On Browsing
Regular price $15.95A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon—and gaining new appreciation—amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.
Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsing’s essays chronicle what we’ve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.
Praise for On Browsing
“Browsing is many things: a lifestyle, a relaxation, a revelation if your search finds a long-sought book or a rare recording, and perhaps more importantly a soul-refreshing excursion in a world of instant online search-and-buy options.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“‘Our choices are chisels,’ says Jason Guriel. This moving book will fill you with a good kind of sadness and help you understand your own nostalgias.”
—Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine
“A mall parking lot, a defunct record store, the lingering crease on a book cover—across the all-flattening boundary of the digital age, Guriel recalls what it meant to access the universal one particular, physical piece at a time.”
—Tom Scocca, author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future
I Can Read Hockey Stories: Hayley's Journey
Regular price $5.99“We can do this!” Hayley Wickenheiser calls to her team as they skate out onto the ice. It’s been a long journey to the Olympics, but Hayley has worked hard to get here. From early-morning practices to playing with boys hockey teams during her childhood, from being the youngest player on Team Canada to winning two Olympic gold medals, Hayley knows she can make history again.
Ideal for young hockey fans and future stars, this level-2 I Can Read book is perfect for children learning to sound out words and sentences.
Rumi and the Red Handbag
Regular price $19.95Finalist 2016 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award
Harper’s Bazaar Top Books of Fall 2015
Fiction
ISBN-13: 978-1-926794-26-6
$19.95 CDN / $18.95 US | Trade Paperback
October 2015
“What is the soul?” asks Rumi, the poet. “If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.”
Rumi and the Red Handbag follows the lives of Shaya and Ingrid-Simone, working together one winter at a second- hand clothing shop. Theodora’s Fine Consignment Clothing shop becomes a small world where Shaya, an academic who abandoned studying the secrets of women writers, finds in Ingrid-Simone a reason to begin writing again, on scraps of paper and post-its. Fresh, unique and intelligent, Rumi and The Red Handbag is a journey to the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam, a journey to find Rumi, the soul, and the secret hidden in a red handbag.
Praise for Rumi and the Red Handbag
This book isn’t just a novel, it’s a small and wonderful work of art. —Wayne Arthurson
Hump
Regular price $18.002010 John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer
Winner 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Poetry Prize
Finalist 2011 ReLit Award
Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.
Praise for Hump
Gordon channels Adrienne Rich’s dichotomy of love and frustration.—Winnipeg Free Press
Ariel Gordon’s writing allows the reader access to the essence of a place and time. Her command of language brings an importance to moments both fateful and seemingly insignificant. Her work displays a surprising combination of ease and conviction, of playfulness tempered with insight, and evokes a vivid sense of the word in its studied context, the image in its rightful place.—Jury for Hirsh Award
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.—Robert Kroetsch
The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed.—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut.—CV2
Everything Affects Everyone
Regular price $18.95Do you believe in angels?
When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene’s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way.
Everything Affects Everyone, is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.
alfabet/alphabet
Regular price $15.95
Winner of the 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Non-fiction
A singular memoir from one of Canada’s most compelling poets.
alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer’s transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity, landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new light.
Praise for Sadiqa de Meijer
Language as the mother of bond and breach is beautifully storied in Sadiqa de Meijer’s poignant and provocative memoir, alfabet/alphabet. This is a book that dreams of transforming migration, citizenship, families, nationhood and the very utterances upon which each is built. A deeply hopeful narrative about language itself, a singular exploration of the way that words build a home.—2021 Governor General Literary Awards Peer assessment committee: Sarah de Leeuw, Amanda Leduc and Evelyn C. White
A voice of authority and grace.–Michael Crummey
These lucid, penetrating meditations on language, loss, and identity glow with the tempered beauty of sea glass. English is Sadiqa de Meijer’s adopted tongue, but her voice sounds as strong as a breaking wave, mellifluous as running water. What is the Nederlands for peerless?–Susan Olding
The Junta of Happenstance
Regular price $19.95Winner 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry
Longlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Award
Longlisted 2022 Raymond Souster Award
Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba’s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet’s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.
