moral presence, able to connect with laypeople and with non-Christian faiths. Pope Francis is also a credible moral voice on issues of immigration, economic inequity, the devastating consequences of political populism, and the accelerating threats to the environment, in spite of the fact that he faces deep infrastructure and governance scandals in his organization.

In his determination to reform the Vatican and ensure the Catholic faith evolves in a way that is relevant to the 21st century, Francis is very much carrying on the tradition of the Jesuits, an order known for their work in education, humanitarian missions, and social justice. A deep understanding of the Jesuit order informs Michael W. Higgins’s approach in this novel reading of a papacy unlike any other.

A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote

Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence.

As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change—and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.

procession: a line of people moving in the same direction; a formal ceremony or celebration, as in a wedding, a funeral, a religious parade. Bestselling novelist and Governor General’s Award–winning poet katherena vermette’s third collection presents a series of poems reaching into what it means to be (at once) a descendant and a future ancestor, exploring the connections we have with one another and ourselves, amongst friends, and within families and Nations.

In frank, heartfelt poems that move through body sovereignty and ancestral dreams, and from ’80s childhood nostalgia to welcoming one’s own babies, vermette unreels the story of a child, a parent, and soon, an elder, living in a prairie place that has always existed, though it looks much different to her now. This book is about being one small part of a large genealogy. A lineage is a line, and the procession, whether in celebration or in mourning, is ongoing.

• NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Hill Times 100 Best Book of 2024 •

The incomparable first-hand account of the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada told by one of the commissioners who led it. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to record the previously hidden history of more than a century of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children. Marie Wilson helped lead that work as one of just three commissioners. With the skills of a journalist, the heart of a mother and grandmother, and the insights of a life as the spouse of a residential school survivor, Commissioner Wilson guides readers through her years witnessing survivor testimony across the country, providing her unique perspective on the personal toll and enduring public value of the commission. In this unparalleled account, she honours the voices of survivors who have called Canada to attention, determined to heal, reclaim, and thrive.

Part vital public documentary, part probing memoir, North of Nowhere breathes fresh air into the possibilities of reconciliation amid the persistent legacy of residential schools. It is a call to everyone to view the important and continuing work of reconciliation not as an obligation but as a gift.

Is China's rise unstoppable? Powered by the human capital of 1.3 billion citizens, the latest technological advances, and a comparatively efficient system of state-directed capitalism, China seems poised to become the global superpower this century. But the Middle Kingdom also faces a series of challenges. From energy scarcity to environmental degradation to political unrest and growing global security burdens, a host of factors could derail China's global ascent.

In this edition of The Munk Debates — Canada's premier international debate series — former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CNN's Fareed Zakaria square off against leading historian Niall Ferguson and world-renowned economist David Daokui Li to debate the biggest geopolitical issue of our time: Does the 21st century belong to China?

Highly electrifying and thoroughly engrossing, the Munk Debate on China is the first formal public debate Dr. Kissinger has participated in on China's future, and includes exclusive interviews with Henry Kissinger and David Daokui Li.

A national bestseller, Let the Elephants Run is the essential guidebook for anyone looking to reignite their creativity.

Creativity is in everyone’s DNA, not a select few. Award-winning musician and founder of CloudID Creativity Lab David Usher believes we just need the right tools to help us reconnect with our imaginations in our day-to-day lives, whether in the head office, the home office, or the artist’s studio. Using a mix of personal anecdotes and professional examples from the worlds of industry, technology, science, music, and art, he shows us that creativity is not magic; it is a learnable skill that any person or business can master. The dynamic full-colour design includes photographs, artwork, and illustrations, as well as action pages to help readers start cultivating the habit of documenting their ideas for future execution. Based on his wildly popular speaking engagements, Let the Elephants Run is the essential guidebook to reigniting and nurturing our creativity in accessible and productive ways.

An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.

The world is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Over 300,000 are dead in Syria, and one and half million are either injured or disabled. Four and a half million people are trying to flee the country. And Syria is just one of a growing number of failed or failing states in the Middle East and North Africa. How should developed nations respond to human suffering on this mass scale? Do the prosperous societies of the West, including Canada and the U.S., have a moral imperative to assist as many refugees as they reasonably and responsibly can? Or, is this a time for vigilance and restraint in the face of a wave of mass migration that risks upending the tolerance and openness of the West?

The eighteenth semi-annual Munk Debate, which was held on April 1, 2016, pits former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour and leading historian Simon Schama against leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage and bestselling author Mark Steyn to debate the West’s response to the global refugee crisis.

Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award

The intertwined story of a cougar and a man that portrays the strength, vulnerability, and consciousness of two top predators. Not since Life of Pi have we encountered such transcendence or walked so fully in the footsteps of a big cat.

The “Old Woman” lives in the wild, searching for food, raising her cubs, and avoiding the two-legged creatures who come into her territory. But she is more than an animal — she is a mythic creature who haunts the lives and the dreams of men. Joseph Brandt has been captivated by the mountain lion’s legend since childhood, and one day he steps into the forest to seek her out. A classic in the making, The Hunter and the Old Woman is a mesmerizing portrait of two animals united by a shared destiny.

Does government surveillance make us safer? The thirteenth Munk Debate, held in Toronto on Friday, May 2, 2014, pitted Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz against Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian to debate whether state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedom — the democratic issue of the moment.

In a risk-filled world, democracies are increasingly turning to large-scale state surveillance, at home and abroad, to fight complex and unconventional threats — but is it justified? For some, the threats more than justify the current surveillance system, and the laws and institutions of democracies are more than capable of balancing the needs of individual privacy with collective security. But for others, we are in peril of sacrificing to a vast and unaccountable state surveillance apparatus the civil liberties that guarantee citizens’ basic freedoms and our democratic way of life.

In this edition of the Munk Debates, former head of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden and civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz square off against journalist Glenn Greenwald and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to debate the legitimacy of state surveillance. With issues of Internet privacy increasingly gaining prominence, the Munk Debate on the Surveillance State asks: Should government be able to monitor our activities in order to keep us safe?

A classic work of nature and wildlife, Spirit Bear is the captivating story of wilderness guide and naturalist Charles Russell’s quest to understand the rare spirit bear of British Columbia’s Princess Royal Island — now updated and reissued with a new design and an afterword by the author.

