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By Sarah Everett. 2023
“One of the best books I have read this year (maybe ever).” —Colby Sharp, Nerdy Book ClubNPR Books We Love…
2023 | Publishers Weekly Best of 2023 | Winner of the Governor General's Literary Awards for Young People's LiteratureA heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It's how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi's whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye."My heart hurt as I raced through the last chapters of this unique book that shines a light on family, friends, grief, and love." —Lisa Yee, author of Maizy Chen's Last ChanceBy David Robertson. 2020
Acclaimed writer, David A. Robertson, delivers suspense, adventure, and humour in this stunningly illustrated graphic novel continuation of The Reckoner…
trilogy. Cole and Eva arrive in Winnipeg intent on destroying Mihko Laboratories. Their plans change when a new threat surfaces, and Cole has terrifying visions. Are these just troubled dreams or are they leading him to a terrifying truth? Will Eva be able to harness her powers to continue the investigation without him?By David Robertson. 2022
"With Cole barely clinging to life, Eva fearlessly takes the lead to investigate Mihko's horrific experiments. But where's Brady? After…
learning that Mihko reinstated the Reckoner Initiative, Cole and Eva confront Mihko head-on. But a vicious battle with Mihko's newest test subject leaves Cole close to death, and Eva must continue their investigation without him. With Brady missing and Cole in recovery, Eva is on her own. When Eva stumbles across Mihko's secret laboratory, she finds her worst nightmares come to life. What new terrors has Mihko created? And can Eva find Brady before it's too late?"--Back coverBy Mcfadden, Bernice L.. 2002
In This Bitter Earth, Sugar Lacey is on her way out of Bigelow, Arkansas, where she’d come to break with…
the past. With her worn leopard-print suitcase and her head held high, she walks past the prying eyes of its small-minded, cruel-hearted townsfolk, praying for the strength to keep going. She doesn’t stop until she arrives at her childhood home in Short Junction. Here she learns the truth about her parentage: a terrible tale of unrequited love, of one man’s enduring hatred, and of the black magic that has cursed generations of Lacey women. A powerfully realized novel that brings back the unforgettable characters from Sugar, McFadden’s bestselling debut, This Bitter Earth is a testament to the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. .By Angela Rodel, Zachary Karabashliev. 2008
After Stella disappears, Zack sets off on a trip across America with his memories, a camera, and a duffle bag…
of dope. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. His journey unleashes a series of erratic, hilarious, and life-threatening events interspersed with flashbacks to his relationship with Stella.By Sheila Fischman, Larry Tremblay. 2014
The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering…
event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her - and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.By Benilde Little. 1998
From the author of the smashing debut bestseller Good Hair comes The Itch, the stirring story of a crisis-torn woman…
who discovers a depth of character and a sense of self she never knew she possessed.Abra Lewis Dixon is the envy of the fashionable, professional women of her well-heeled social circle. She leads a charmed life -- having attended all the right schools, married the right man, and started a successful film production company with her best friend, Natasha Coleman -- and seems like an ambassador from the world of perfection. It is only when her impeccable marriage turns suddenly shaky that her utopia is left in pieces.By Derrick A. Bell. 1996
Just like the songs of a gospel choir, the pieces in this book give voice to the hardships faced by…
African Americans. Through allegorical stories and fictional encounters, dreams and dialogues, it presents fresh perspectives on the different issues that concern blacks. Despite their tough subjects, however, these stories resound with laughter and compassion and a continuing theme of Christian love.By Howard Scott, Phyllis Aronoff, Hélène Vachon. 2014
A Matter of Gravity is a playful and touching treatment of illness and tragedy, in which an enigmatic manuscript brings…
together two disparate male characters. Black humor and compassion brilliantly illuminate their tragic encounter.Hélène Vachon is the author of two novels and more than twenty works of children's literature. Her books have been nominated for many prizes, including the Governor General's Literary Award and the Mr. Christie's Book Award.Howard Scott is a Montreal literary translator who specializes in the genres of fiction and nonfiction.Phyllis Aronoff is former president of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada.By Eric V. Copage. 2011
Thirteen-year-old Jordan Garrison is at a crossroads. He's just about to enter high school, and his biggest worries are his…
new bottom-of-the-totem-pole status as an incoming freshman and his father's constant lectures about becoming a man. Growing further apart from his younger siblings-precocious eight-year-old twins-Jordan thinks his only ally is his grandmother, a hip sixty-two-year-old with a youthful glow that comforts Jordan, especially in the absence of his mother. But when his widowed father suddenly dies, Jordan finds the journey through puberty to adulthood all the more daunting. He feels alone despite the best efforts of his family and friends. He is resentful and confused about new responsibilities forced on him, and torn between acting with his heart or fulfilling the expectations of those around him. A mysterious neighborhood shopkeeper, Snackman, notices Jordan's dilemma and steps in as surely as Jordan's own father would have. He offers Jordan a dirty strip of kente cloth, which he says contains the answers to Jordan's problems. And through this strip of cloth, Snackman guides Jordan to the answer of what it is to be a Black man. But not before Jordan meets with an almost disastrous fire and realizes his true importance to his family. Dazzling and magical, Between Father and Son is a heartening story with a powerful message that adults and children alike will turn to time and time again.By Charles W. Chesnutt, Richard H. Brodhead. 1993
The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in…
1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work.In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman.Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.By Lolita Files. 2000
Hollywood. The place people go to fulfill their dreams. But its reality is a cruel one: Opportunities are few and…
the competition ruthless. Innocent hearts can suddenly turn dark, and the most loyal of friends can become bitter enemies. Desi, Sharon, and Bettina are three black women struggling to make names for themselves amid the glitz, glamour, and deception. Before the women can be swept away by the intrigue and intensity of the entertainment industry, they must answer the desperate calls from the ghosts of their pasts....But if they do, will the shadows of infidelity, abandonment, and murder destroy everything they've worked for?By John Jennings, Craig Fischer, Frances Gateward, Rebecca Wanzo, William Lafi Youmans, Kinohi Nishikawa, Blair Davis, Nancy Goldstein, Daniel F. Yezbick, Sally Mcwilliams, James J. Zeigler, Qiana Whitted, Reynaldo Anderson, Hershini Bhana Young, Robin Means Coleman, Patrick F. Walter, Consuela Francis, Andre Carrington. 2015
When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps,…
inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century. The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into "panels" in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner. Though it does not shy away from examining the legacy of racial stereotypes in comics and racial biases in the industry, The Blacker the Ink also offers inspiring stories of trailblazing African American artists and writers. Whether you are a diehard comic book fan or a casual reader of the funny pages, these essays will give you a new appreciation for how black characters and creators have brought a vibrant splash of color to the world of comics.By Michelle Latiolais. 2011
BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST"In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find…
the heartbeat within."-Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones"Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece." -William Kittredge"In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder." -Christine Schutt"There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty." -Elizabeth TallentThe stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. These meditations bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail-reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Among these stories of loss are interwoven other tales, creating a bridge to the ineffable pleasures and follies of life before the catastrophe. Throughout this collection, Latiolais captures the longing, humor, and strange grace that accompany life's most transformative chapters.Michelle Latiolais is the author of Widow: Stories, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, and two previous novels, including A Proper Knowledge, also published by Bellevue Literary Press. She is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California and an English professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine.By Ray Robertson. 2014
"Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls, and a heart of gold. I Was There the Night He…
Died is a hilarious, moving, insightful, and timely piece of modern realism, delightfully void of literary pretension. Here, at last, is a novel that rocks and rolls."-Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving"So," she says. "Who died tonight?"Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes. Yet somehow, between a record player and a park bench, through late-night conversations about the deaths of Sam's musical heroes, and ultimately through each other, Sam and Samantha learn to endure the things they fear most.Starring a 40-something writer who stumbles through the small town he thought he'd left behind forever, and a marooned teenager who wishes she were anywhere else, I Was There The Night He Died is a saucy, swaggering look at loss, love, and the redeeming power of music in the twenty-first century.Praise for Ray Robertson,A Women's National Book Association Great Group Reads Author, 2013Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize, 2011and the Trillium Prize, 2008 "Ray Robertson is the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American Letters."-Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners "Both playful and profound, laced with insight from music to history, politics to literature, high to low culture."-National Post "Robertson's art is as character-driven as Mordecai Richler's ... he wants us all to behave better and doesn't care who he angers along the way."-Globe and MailBy Michelle Latiolais. 2011
BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST"In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find…
the heartbeat within."-Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones"Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece." -William Kittredge"In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder." -Christine Schutt"There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty." -Elizabeth TallentThe stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. These meditations bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail-reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Among these stories of loss are interwoven other tales, creating a bridge to the ineffable pleasures and follies of life before the catastrophe. Throughout this collection, Latiolais captures the longing, humor, and strange grace that accompany life's most transformative chapters.Michelle Latiolais is the author of Widow: Stories, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, and two previous novels, including A Proper Knowledge, also published by Bellevue Literary Press. She is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California and an English professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine.By Jessica Moore, Jean-François Beauchemin. 2012
In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who,…
following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartolomé's quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries.Through reference to the two-million-year-old "Turkana Boy," the fossilized remains of a boy found in 1984 near Lake Turkana, Kenya, Beauchemin addresses processes of memory and the long history of human evolution. Beauchemin's character Bartolomé sees in the lives of the boys-separated by nearly two million years-a kind of twin destiny. Has the passage of millennia changed the intensity of human feeling at the loss of blood relations? "Who knows what they had felt? Had the same emotions, those associated with incommensurable loss, broken their bodies, as they had his? Over and above morphological differences sculpted by the passage of millennia, was there something resembling a permanence of feeling, a sort of eternity for the murmuring of the heart, transmitted through the ages by the bonds of blood?"Turkana Boy offers a poignant examination of grieving and one man's search for understanding. This surrealist narrative is punctuated with magnificent musings on the world and startling questions about what it means to be alive.By M.A.C. Farrant. 2011
This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as "a brave iconoclast" and whose work the Globe…
& Mail has said "bristles with moral fury ... at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour," offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.A three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world."Annotations About an Absence" is a series of 115 numbered annotations to the day-long ruminations of a retired couple living in a gated community attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future: "We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life. Which is? We are afraid.""Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence" is written as a series of notes to these annotations, providing (in the utterly blank spirit of transparency) a running satiric narrative on the project. Each of these "notes" is written as if it were a description of a late-night TV movie or the content of a wet Jehovah's Witness pamphlet left on a woman's doorstep that has taken hold of her mind."Other Prose Surrounding Absence" comprises twenty-seven prose pieces that take aim at a globalized world bludgeoned by the threat of "end times"-climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics-that seem designed insofar as we are able to retain our status as "individuals."Unique in style and approach, engaging, enigmatic, controversial, and delightful, this book is an attempt to prick the bubble of our complacency in the face of the "awful atrocity" we've made for ourselves.By Will Browning, Réjean Ducharme. 2003
Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of…
twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rémi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him, but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and Africa in the company of the dangerous and blonde Raïa, Rémi's former mistress. Meanwhile, Rémi remodels a ramshackle house in rural Quebec, designed for Mammy, if she ever comes back, "in flesh and bed." The novel is the journal that he keeps during their parallel journeys.By Howard Scott, Madeleine Gagnon, Phyllis Aronoff. 2012
Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take…
drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death.In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.