Praise for The Junta of Happenstance
Tolu Oloruntoba uses a “safecracker ear” (“Child at Sleep”) to perceive both the subtle and overt mechanics of human interactions and to explore the interlocking parts of past and present, individual and community, and the here and there.—Samantha Jones, ARC Poetry magazine
The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.—Judges’ Citation, 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Tolu Oloruntoba’s voice in The Junta of Happenstance is at once thoughtful and authoritative, metaphorically rich and lyrically surprising. Oloruntoba’s language travels through history and myth to speak to today and engage with a future transformed by new understanding. The combination of craft and spirit cuts a fine place for this debut work, expanding our literary view.—2021 Governor General Literary Award Peer assessment committee: Kaie Kellough, George Murray and Anna Marie Sewell
Super Detectives (Simon and Chester Book #1)
Regular price $13.99Solace
Regular price $18.95The poems in the collection were written within one year when the pandemic ruled our lives by forcing us into isolation. In hope of maintaining a semblance of reality, the poet is compelled to inhabit imaginative space, focusing on specific images generated by everyday life. The poems become her companions and through writing them, she finds relief in pain and grief. The book Solace is a quest to find consolation, and to speak on behalf of people, who although overwhelmed by human limitations, search for something tangible which can restore their peace of mind in turbulent times.
At the End, Beginnings
Regular price $18.95In this first book by Christopher Lawrence Menard, the poet paints a picture of what it means to be a son, a brother, a husband and a father, even as his own father begins to succumb to the diseases he has battled for years. John B. Lee, the renowned Canadian poet, describes Menard’s tribute to family life as “a love story,” and says. “the love of life is life itself.” In this collection of poems, Menard reflects both on the man who shaped him and the man he became, as well as the boy he is helping to guide.
Arlo & Pips - King Of The Birds (Hardcover)
Regular price $15.99New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids
Junior Library Guild Selection
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best
Perfect for fans of Narwhal and Jelly, Arlo & Pips: King of the Birds is the first in a new early graphic chapter book series about the friendship between Arlo, an arrogant crow, and a sarcastic little bird named Pips.
Like most crows, Arlo has a big brain. But Arlo has something else: a little pal who’s not afraid to tell him when he’s being insufferable!
In the first of three episodes, a battle of the brains and bird-to-bird banter soon turns into an unexpected friendship. Arlo and Pips' adventures include a visit the big city and the beach on their hunt for shiny things and French fries. Cool crow facts are included throughout the book.
Everyone's crowing about Arlo & Pips, with Kirkus praising it as "a perfect match for newly independent readers"!
More praise for Arlo & Pips #1: King of the Crows: A New York Public Library Best Book * A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best * A Junior Library Guild Selection * "An unexpected friendship story! In three short graphic chapters marked by [Gravel’s] signature sly humor, facts about crows are sprinkled throughout, making the reader believe that maybe crows are truly as amazing as Arlo says.” —The Horn Book (starred review)
“Fun and informative! This book will FLY off the shelves!” - Ben Clanton, bestselling author of the Narwhal and Jelly series
"Straightforward sentences, limited color scheme, and thick black outlines make this a perfect match for newly independent readers. Through Pips’ inquisitiveness and Arlo’s desire to prove himself, readers also learn much about the intelligence, diet, and behavior of crows. A charming treasure." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“It's an unexpected friendship story! In three short graphic chapters marked by [Gravel's] signature sly humor, facts about crows are sprinkled throughout...making the reader believe that maybe crows are truly as amazing as Arlo says.” - Horn Book (starred review)
"Gravel brings the smart attitude of her Disgusting Critters series to a more fictional narrative here, and it’s just as informative and accessible in its provision of kid-pleasing facts...Aspiring birders with a flair for the dramatic may be particularly drawn to Arlo’s braggadocio." - Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
"This simple story of would-be friendship [has] Gravel's distinctive panels and snappy dialogue...crow facts appear throughout like cereal-box prizes" - Publishers Weekly
Ice Chips & The Grizzly Escape
Regular price $9.99The fifth title in the beloved and bestselling Ice Chips series by acclaimed authors Roy MacGregor and Kerry MacGregor and illustrator Kim Smith, featuring a vibrant and diverse cast of characters and inspiring hockey greats
In their latest adventure, the Chips travel to British Columbia, meet an inspiring young hockey hero and escape up Anahim Peak, thanks to their new friend’s calm head—and a very special puck!