From early experiences observing black bears in the Rocky Mountains with his father, the well-known writer and broadcaster Andy Russell, to nerve-racking encounters with grizzlies in British Columbia’s Khutzeymateen Valley, Charles Russell has spent a lifetime studying bears in their natural habitat. In 1991, Russell visited Princess Royal Island, an uninhabited island off the coast of British Columbia. There, amidst the rivers and trees of the western rainforest, he encountered the elusive spirit bear.

Known to scientists as the Kermode bear and to the public as the white, ghost, or spirit bear, these extraordinary animals have never been exposed to civilization. In Spirit Bear, Russell recounts his experiences on Princess Royal Island — trekking over rocks and through streams; waiting hours for the evasive ghost bear to appear; and finally coming face-to-face with a spirit bear only inches from his nose.

Illustrated with more than 100 stunning colour photographs, Spirit Bear provides beautiful and astonishing insight into the habits and nature of the Kermode bear, and is part of an ongoing effort by conservationists to save Princess Royal Island as a sanctuary for these remarkable animals.

John Mighton’s revolutionary JUMP at Home: Grade 6 workbook, now available as a PDF for the first time for at-home learning.

“John Mighton’s JUMP program has demonstrated powerfully that, with the right instruction, no one need be left behind in math.” — New York Times

John Mighton's innovative JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) Math program is changing the way math is taught. With these workbooks, parents and caregivers can bring the JUMP program home to keep children learning.

The key to the enormous success of the program is a step-by-step teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly that children can not only understand them, but also build up great confidence in themselves and their ability.

This workbook includes an introduction that clearly explains the thinking behind the program and follows the carefully designed worksheets used by JUMP tutors and classroom teachers.

Royalties from the sales of the JUMP workbooks are donated to the JUMP organization.

Days into Flatspin is Ken Babstock's extraordinary second collection and it reveals a poet in full flight, fearless and technically brilliant.

Diving into and then beyond what is seen or "the coma of looking" as one poem calls it, Babstock veers into the inner core of things, animals, and places through portals that exist all around us -- clothing, banisters, marshes, locks, wounds. And these are always entry points, always a means by which to go forward and further into, forcing decisions about whether to continue on or retreat and revealing that we rarely have any choice at all.

Babstock opens everything to investigation, rupturing the limitations of the eye and the strictures of the poetic form: a sonnet is built from a Frisbee game, a love poem inspired by a cow, a gash inhabited by a field of crickets. And throughout his poetic landscape is a solitary bird -- watching, passing overhead, biding time, always present. Days into Flatspin is a soaring collection.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the shortlist of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

Featuring works from shortlisted poets Victoria Chang, Changtai Bi, Joseph Dandurand, Canisia Lubrin, Valzhyna Mort, Srikanth Reddy, Yusuf Saadi, Tracy K. Smith, and Yi Lei.

In May 1997, eighteen-year-old Laura McPherson left her house for a run and didn’t return …

Twenty years later, a reporter arrives in the small town of Griffiths to write an article about the unsolved murder of Laura McPherson. He is the most recent in a long line of journalists, podcasters, and amateur sleuths seeking new insights into what really happened to Laura.

Laura’s younger brother, David, a repressed and stuck thirty-something, is dealing with the recent death of his mother when the reporter comes knocking. The last surviving family member, David has lived a sheltered life, protected from the prying eyes of the media by his mother. But David cannot escape the past forever, and soon finds himself confronting the lasting impact of his sister’s death. As David learns more about his sister and the history of Griffiths, his eyes are opened to the casual violence, misogyny, and racism that lurk just below the surface of his seemingly placid community.

Provocative and haunting, Not That Kind of Place is a literary anti-mystery, a compelling exploration of our obsession with true-crime stories and the devastating effects of systemic violence on our most vulnerable populations.

A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind. 

Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost.

A fun, informative guide to hosting the perfect party every time.

"Every dinner party experience I’ve had in the last ten years at Corey’s has been incredible. But practice really does make perfect and I can now honestly say there is nowhere I’d rather be in the world than at his table … I can’t begin to express the relief I felt in reading this book and realizing there was a method to his success."
- Sarah Polley, from the introduction

We’ve all been there: twenty minutes before guests arrive, and you’re unsure if you’ve got enough wine, or enough chairs, or whether your friend is a vegetarian or a vegan. Hosting a dinner party is hard, but Corey Mintz can help. For his popular Toronto Star column, "Fed," he has presided over 115 dinner parties, every week opening his home to strangers and friends alike in an effort to perfect the craft of hosting. And in How to Host a Dinner Party, he shares everything he’s learned in a hilarious handbook that will appeal to everyone — from those throwing their first dinner party to seasoned entertainers looking to enhance their skills.

This book guides readers through everything they need to know about hosting, starting with the golden rule — that the goal of a dinner party is to have fun with our friends, not to show off our cooking skills. It will explain why we like to gather for dinner, when we should host, who we should invite, what we should cook, and how we should cook it. Featuring recipes, anecdotes, expert analysis, and an endless bounty of how-to tips, it is the essential guide to perfecting the art of welcoming people into your home.

Featuring internationally acclaimed poetry from more than twenty books and chapbooks published over forty-five years, The Sparrow is a career-spanning selection that reveals how A. F. Moritz’s dynamic, ever-exploratory work is also a vast, singular poem.

A. F. Moritz has been called “one of the best poets of his generation” by John Hollander and “a true poet” by Harold Bloom, who ranks him alongside Anne Carson. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours throughout North America, including the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Beth Hokin Prize, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Sparrow: Selected Poems of A. F. Moritz surveys forty-five years of Moritz’s published poems, from earlier, lesser-known pieces to the widely acclaimed works of the last twenty years. Here are poems of mystery and imagination; of identification with the other; of compassion, judgement, and rage; of love and eroticism; of mature philosophical, sociological, and political analysis; of history and current events; of contemplation of nature; of exaltation and ennui, fullness and emptiness, and the pure succession and splendour of earthly nights and days.

The Sparrow is more than a selected poems; it is also a single vast poem, in which the individual pieces can be read as facets of an ever-moving whole. This is the world of A. F. Moritz — a unique combination of lyrical fire and meditative depth, and an imaginative renewal of style and never-ending discovery of form.

