ISBN 978-0-9864924-0-2
$25.00
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“My name is Jerry Carson.” And so it begins. All Carson men leave home early, and between departure and return, between flight and reconciliation lies the journey. Trial by water and by fire, trials of betrayal, imprisonment, loneliness and loss. As in all fairy tales there are Helpers and Instructors: canny old men, carny freaks, a pair of hoboes, a miner, a shaman, a fortune-teller, Mary of the yoga class, Marie of the hot-air balloon. New Orleans, Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, Florida, by truck, boxcar, ship, horseback. The final trial, however, is back home in the trailer park, in a letter from the dead.

Colin Fullerton lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is his first novel.

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Leslie Watts, Long Path (2008).

ISBN 978-0-9784321-9-5
$20.00
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The final days of Jørgen Mikkelsen. A man of no family or property, a disappointed artist and lover, a reluctant Resistance fighter, a man with intolerable burdens of memory and regret. Alone with his thoughts, a curiously lucid madman imprisoned in an attic room, Jørgen conjures out of his past a parade of ghosts. Dominating Jørgen’s disjointed narrative, however, is the haunting, imperious, tragic figure of Anna Hauge, whose circuits ran up and down the seamy streets of Vesterbro in wartime Copenhagen.

S.K.Johannesen is author of Sister Patsy (Pasdeloup Press, 2003), Luggas Wood (Blaurock Press, 2007), and many short stories, essays and memoirs. He is editor of Blaurock Press and lives in Stratford, Ontario.

Book Review by Andrew Hunt, The Record, Friday, April 23, 2010

“Johannesen’s latest, The Yellow Room, shines on all levels. Like his first two works, it is impressionist literature that explores the inner thoughts and experiences of its protagonist. In this case, the first-person narrator is Jørgen Mikkelsen, a man whose life has been all over the map: artist, anti-Nazi resistance fighter, skilled cabinetmaker and a man haunted by the ghosts of his past.

“The richness of the story is found in its memorable vignettes of the people Mikkelsen encounters in his journeys. The time he spends in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Denmark gives him plenty of opportunities to reflect on his past, and his memories are strikingly vivid. Those memories are the subject of his writings while holed up in a room that is “pale yellow. Almost white where the sun is reflected.”

and:

“…every sentence, every word, is beautifully rendered, like a painting.”

and:

“The Yellow Room reminded me of E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley….  The stories are quite different …. But the two books share a powerful narrative voice in which dialogue is spare, yet the descriptions are so vivid that you remember scenes long after you’ve put the book down.”

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Susan Benson.

edited by Douglas Glover

ISBN 978-0-9784321-7-1
$24.00
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“—a magnificent poet, prolific, protean and deeply, intensely, personal. She is a metaphysical poet, concerned with ends and existence, yet she grounds everything in the specific and the concrete.

“Reading and rereading her, one begins to notice, beyond the narratives of love and death and the concrete references to loved ones and beloved places, insistent recurrences—water, islands, plant lore, horses, seahorses—unfolding into myth, comedy, eros and personal anguish.”

—Douglas Glover, from the Introduction

Karen Mulhallen is Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning magazine Descant. She has published ten books of poetry and authored, co-authored, edited and co-edited magazines, anthologies, columns and critical articles on culture and the arts. She also teaches literature at Ryerson University and lives in Toronto.

Book design by Christian Snyder.  Cover art by Virgil Burnett.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-6-4
$20
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A hybrid narrative, different voices, contrasting worlds. One strand—banal, cruel, funny, sentimental by turns—a coming-of-age tale, a middle-class schoolboy awakens to the facts of class and sex in post-war England. The other strand a sordid tale of manipulation, betrayal and murder in Toronto, Kingston and Montreal. These stories are brought together in the narrator’s pursuit of the truth about life in general and his life in particular. Haunted by bad faith, in others and in himself, he nevertheless gropes toward insight into the nature of personal responsibility.

Eric Schachter is a Montreal writer and film-maker now living in Harlem. His previous book Skandalon is an astoundingly candid exercise in personal and family archaeology. He may be reached at skandalon.net.

Comments on a very early draft of Dry Bones:

“I think you are probably a good person.”
—Ivan Illich

“A cool investigation of class and crime.”
—Robertson Davies

“The best study of violent crime I have ever read.”
—June Calwood

“Everything rings true except for the fact that you actually liked [Bonnie and Ricky].”
—Timothy Findley

“It is not clear as to whether this is fact or fiction.”
—Leslie Fiedler

“I return this unread, as I have been accused in the past of stealing other people’s material.”
—Margaret Atwood

Book design and cover art by Christian Snyder.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-8-8
$20
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A Manhattan fable of talent and mediocrity, ambition and genius, art and commerce, crime and punishment. Owen Higdon, hungry artist’s-agent, likeable chancer and compulsive gambler, has staked everything on selling Philip Snowcroft’s new painting. Finality is his friend’s culminating achievement as an artist, a work of epic scale, raw passion, moral authority—and worth a lot of money. Unfortunately, there are other stakes in play, in an increasingly desperate and dangerous game. Owen must choose. The next roll of the dice will be for his own soul.