Anne of Green Gables
Regular price $9.99 When Marilla Cuthbert and her brother, Matthew, decide to adopt a child from a distant orphanage, they don't get quite what they bargained for. The child who awaits them at the tiny Bright River train station is not the strapping young boy they'd imagined--someone to help Matthew work the fields of their small farm--but rather a freckle-faced, redheaded girl named Anne (with an e, if you please).
Matthew and Marilla may not be sure about Anne, but Anne takes one look at Prince Edward Island's red clay roads and the Cuthberts' snug white farmhouse with its distinctive green gables and decides that she's home at last. But will she be able to convince Marilla and Matthew to let her stay?
Armed with only a battered carpetbag and a boundless imagination, Anne charms her way into the Cuthberts' hearts--and into the hearts of readers as well. She truly is, in the words of Mark Twain, "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice."
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), was a Canadian author best known for her series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, which was an immediate success. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 500 short stories and poems. She was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Theory
Regular price $17.00A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists.
By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender--and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.
A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.
______________
DIONNE BRAND's literary credentials are legion. Her latest novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected a Best Book by the LA Times; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing, and from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto's Poet Laureate. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.
Brendan Scott Friel | Summer Moons
Regular price $15.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes both WAV & MP3 files, album artwork, liner notes & lyrics.
Includes a beautiful edition of "Summer Moons" on CD.
TRACK LIST:
01. Summer Moons [1:24]
02. All In [3:14]
03. Missing Piece [4:45]
04. Lorelai [3:13]
05. Shadows [3:48]
06. (06.18.21) [0:48]
07. Cheap String Lights (Ft. Crissi Cochrane) [3:10]
08. A Kiss in the Dark [3:26]
09. Ghosts on the Clothesline [3:45]
10. Run [3:29]
Released April 23, 2021
Soul Brother Mike | If We Can Be Friends
Regular price $1.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes both WAV & MP3 files, liner notes, album artwork and lyrics.
TRACK LIST:
01. If We Can Be Friends [3:35]
Released March 12, 2021
Madeline Doornaert | Muddy Water | Album
Regular price $10.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes both WAV & MP3 files, liner notes, album artwork & lyrics.
TRACK LIST:
1. Sunscreen (2:25)
2. Baby Calf (2:25)
3. Lost It In The Laundry (3:36)
4. Harvey High School (2:49)
5. Running Back (3:10)
6. Sing Up, Sing Softly (2:56)
7. I’ve Felt This Way Before (4:23)
8. This Kind Of Love (5:12)
9. Muddy Water (3:45)
10. Muddy Water - Reprise (3:48)
Released February 25, 2021.
Soul City Music Co-Op | Best of 2020
Regular price $10.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes high quality MP3 files, album artwork, liner notes & lyrics.
TRACK LIST:
01. Hungry Love (Crissi Cochrane)
02. Late Nights (The Bishop Boys)
03. Home (Ayola)
04. Give It More Try (The Family Soul)
05. Dancing In The Living Room (Dane Roberts)
06. Muddy Water (Madeline Doornaert)
07. Brother She's Gone (Crissi Cochrane)
08. Time Takes Me (The Bishop Boys)
09. Bola (Ayola)
10. Baby I Want A Change (Soul Brother Mike)
The Family Soul | Give It More Try
Regular price $4.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes both WAV & MP3 files, album artwork, liner notes & lyrics.
TRACK LIST:
01. Give It More Try 3:16
02. Little Bit Famous 2:41
03. What's The Deal? 3:41
04. Only In Love 2:56
The Family Soul | On The Shoulders of... Vol 1
Regular price $11.00
This is a digital product. Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link to download your music.
Includes both WAV & MP3 files, album artwork, liner notes & lyrics.
TRACK LIST:
1. Ain't That Lovin' You 2:56
2. Blessing In Disguise 4:04
3. I Love Your Lovin' Ways 3:32
4. Every Pharaoh Needs A Queen 3:33
5. I Got To Love Somebody's Baby 3:18
6. So Beautiful 3:26
7. Just The One 2:34
8. There's Nothing I Can Do About It 3:23
9. Hypnotized 3:44
10. You're All I Need To Get By 3:02
11. Back Together 4:46