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

Shortlisted for 2016 CBC Canada Reads

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods -- and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.

When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.

Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

This long-awaited final novel in the bestselling Grazia dei Rossi Trilogy follows Grazia dei Rossi’s only son, Danilo del Medigo, as he returns to the Republic of Venice at the height of Christendom’s persecution of the Jews.

April, 1536. Danilo del Medigo arrives incognito in Venice from Istanbul, with two assassins hot on his trail. Western civilization is in crisis. Jews and “New Christians” — people whose families had converted from Judaism — are threatened with expulsion, imprisonment, and death. Danilo seeks refuge in the Venetian Ghetto, and promptly falls in love with the beautiful Miriamne Hazan.

But soon Danilo is blackmailed into becoming a spy for Venice, which means he must abandon Miriamne in order to save her. The only safe place is hiding in plain sight, so embeds himself within an itinerant group of actors travelling the Italian countryside. With assassins close behind, Danilo, together with a cast of libertines, courtesans, and fellow spies, witnesses the agony of the Renaissance: Protestants warring with Catholics, the Inquisition threatening everyone, and the Ottoman Empire poised to invade the heart of Europe. As fear and panic spread throughout the Jewish communities of Italy, a promise of a new lifeline emerges, and Danilo may be the only one who can ensure it.

The intriguing, in-depth story of the most powerful woman in Canadian politics. *A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*

Catherine Tsalikis traces Chrystia Freeland’s remarkable journey from the northwestern Alberta town of Peace River to Moscow, London, and New York, where she spent two decades as a journalist, to the halls of Parliament Hill as deputy prime minister and finance minister in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Ambitious and talented with a work ethic to match, Freeland has had an impressive run since she entered politics in 2013: spearheading major trade negotiations, expertly navigating relations with an erratic US president, speaking out about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, and standing up to Vladimir Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine.

With her impeccable research, seasoned perspective, and accessible style, Tsalikis brings Freeland’s story to life. The defining moments and experiences that shaped Freeland’s particular worldview illuminate the answers to larger social questions: how to live a good, useful life; how to hold fast to guiding principles; how to break through glass ceilings. This is a unique behind-the-curtains look at Canadian politics through the story of a trailblazing woman.

Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian physicist from Winnipeg, over the current state of literary utopian projects, we'd hear something nearly as captivating as Michael Lista's Bloom. As it is, we also get "Lista" swimming ghostlike through this palimpsest-narrative, inhabiting Slotin and brashly "tickling the dragon's tail" at the nucleus of untested notions of creation, stasis, and destruction. In Bloom, one of the most dangerous historical fulcrums of the last century is somehow made viscerally present again, and, more wondrously, made to radiate outward into very current crises.

In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing "gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and stops time.

In Little Theatres, Ern Moure's avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces - the bench behind her grandmother's woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces - the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, and to understand her mother's silence at the sadness of her forebears, her "salt-shaker love."

With an updated preface by the author.

Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, rights have become the dominant language of the public good around the globe. Indeed, rights have become the trump card in every argument. Long-standing fights for aboriginal rights, the issue of preserving the linguistic heritage of minorities, and same-sex marriage have steered our society into a full-blown rights revolution. This revolution is not only deeply controversial in North America, but is being watched around the world. Are group rights jeopardizing individual rights? When everyone asserts their rights, what happens to responsibilities? Can families survive and prosper when each member has rights? Is rights language empowering individuals while weakening community?

Michael Ignatieff confronts these controversial questions head-on in The Rights Revolution, defending the supposed individualism of rights language against all comers. For Ignatieff, believing in rights means believing in politics, believing in deliberation rather than confrontation, compromise rather than violence.

Governor General's Award-finalist Steven Heighton employs his signature blend of emotional fierceness and linguistic beauty to tap into "This whim / against what drifts to dark." The Address Book is a collection of remarkably well-crafted love letters, letters of loss, and lyrical moments of complaint and redress where music and intelligence are the last guard against wind walls of real grief. Elegiac, angry, tender, and brazenly heart-felt, these poems achieve their effect through total conviction; a complete immersion in the rich palette of human emotions — comfortable and otherwise. The collection's second half includes the author's versions from Western poetry's sustaining giants, including Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Catullus, Homer, and Rilke.

Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.

A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.

Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.

All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.

Why are there so few women in politics? Why is public space, whether it’s the street or social media, still so inhospitable to women? What does Carrie Fisher have to do with Mary Wollstonecraft? And why is a wedding ceremony Satan’s playground?

These are some of the questions that bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Renzetti examines in her new collection of original essays. Drawing upon her decades of reporting on feminist issues, Shrewed is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come — and how far we have to go.

If Nellie McClung and Erma Bombeck had an IVF baby, this book would be the result. If they’d lived at the same time. And in the same country. And if IVF had been invented. Well, you get the point.

John Mighton’s revolutionary JUMP at Home: Grade 1 workbook, now available as a PDF for the first time for at-home learning.

“John Mighton’s JUMP program has demonstrated powerfully that, with the right instruction, no one need be left behind in math.” — New York Times

John Mighton's innovative JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) Math program is changing the way math is taught. With these workbooks, parents and caregivers can bring the JUMP program home to keep children learning.

The key to the enormous success of the program is a step-by-step teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly that children can not only understand them, but also build up great confidence in themselves and their ability.

This workbook includes an introduction that clearly explains the thinking behind the program and follows the carefully designed worksheets used by JUMP tutors and classroom teachers.

Royalties from the sales of the JUMP workbooks are donated to the JUMP organization.

Named after a local word meaning “soaked through” or “weighed down,” Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Megan Gail Coles’s debut poetry collection, Satched, is a vivid portrait of intergenerational trauma, ecological grief, and late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a woman of rural-remote, Northern, working class, mixed ancestry.

Honest, penetrating, and often darkly comic, these poems explore the extraordinary will it requires to stay alive in the face of economic precariousness, growing inequality, and prevailing dissatisfaction. With a fierce dedication to place, the collection explores the conflict inherent to individualistic priorities and collective needs present in a hyper-commodified Newfoundland and Labrador. Satched demands compassionate advocacy for all as it resolutely strives for clarity and acceptance while celebrating the momentary glimpses of joy in the path toward shared values and resilience.

