Literary Collections

My Home As I Remember describes literary and artistic achievements of First Nations, Inuit and Metis women across Canada and the United States, including contributions from New Zealand and Mexico. Their voices and creative expression of identity and place are richly varied, reflecting the depth of the culturally diverse energy found on these continents.

Over 60 writers and visual artists are represented from nearly 25 nations, including writers such as Lee Maracle, Chrystos and Louise Bernice Halfe, and visual artists Joane Cardinal-Schubert, Teresa Marshall, Kenojuak Ashevak, Doreen Jensen and Shelley Niro; and some who are published for the first time in this landmark volume.

Lee Maracle is the author of numerous books, including Ravensong. Sandra Laronde, writer/actor, is Executive Director of Native Women in the Arts.

Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent.

A Nigerian immigrant to Senegal explores the increasing influence of China across the region, a Kenyan student activist writes of exile in Kampala, a Liberian scientist shares her diary of the Ebola crisis, a Nigerian journalist travels to the north to meet a community at risk, a Kenyan author travels to Senegal to interview a gay rights activist, and a South African writer recounts a tale of family discord and murder in a remote seaside town.

In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa.

W. Gunther Plaut is one of Reform Judaism's most acclaimed twentieth century rabbis and scholars. He is a gifted writer and intellectual whose ideas garner devotees throughout the world. Eight Decades: The Selected Writings of W. Gunther Plaut is a selection of his previously published articles and essays. They include discussions on history, biblical topics, literature and linguistics, theological questions, moral and social issues, perspectives on Reform Judaism, legal issues, and Israel. First published in magazines as diverse as Maclean's, Atlantic, Commentary, Reconstructionist, Ontario Medical Review, Hebrew Union College Annual, and many others, each essay carries a unique message that is still relevant today. Eight Decades is a fitting companion to One Voice: The Selected Sermons of W. Gunther Plaut, published in 2007 on the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday.

Unearthed recordings reveal the early days of the literary powerhouses who gave birth to CanLit in the 1960s.

From 1969 to 1970, radio interviewer Earle Toppings recorded sixteen Canadian writers and poets who went on to become pillars of Canadian literature. These emerging icons of Canadian literature, including Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Al Purdy, captured in Toppings’s interviews and readings, give intimate and compelling views of their developing prose and poetry, in their own words.

The Earle Toppings tapes provide a distinctive and special glimpse into the workshops of emerging CanLit authors, revealing their thoughts about writing, about their successes and failures, about their place in Canada and in Canadian literature. This written version of Toppings’s recordings presents exact transcripts of the spoken interviews, complemented by brief biographies and bibliographies. The interviews were carefully compiled by the inaugural group of four Northrop Frye Research Centre Undergraduate Fellows at Victoria College. This rare portrait would not have been complete without an interview with Mr. Toppings himself, sharing his personal recollections of the authors he recorded and his own insight into their works.

Although it may lack the labyrinthine sewers of Paris, the mean streets of Los Angeles, or the low and vile alleys of London, Toronto is not without its places of danger, excitement and romance. In Bloody York, thirteen Canadian writers from the late nineteenth century to today find intrigue, mystery and terror in the familiar streets and places of Toronto, in stories set from the 1860s to beyond the present.

This selection of writings by 29 women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the 17th to the early 20th century, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman's wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children's writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general's wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women's experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.

E.M. Forster, whose novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India probe the values of the English middle class, is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished authors. He was also a highly respected literary critic. The Creator as Critic contains more than 40 of Forster's hitherto-unpublished essays, lectures, and memoirs, spanning the period 1898 to 1960. They reflect his views on a wide range of authors: Coleridge, Tolstoy, Pater, Wilde, James, Hardy, Butler, Housman, Kipling, Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Cavafy, and others.

The Creator as Critic also presents the original texts of some 30 broadcasts made by Forster for the BBC between 1928 and 1959. These radio talks, collected for the first time in this volume, are the thoughtful and thought-provoking products of Forster's active engagement with the literary, political, and social events of his time.

First published by Oxford University Press in 1993, Exploration Literature is a groundbreaking collection of early writing inspired by the opening of a continent.With maps, notes, and thumbnail biographies of these early writers, Exploration Literature is an entry point for both the casual reader and the student of Canadian literature into the beginnings of a literate response to the awe and wonder inspired by an unfolding geography and the literary fundamentals of new nationhood.

Alan Samuel examines core texts of Greek literature to show how they have formed our modern concepts of the nature of humanity and society.