Jason Schneider is co-author of Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance, author of Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots Of American Music, and one of Canada’s most respected music journalists. His first novel, 3,000 Miles, was published in 2005. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Barry Lorne.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-5-7
$20.00
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Lilla, Joey and Clara Pentangeli, their father Salvatore and their mercurial mother Seraphina live on Paradise Street behind a giant billboard, in a charmed world filled with operatic heroines. Seraphina idolizes Maria Callas. Between bouts of housework, she re-enacts Violetta’s death scene from La Traviata, dresses in a kimono like CioCioSan in Madama Butterfly, and concocts outrageous tales for her three enchanted children. She also reveals one or two secrets from her past. At last real-life tragedy overtakes the house on Paradise.

Michelle Alfano is a Toronto writer and a Co-Editor with the literary quarterly Descant. Her short story “Opera,” on which Made Up Of Arias is based, was a finalist for the Journey Prize. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been published in Canada and in the United States. She will be featured in a forthcoming documentary on the passengers, and the children of the passengers, of the Saturnia, an immigrant ship which transported thousands of Italian-born immigrants to Canada in the 1950s and 60s and which will be featured on OMNI-TV. She blogs at alitchick.blogspot.com

“Made Up of Arias is all the voices of childhood, all the stories that allow a child’s imagination to safely try on adult themes. Alfano is a keen observer, with an eye for detail and a gift for humour.” —Julie Booker, author Silver Hearts

“Michelle Alfano speaks in the beautifully compelling, yet remarkably guileless voice of her protagonist and narrator, Lilla Pentangeli…Michelle Alfano’s mastery of English and Italian, her knowledge of opera, and her ability to elevate the ordinary, are inspiring and transforming.” —Lina Medaglia, author The Demons of Aquilonia

“Michelle Alfano’s Made Up of Arias beautifully evokes an immigrant childhood lived against the backdrop of opera, which stands in for all that her characters have lost or will never attain even while it speaks to the most common and everyday of their tragedies and joys. Alfano writes with the humour and compassion of someone who not only understands her characters, but forgives them.” —Nino Ricci, author The Origin of Species and Lives of the Saints

“Made up of Arias is an important and welcome addition to the tradition of Italian-Canadian literary voices … an outstanding writer whose fiction carves a distinct place in Canada’s national narrative. Beautifully observed, richly comic, heartbreaking and compelling, Made up of Arias, deserves to be read by a broad audience as well as specialists. —Lilia Topouzova, screenwriter The Mosquito Problem

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Amber Albrecht.

A cycle of spare, sweet-sad, magical tales. A small girl dreams a house floating away. Lolly loves pink. Walter and Hank conduct a juke-box war. Tessie dances with a spectral Sidney Greenstreet. Sadie may or may not have caused Lila to be air-borne. Characters migrate between stories. Down-to-earth realism turns out to be not quite real after all. Limited and damaged lives are refracted and transformed, as in a kaleidoscope, by absurdity, by wonder, by magic and desire. As a character in one of these stories reflects, thinking of the last word in Joyce’s Ulysses, the answer to the mystery of life is YES.

Sylvia Markle-Craine lives in Guelph, Ontario. She has published poetry and short stories. One of her stories won first prize in the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival Literary Contest.

“With some basic ingredients she cooks up just enough magic to make perfect little fables from what on some level amounts to an album of small town gossip. By inviting readers behind closed doors, she reveals worlds rich in character, the quirky opinions and pursuits of those characters, and the diner-friendly language they use to communicate with one another….at the intersection of strangeness and character Markle-Craine writes her most descriptive, sensual sentences to help us tune into the smaller details of daily existence.” —”Off the Shelf”

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Amber Albrecht.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-2-6
$28
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This Byronic tale is a narrative tour de force reminiscent of the haunting, romantic visions of Julien Gracq. At once mystery, thriller, erotic fantasy, ghost story, epic, a tale of obsession and weird encounter, Scarbo Edge is set on a Lake Huron coast unlike anything encountered before in Canadian literature. Readers will not soon forget the doomed lovers Isa and Eber—whose trials invoke the legend of Tristan and Iseult—the noble Beppo, the terrifying bear-hunter Ledoux.

Virgil Burnett is an author, publisher and artist working in several different media. His work has been widely published in Europe and North America. A show of his illustrations was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in 2005. He lives in Southern Ontario.

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by the author.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-1-9
$18
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And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?

In Luggas Wood, a dark and brooding headland on the border of England and Wales, an extension of this ancient myth may be playing itself out. Max Pilbeam, successful sculptor and architect, is hoping to re-invigorate a career, and a life, gone stale. A corpse, a mysterious grotto, an encounter in The Ferryman, an affecting homily on the Stabat mater, a class in Creative Writing in which an unsettling story is discussed, a dinner party in which is raised the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Max starts a new commission, learns about daffodils, meets a band of pilgrims, before realizing, on Easter Morning, what he is meant to do in Luggas Wood.

S.K.Johannesen is a frequent contributor to Canadian literary magazines and the author of the novel Sister Patsy (Pasdeloup Press, 2003). He lives in Stratford.

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Amber Albrecht.