A sweeping saga of intrigue and romance set during the Italian Renaissance and told through the eyes of Grazia dei Rossi, a young Jewish woman torn between duty and forbidden romance, who wins our hearts with her recorded secrets of love.

Grazia dei Rossi, private secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d’Este, is the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the pope’s Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince. In a “secret book,” written as a legacy for her son, she records her struggles to choose between the seductions of the Christian world and a return to the family, traditions, and duties to her Jewish roots. As she re-creates Renaissance Italy in captivating detail, Jacqueline Park gives us a timeless portrait of a brave and brilliant woman trapped in an unforgiving, inflexible society.

A Palestinian teenager finds his footing amid escalating violence across Jerusalem in this taut debut novel.

The sudden death of Hassan at the hands of an Israeli shakes his friends Aziz and Mustafa to their core, leaving them grappling with grief, guilt, and an uncertain future. Drawn into the orbit of Hassan’s father—a respected community leader known for his charity work and fiery speeches—they struggle to find their place in a world that feels increasingly volatile.

Meanwhile, Aziz wrestles with his growing feelings for Dafna, a Jewish girl he works with in West Jerusalem. This angers Mustafa, who accuses Aziz of betraying Hassan’s memory. With violence escalating around them, Aziz’s mother searches for a way to secure his future, even if it means leaving behind the city he loves. But as events spiral beyond his control, Aziz is forced to confront painful truths about loss, survival, and what it means to find hope amid the ruins.

Seven Heavens Away is a gripping and moving coming-of-age story that delves into the complexities of identity, power, and the fight for freedom.

Just Fine traces the mishaps and misadventures of a conflicted agoraphobe: a woman psychologically restricted to a life indoors but spiritually inclined to wander the meadows, roads, and community beyond the house and river of her youth.

Her struggle assumes historic proportions when her neighbours dream of their own escapes from the insular, predictable cadences of life in Acadia: Camil changes his name; Terry embarks on a voyage of discovery; Carmen studies exotic river deltas; Elizabeth searches for a transcendent love; and the agoraphobe, dreams of travelling to Paris and telling her story to a French television star. The course of their endeavours, like the river that dominates their town, twists and turns.

In its brilliant collage of river lore, art history, astrology, and mythology France Daigle's rich and witty novel journeys beyond the cultural, psychological, and literary bounds within which its characters live and leads us to where history, fantasy, and memory collide. This is the initial work in the trilogy which also includes A Fine Passage and Life's Little Difficulties.

At once casting aside and reinventing the confessional mode, Liar is a booklength monument to love found, betrayed, renounced, and ultimately accepted as transformative. The white-hot immediacy of detail and scorching emotional honesty of Liar make for a compelling tour through one lover's accounting for her own actions and those of her beloved. From the delusion of ownership to the pain of estrangement, Crosbie's surgical intelligence exposes what romantics so often refuse to acknowledge: the lover's own complicity in her joy and suffering.

Swinging between the grotesque and the beautiful, Crosbie's depiction of the lover adrift alters how we think of the love poem -- indeed, how we think of passion itself.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the shortlist of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation.

Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens. 

 What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime. 

Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.

Based on the solo show by critically acclaimed playwright and actor Ins Choi, Subway Stations of the Cross is a journey of an ancient faith in today’s restless world.

Inspired by a real-life encounter with a homeless man, award-winning playwright Ins Choi (Kim’s Convenience) has originated an astounding work of artistry and imagination in these fourteen spoken-word poems and songs that make up Subway Stations of the Cross. Part public disturbance, part performance artist, and part modern-day prophet, Ins Choi embodies the form of a nameless vagabond who is both beggar and seer. He creates a rich tapestry of the profane and the sacred, the humorous and the banal, the contemptuous and the poignant in both poetry and lyric. It is a holy communion for the urban soul. This relevant and challenging show is captured here in book form with illustrations of subway drawings by Guno Park, whose work has been featured internationally.

Winner, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Winner, League of Canadian Poets Raymond Souster Award
Finalist, League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
CBC Best Book of 2024

Marked by rhythmic drive, humour, and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Firmly grounded in the local, the arresting poems in Chimwemwe Undi’s debut collection, Scientific Marvel, are preoccupied with Winnipeg in the way a Winnipegger is preoccupied with Winnipeg, the way a poet might be preoccupied with herself: through history and immigration; race and gender; anxieties and observation. Marked by rhythmic drive, humour and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the west. Taking its title from a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years of operation, Scientific Marvel approaches the prairies from the point of view of a person who is often erased from the prairies’ idea of itself. “I mean my country the way / my country means my country / and what else is there to say? / I am bad and brown / and trying. Nothing here / belongs to me or could / or ever will.”

This is poetry that touches on challenging topics—from queerness and colonialism to racism, climate rage, and decolonization, while never straying far from specific lived experience, the so-called ‘smaller’ questions: about self, art, dance parties and pop culture, relationships and love.

A lyrical, powerful, and richly textured novel about three lives that intertwine across oceans and time.

On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water. Although she does not know it, her decision will set in motion an astonishing chain of events. It will lead to 1950s Norway, where a grieving toy-maker is on the cusp of a transformative invention, all the way to present-day Ottawa Valley in Canada, where a journalist, battling a terrible disease, risks everything for one last chance to live.

Taking inspiration from a remarkable true story, Coming Up for Air is a bold, richly imagined novel about the transcendent power of storytelling and the immeasurable impact of every human life. The legacy of the woman at its heart touches the lives of us all today, and this book reveals just how.

The twentieth semi-annual Munk Debate pits Niall Ferguson against Fareed Zakaria to debate the end of the liberal international order.

Since the end of World War II, global affairs have been shaped by the increasing free movement of people and goods, international rules setting, and a broad appreciation of the mutual benefits of a more interdependent world. Together these factors defined the liberal international order and sustained an era of rising global prosperity and declining international conflict. But now, for the first time in a generation, the pillars of liberal internationalism are being shaken to their core by the reassertion of national borders, national interests, and nationalist politics across the globe. Can liberal internationalism survive these challenges and remain the defining rules-based system of the future? Or, are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the liberal international order?

The twentieth semi-annual Munk Debate, held on April 28th, 2017, pits prominent historian Niall Ferguson against CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to debate the future of liberal internationalism.

The much-anticipated second collection from Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–winning poet Kayla Czaga, Dunk Tank is a rich, imaginative, and sometimes absurdist exploration of the landscape of the body and of adult life.

In the title poem of Kayla Czaga’s sophomore collection, a teenage speaker is suspended between knowledge and experience, confidently hovering before the world plunges her into adult life. Dunk Tank reimagines the body as a strange and unknowable landscape: full of cancers that “burst like blackberries,” a butt that could run for prime minister of Canada, and the underworld lurking in Winona Ryder’s pores. Clouds become testicles and uteri turn into goldfish, flickering and fragile, but still ultimately glowing. These poems explore the varied and strange relationships that underpin a young woman’s coming of age, from inconsequential boyfriends to the friendships that rescue us from “grey daily moments.” Unsure of how the world works and her part in it, Czaga forges a landscape of metaphor and gleaming, dense imagery. Dunk Tank is playful and dark, comic and disturbing.

Part of the CBC Massey Lectures Series

In History’s People internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of figures of the past, women and men, some famous and some little-known, who stand out for her. Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorable for being risk-takers, adventurers, or observers. She looks at the concept of leadership through Bismarck and the unification of Germany; William Lyon MacKenzie King and the preservation of the Canadian Federation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. She also notes how leaders can make huge and often destructive mistakes, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. Richard Nixon and Samuel de Champlain are examples of daring risk-takers who stubbornly went their own ways, often in defiance of their own societies. Then there are the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers, individuals like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who manage to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. Finally, there are the observers, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and Victor Klemperer, a Holocaust survivor, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life.

History’s People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times.

A courageous, moving, and powerful memoir from a renowned feminist activist, Heroes in My Head is the incredible untold story of Judy Rebick’s struggle with depression and Dissociative Identity Disorder.

In this riveting memoir, renowned feminist Judy Rebick tells the story of the eleven personalities she developed in order to help her cope with, and survive, childhood sexual abuse. In Heroes in My Head, Rebick chronicles her struggle with depression in the 1980s, when she became a high-profile spokesperson for the pro-choice movement during the fight to legalize abortion. It was in the 1990s, when she took on her biggest challenge as a public figure by becoming president of a major women’s rights association, that her memories began to surface and became too persistent to ignore.

Rebick reveals her moment of discovery: meeting the eleven personalities; uncovering her repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse; and then communicating with each personality in therapy and on the page in a journal — all of this while she is leading high-profile national struggles.

Heroes in My Head is a fascinating, heartbreaking, but ultimately empowering story. With courage and honesty, Rebick lays bare the public and private battles that have shaped her life.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection drift, Kevin Connolly's Revolver is a daring marriage of brilliant technical skill and explosive imagination. Each of the poems in this extraordinary collection is written in a different vocal register -- revolving through poetic voices with precise control and sharp wit. Connolly reveals himself to be one of the few poets in Canada who can pull off such a high wire act, and make it both thrilling and meaningful.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

A landmark collection from one of Canada’s literary icons, and the founder of House of Anansi Press, Heart Residence collects for the first time work from all corners of Dennis Lee’s extraordinary career.

This book is an exhilarating revelation. No other poet in Canada has the depth and range of Dennis Lee — jazzman, jester, and metaphysician, hardball political thinker and passionate lover, he has been publishing poems for fifty years. His first book, Kingdom of Absence, published in 1967, was the founding publication of House of Anansi Press. Since then Lee has produced work across the poetic spectrum, from nursery rhymes and skipping songs to uncompromising moral introspection to full-tilt love songs, plangent psalms, and ecstatic, solitary prayer.

There are poets’ poets and people’s poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture. Heart Residence collects, for the first time, work from all corners of this extraordinary career. In its verve and variety, this is a one-of-a-kind collection.

Karen Solie launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of many other awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal (2005), and is now considered one of Canada's best poets.

Pigeon is yet another leap forward for this singer of existential bewilderment. These poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, and the eros of danger. Once again, Solie shows that her ear is impeccable, her poetic intelligence rare and razor-sharp.

Winner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her work
Finalist, 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Finalist, 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

Tanya Talaga, the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples — youth suicide.

“Talaga’s research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. She brings each story to life, skillfully weaving the stories of the youths’ lives, deaths, and families together with sharp analysis… The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action.” — Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*

“Talaga has crafted an urgent and unshakable portrait of the horrors faced by Indigenous teens going to school in Thunder Bay, Ontario… Talaga’s incisive research and breathtaking storytelling could bring this community one step closer to the healing it deserves.” — Booklist *Starred Review*

In this urgent and incisive work, bestselling and award-winning author Tanya Talaga explores the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism.

Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.

In his follow-up to This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field is a provocative, powerful, and genre-bending new work that uses the modes of accusation and interrogation.

He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples’ rogue possibility, their utopian drive.

In NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, the poet takes on the political demands of queerness, mainstream portrayals of Indigenous life, love and its discontents, and the limits and uses of poetry as a vehicle for Indigenous liberation. In the process, Belcourt once again demonstrates his extraordinary craft, guile, and audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.

Finalist for the 2023 Trillium Book Award

The world is desperate for cobalt. It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies. But this “demon metal” has a horrific present and a troubled history.

The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada, a place called Cobalt. Like the demon metal, this town has a dark and turbulent history. 

The tale of the early-twentieth-century mining rush at Cobalt has been told as a settler’s adventure, but Indigenous people had already been trading in metals from the region for two thousand years. And the events that happened here — the theft of Indigenous lands, the exploitation of a multicultural workforce, and the destruction of the natural environment — established a template for resource extraction that has been exported around the world. 

Charlie Angus reframes the complex and intersectional history of Cobalt within a broader international frame — from the conquistadores to the Western gold rush to the struggles in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. He demonstrates how Cobalt set Canada on its path to become the world’s dominant mining superpower.

A delicately rendered memoir on motherhood, family, and the beauty of the natural world.

In fall 2007, Lynn Thomson experiences a huge life shift. Her teenage son, Yeats, is just beginning high school. Yeats has always struggled against the system, against the pressure to conform. He is a poet at heart: acutely sensitive, highly intelligent, and solitary by nature. Lynn and Yeats have always been close, but after fourteen years as a stay-at-home mom Lynn is going back to work for her husband, Ben, who has just opened his own bookstore.

When Lynn and Yeats take a trip to Vancouver Island, they discover a mutual love of bird watching. Lynn is the only other person Yeats has found who loves nature and watching birds. Plus, she has a car. Lynn describes in wondrous detail the many trips she and Yeats take, from the Wye Marsh and Pelee Island in Ontario, to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, to an ill-fated trip to the Galapagos Islands. The two grow closer with each bird-watching expedition. At the same time, Lynn notices that her son is beginning to pull away — and she must learn to let go.

Birding with Yeats is a delicate, sensitive, and gentle reflection on the unique bond between a mother and son, and the magic that is the natural world.

A timely tale of ownership and loss, loneliness and connection, and a meditation on all the stuff in our lives.

Home staging is an art of erasure. But in some cases—no matter how much clutter you remove, or how many coats of white paint you apply—stains bleed through, and memories rise from the walls like ghosts. Harriet, an elderly poet whose eccentricities have been compounded by years of living alone, must sell her beloved house. Having been recently diagnosed with dementia, she is being moved into a care facility against her wishes. When stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet’s brimming and mysterious world, but as they struggle to help her, their own lives are unravelling.

Keep is a meditation on all the stuff in our lives—from the singular, handcrafted artifact to indelible, mass-produced plastics. As Jenny Haysom excavates the material of our domestic spaces, she centres the people within them and celebrates the power of memory, even when it falters.

The 2025 Massey Lectures delivered by human rights activist and former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada Alex Neve.

Universality is the core promise of the human rights order born out of the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust: these rights extend to everyone, everywhere, at all times, without exception. But the cruel reality is that the word universal also screams of our profound failure to keep the promise. Too often, human rights are applied selectively, withdrawn on the whims of political leaders, or ignored altogether, and the broken promise is palpable in humanity’s darkest moments, not only in violent conflict, but also in the economic, political, and social structures of our fractured world.

This is not universality’s finest hour. At a time of immense global challenges, including the climate crisis, mass atrocities, and the rise of hate, the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is deeply contested and frayed, even as people demand and embrace their rights as never before.

Weaving together law, history, and stories from decades on the front lines of the struggle for human rights, Alex Neve investigates where we went wrong, how we have progressed, and what we can do to fulfill the promise that human rights are inherent, inalienable, and applicable to all people.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the shortlist of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

"A piece of paper with writing on it is flat, but when what is written on that paper fills the mind of a reader, it takes off into the wind like a box kite on a windy day," writes Baziju — the shared voice of poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. This exquisite, collaboratively written sequence of prose poems, unfolding through rich, delicate imagery, journeys through streets and gardens, houses and temples, cities and countryside, Canada and China. It is a meditation on the way we travel between places and between times, and how words and ideas travel between languages.

Baziju explores the literature of China, from centuries past to the present, exploring, at the same time, the meaning of hope and of home: childhood homes, the homes we grow into, and the homes in our minds. In Lu Xun's classic story "My Old Home," the hero returns from a distant city to the home he left two decades earlier. Hope, he ponders, "is just like the roads of the earth… . [T]o begin with the earth has no roads, but where many people pass, there a road is made."

These sensual, deeply personal prose poems ponder change, loss, friendship, and belonging. In a life in which every detail has significance, the smallest observation grows, and spreads like the branches of wisteria.

In 1907, the fifteen-year-old French-Canadian Ernest Dufault left his home in Quebec for Montana, where he was promptly arrested as a cattle thief. As a prisoner of the state of Nevada, he passed himself off as an American cowboy named Will James. Over the next few decades, Dufault, a.k.a. James, would flourish as a cowboy and horsebreaker and go on to become an artist, a soldier, a Hollywood stuntman, and a bestselling author of award-winning westerns — and his own false memoir. The Quebecer was so successful a pretender that he was later inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners, and his estranged wife, Alice Conradt, would only learn his true identity when, at the age of fifty, Will James died and left his estate to a man she had never heard of: one Ernest Dufault.

In Benediction, Olivier Dufault recreates the true story of his distant relative Ernest’s incarceration in a Nevada prison and his subsequent reinvention as “Will James.” Relying on authentic historical materials, including letters, telegrams, and court documents, as much as his own imagination, Olivier Dufault’s magnificent novel is a posthumous benediction of an exceptional American life in which truth and lies walk side by side.

The new collection from Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction.

The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure’s late father — accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”

Naked under a tattered shower curtain, fifteen-year old Tracey Berkowitz has been sitting in the back of a bus for two days, looking for her brother, Sonny, who thinks he is a dog. Tracey's stories begin to twist and intertwine truth with lies, absorbing the reader into the games and delusions she uses to escape her despair.

The Tracey Fragments is a raw, moving account that immerses the reader into the labyrinth of a troubled, adolescent psyche, full of twists and turns, fear and uncertainty, trust and betrayal.

Maureen Medved adapted her novel into a film screenplay that was directed by acclaimed filmmaker Bruce McDonald. At the Berlin Film Festival in early 2007, the motion picture won the Manfred Salzgeber Prize for an innovative film that broadens the boundaries of cinema.

In the tradition of Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, Bad Singer follows the delightful journey of Tim Falconer as he tries to overcome tone deafness — and along the way discovers what we’re really hearing when we listen to music.

Tim Falconer, a self-confessed “bad singer,” always wanted to make music, but soon after he starts singing lessons, he discovers that he’s part of only 2.5 percent of the population afflicted with amusia — in other words, he is scientifically tone-deaf.

Bad Singer chronicles his quest to understand human evolution and music, the brain science behind tone-deafness, his search for ways to retrain the adult brain, and his investigation into what we really hear when we listen to music. In an effort to learn more about his brain disorder, he goes to a series of labs where the scientists who test him are as fascinated with him as he is with them. He also sets out to understand why we love music and deconstructs what we really hear when we listen to it. And he unlocks the secret that helps explain why music has such emotional power over us.

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry

In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.

Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.

Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.

In the tradition of Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, Bad Singer follows the delightful journey of Tim Falconer as he tries to overcome tone deafness — and along the way discovers what we’re really hearing when we listen to music.

Tim Falconer, a self-confessed “bad singer,” always wanted to make music, but soon after he starts singing lessons, he discovers that he’s part of only 2.5 percent of the population afflicted with amusia — in other words, he is scientifically tone-deaf.

Bad Singer chronicles his quest to understand human evolution and music, the brain science behind tone-deafness, his search for ways to retrain the adult brain, and his investigation into what we really hear when we listen to music. In an effort to learn more about his brain disorder, he goes to a series of labs where the scientists who test him are as fascinated with him as he is with them. He also sets out to understand why we love music and deconstructs what we really hear when we listen to it. And he unlocks the secret that helps explain why music has such emotional power over us.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in Canada and internationally in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets.The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems from their collections.

Featuring works from shortlisted poets Sharon Dolin, Gemma Gorga, Douglas Kearney, Ali Kinsella, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Natalka Bilotserkivets, Ed Roberson, David Bradford, Liz Howard, and Tolu Oloruntoba.

A poet and journalist looks back on a remarkable journey from Turkey to Nepal in 1978, when the region was on the brink of massive transformation.
In the spring of 1978, at age twenty-two, Mark Abley put aside his studies at Oxford and set off with a friend on a three-month trek across the celebrated Hippie Trail — a sprawling route between Europe and South Asia, peppered with Western bohemians and vagabonds. It was a time when the Shah of Iran still reigned supreme, Afghanistan lay at peace, and city streets from Turkey to India teemed with unrest. Within a year, many of the places he visited would become inaccessible to foreign travellers.
Drawing from the tattered notebooks he filled as a youthful wanderer, Abley brings his kaleidoscope of experiences back to life with vivid detail: dancing in a Turkish disco, clambering across a glacier in Kashmir, travelling by train among Baluchi tribesmen who smuggled kitchen appliances over international borders. He also reflects on the impact of the Hippie Trail and the illusions of those who journeyed along it. The lively immediacy of Abley’s journals combined with the measured wisdom of his mature, contemporary voice provides rich insight, bringing vibrant witness and historical perspective to this beautifully written portrait of a region during a time of irrevocable change.

A muscle’s “twitch force” is a measurement of its energy potential. It’s history dependent: you can forget it, but it’s engraved on you where you can’t see it, and all it wants to do is repeat. Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Michael Redhill’s first collection of poetry in eighteen years, Twitch Force has a gnomic, satirical, and lucid intelligence. In “Ingredients,” heredity’s recipe is told via short-form family narrative; in “My Arrangements,” a stolen laptop battery leads to an encounter with the Israeli Olympic women’s beach volleyball team; while in “The Women,” human beauty is parsed down to the level of chromosomes: “I’m beautiful; I have my mother’s feet. The women who change into men are beautiful men who were once beautiful women.”

This is poetry concerned with love and its loss, despair and hard-won hope, knowledge and essential mystery, aging and timelessness. Readers are cautioned: ideas that present as self-explanatory may be closer than they appear. Twitch Force is a stunningly realized return to the form from one of Canada’s bravest and most original poets.

Now more relevant than ever, Ronald Wright’s #1 national bestseller, A Short History of Progress. The fifteenth anniversary edition includes a new introduction warning of the accelerating patterns of progress and disaster.

Each time history repeats itself, so it’s said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: Where will this growth lead? Can it be consolidated or sustained? And what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In his #1 national bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment’s inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome. In his new introduction to the fifteenth anniversary edition, Wright looks at the past fifteen years of human innovation — and asks whether we can still get the future right.

Drawing upon his Cree and Scandinavian roots, Harold R. Johnson merges myth, fantasy, and history in this epic saga of exploration and adventure. 

While sorting through the possessions of his recently deceased neighbour, Harold Johnson discovers an old, handwritten manuscript containing epic stories composed in an obscure Swedish dialect. Together, they form The Björkan Sagas.

The first saga tells of three Björkans, led by Juha the storyteller, who set out from their valley to discover what lies beyond its borders. Their quest brings them into contact with the devious story-trader Anthony de Marchand, a group of gun-toting aliens in search of Heaven, and an ethereal Medicine Woman named Lilly. In the second saga, Juha is called upon to protect his people from invaders bent on stealing the secrets contained within the valley’s sacred trees. The third saga chronicles the journey of Lilly as she travels across the universe to bring aid to Juha and the Björkans, who face their deadliest enemy yet.

The Björkan Sagas is a bold, innovative fusion of narrative traditions set in an enchanted world of heroic storytellers, shrieking Valkyries, and fire-breathing dragons. 

Enough small talk. Let’s get right to it: Why can’t we talk to each other anymore? What makes good communication? And how do we restore the lost art of conversation?

In contemporary society, much of our communication exists in a new dimension, the online space, and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, we can be anonymous, we can make false and hurtful comments yet evade consequences in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time and patience, courage, even. We need to realize that one-half of our conversations is, in fact, listening. And aren't the best conversationalists—like the best musicians—good listeners?

With What I Mean to Say, award-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings. Alternately serious and playful, Williams nimbly leaps between topics of discussion and, along the way, is discursive, digressive, and endlessly generous—like any great conversationalist.

The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.

Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik’s kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture.

 A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik’s trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. This deluxe 50th anniversary edition includes full-colour images printed on two 8-page inserts.

The Good Body is a triumphant blend of mordant humour and heartbreak. It tells the comic and poignant story of a retired pro-hockey ruffian named Bobby Bonaduce who is stubbornly ignoring a disease - multiple sclerosis - that may be killing him. Bobby returns to his hometown and scams his way into university in a misguided attempt to redeem his messy past and lay emotional claim to a son he abandoned twenty years earlier.

With this terrific novel, Bill Gaston demonstrates yet again that he is "a writer of great empathy, capable it seems of getting beneath the skin of anybody." (2002 Giller Prize jury)

The twenty-fourth semi-annual Munk Debate, held on May 9, 2019, pits former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs H. R. McMaster and Director for Chinese Strategy at the D.C.-based Hudson Institute think tank Michael Pillsbury against former President of the United Nations Security Council Kishore Mahbubani and president of one of China’s top independent think tanks, the Center for China Globalization, Huiyao Wang to debate the threat of China to the liberal international order.

Increasingly in the West, China is being characterized as a threat to the liberal international order, one that must be overcome through economic, political, technological, and even military means. For those who believe that the policies of the Chinese Communist Party pose a threat to free and open societies, the U.S. and like-minded nations must band together to preserve a rules-based international order. For others, this approach spells disaster; it ignores the history and dynamics propelling China’s rise to superpower status. Rather than threatening the post-war order, China is its best, and maybe only, guarantor in an era of declining U.S. leadership, increased regional instability, and slowing global growth.

A taut tale of female friendship and betrayal.

Set between the 1970s and 2010, I Never Said That I Was Brave examines the complicated relationship between two women as they navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’. Motivated by guilt and confusion, the unnamed narrator recounts the shifting dynamics of her lifelong friendship with Miriam, a charismatic astrophysicist who focuses on dark matter. As childhood immigrants to Canada from Uganda, the girls are able to assimilate (though not always easily). In adulthood, they chafe against the deeply held traditions and expectations of their South Asian community and their own internalized beliefs about women.

As the narrator follows her memories on their unpredictable and unreliable paths, the reader is taken along on a devastating journey, one which blurs distinctions between right and wrong, victim and manipulator, life and death.

How should the West deal with Putin’s Russia? For the U.S. and some European powers the answer is obvious: isolate Russia with punishing economic sanctions, remove it from global institutions such as the G8, and arm the nations directly threatened by Putin. In short, return to the Cold War doctrine that froze Soviet aggression in Europe and helped bring about the collapse of communist Russia. Others argue that such a policy is a dead end. Putin’s Russia has legitimate grievances against Western and NATO powers meddling in its sphere of influence. Instead of further antagonizing Putin and risking a dangerous escalation of the current conflict, the U.S. and Europe should seek common cause with Russia to address shared threats, from the Middle East to Asia to combatting terrorism.

In the fifteenth semi-annual Munk Debate, acclaimed academic Stephen F. Cohen and veteran journalist and bestselling author Vladimir Poznar square off against internationally renowned expert on Russian history Anne Applebaum and Russian-born political dissident Garry Kasparov to debate the future of the West’s relationship with Russia.

John Mighton’s revolutionary JUMP at Home: Grade 4 workbook, now available as a PDF for the first time for at-home learning.

“John Mighton’s JUMP program has demonstrated powerfully that, with the right instruction, no one need be left behind in math.” — New York Times

John Mighton's innovative JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) Math program is changing the way math is taught. With these workbooks, parents and caregivers can bring the JUMP program home to keep children learning.

The key to the enormous success of the program is a step-by-step teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly that children can not only understand them, but also build up great confidence in themselves and their ability.

This workbook includes an introduction that clearly explains the thinking behind the program and follows the carefully designed worksheets used by JUMP tutors and classroom teachers.

Royalties from the sales of the JUMP workbooks are donated to the JUMP organization.

An entrancing novel about a wellness retreat on a remote Greek island hosted by a celebrity guru who is more than meets the eye.

On a flight to New York at the end of her first book tour, up-and-coming writer Agnes Oliver meets Jack Verity, the handsome filmmaker and ex-husband of Geia Stone, a famous actress turned wellness guru, whose popular lifestyle brand Goddess™ promotes controversial therapies and expensive beauty tools in the name of self-care and inner nourishment. Jack invites Agnes to a party in the Hamptons, where she meets Geia and finds herself welcomed into the guru’s inner circle.

That summer, Geia arranges for Agnes to attend the Goddess™ Summit, an exclusive wellness retreat held on a remote Greek island. There, Agnes observes many strange happenings she can’t explain, as one by one the other guests seem to fall under the spell of their enchanting host. When Agnes begins to discover who Geia really is, she realizes it’s up to her to protect the other women at the summit from an unexpected and unwelcome fate.

A propulsive and captivating story about beauty and influence, self-doubt and seduction, Goddess is an electrifying new novel from a talented writer to watch.

The twenty-third semi-annual Munk Debate, held on November 2, 2018, pits Stephen Bannon, the CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, against columnist and author David Frum to debate the future of liberalism against the rising tide of populism.

Throughout the Western world, politics is undergoing a sea-change. Long-held notions of the role of government, trade and economic policy, foreign policy, and immigration are being challenged by populist thinkers and movements. Does this surging populist agenda in Western nations signal a permanent shift in our politics? Or is it a passing phenomenon that will remain at the fringes of society and political power? Will our politics continue to be shaped by the post-war consensus on trade, inclusive national identity, and globalization, or by the agenda of insurgent populist politics, parties, and leaders?

The twenty-third semi-annual Munk Debate pits former Donald Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon against columnist and public intellectual David Frum to debate the future of the liberal political order.

This specially designed and bound hardcover First Edition of Erín Moure's poetry collection Kapusta is limited to 50 copies.

In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing "gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and stops time.

In Little Theatres, Ern Moure's avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces - the bench behind her grandmother's woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces - the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, and to understand her mother's silence at the sadness of her forebears, her "salt-shaker love."

For the first time in history, will it be better to be a woman than a man in the upcoming century? The twelfth semi-annual Munk Debate pits Hanna Rosin and Maureen Dowd against Caitlin Moran and Camille Paglia to debate one of the biggest socio-economic phenomena of our time — the relative decline of the power and status of men in the workplace, in the family, and society at large.

Men have traditionally been the dominant sex. But now, for the first time, a host of indicators suggests that women not only are achieving equality with men, but are fast emerging as the more successful sex of the species. Whether in education, employment, personal health, or child rearing, statistics point to a rise in the status and power of women at home, in the workplace, and in traditional male bastions such as politics. But are men, and the age-old power structures associated with “maleness,” permanently in decline?

In this edition of the Munk Debates — Canada’s premier debate series — renowned author and editor Hanna Rosin and Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Maureen Dowd square off against New York Times–bestselling author Caitlin Moran and academic trailblazer Camille Paglia to debate the future of men.

With women increasingly demonstrating their ability to “have it all” while men lag behind, the Munk Debate on gender tackles the essential socio-economic question: Are men obsolete?