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A

Against an African Sky and Other Stories

Farida Karodia

 

With the end of apartheid, a new constitution, and a new hope for the future of the country, ordinary South Africans pick up the threads of their ordinary day-to-day lives. In these stories Karodia explores lives and relationships in the new South Africa from the perspective of Indian, African, and European characters.

 

“…riveting…palpable and heart wrenching…”

The Globe and Mail

“Karodia has taken the writer’s role to new heights in South Africa.”
—South African Review of Books

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661628 
Price: $13.95
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Alphabet Zen

(poems)

Bing He

 

Rooted in Zen, Taoism and traditional Chinese poetry, influenced by modern Western movements such as Surrealism and Expressionism, this poetry collection reflects the author's transfigurations and redemptions of life's drabness with imagination, harmonizing oriental wisdom with metaphysical sensibilities.

 

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770231
Price: $16.95
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  Interview

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Another Way to Dance

Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States

Cyril Dabydeen

 

This anthology contains some of the most active and dynamic voices of contemporary poetry written by Americans and Canadians of Asian background. The poetry has a wide-ranging appeal reflecting place and time. Bold clear imagery and motifs depict a changing North American landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity. Included are Canadians Joy Kogawa, Rienzi Crusz, Suniti Namjoshi, and Himani Bannerji, and Americans Arthur Sze, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Mura, Cathy Song.

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661598
Price: $19.95
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B

Behind the Face of Winter

H Nigel Thomas

 

A coming-of-age novel set in a Montreal in which immigrant youth totter on the edge of self-destruction and oblivion, in the face of brutal and racist police, an insensitive education system, and few prospects for the future. Thomas’s language is spare, and his crackling dialogue and use of patois can compare with the best in Caribbean literature.


“…a hard story, sometimes despairingly bleak, but it is also undeniably beautiful…worth reading – and rereading…”

—Quill & Quire

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661956 
Price: $16.95
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Belonging and Banishment

Being Muslim in Canada

Natasha Bakht

 

I

In this book a variety of Canadian Muslim voices address vital issues related to the question of living as Muslims in the Canadian social, legal, and political spaces. For example, what issues of integration and identity face young Muslims growing up in this country? Is there, in fact, a single Muslim identity? Has the Canadian government, under pressure due to the “war against terror,” failed to safeguard the rights of young Muslims? How does Canada’s tolerance of diverse cultures extend to the case of Muslims? What are the implications of the veiled voting legislation? Is worship in Islam compatible with the practice of science?
 
The contributors to this important and timely volume include,
Haroon Siddiqui, editor emeritus, The Toronto Star;
Anver Emon, professor of law, University of Toronto;
Carmela Murdocca, professor of sociology, York University, Toronto;
Sheema Khan, columnist, The Globe and Mail;
Ausma Khan, editor, Muslim Girl;
Karim Karim, Director of Journalism and Communications, Carleton University, Ottawa;
Anar Ali, author (fiction);
Rukhsana Khan, author (children’s books);
Arif Babul, professor of astronomy, University of Victoria, British Columbia;
Amin Malak, professor of English, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta.

CRITICISM
ISBN: 9781894770484 
Price: $25.95
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AVAILABLE
NOVEMBER 15, 2008
 
 

 

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Beyond Silence

Chinese-Canadian Literature in English

Lien Chao

 

From unappreciated railway workers facing institutional racism and neglect in the last century to national cultural figures of the present, the Chinese, like other coloured peoples of Canada, have made great inroads into the mainstream, which in turn has adjusted its self-image to accommodate diversity.

 

“…an important milestone in the evolution of Canadian literary studies”

Arun Mukherjee, York University

CRITICISM

ISBN: 9780920661697

Price: $21.95

 

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Blues from the Malabar Coast

Nalini Warriar

 

These twelve delightful linked stories begin in a small village on India’s Malabar coast. The Variyars are a traditional matriarchal family, their children are numerous and spoilt, and life revolves around the temple. The family and its fortunes are described through the perceptions of its various members, particularly the younger ones. “Blues from the Malabar Coast” describes the life of the family, dominated from dawn till dusk by the old grandmother in the kitchen . . . In “Greener Pastures” a young couple arrive in Quebec City, whose winters Ven adores and where Seema recalls the life of her family. In “Going Back” Seema returns for the cremation of her father.


“Beautiful and gripping stories written with a seasoned maturity.”

Austin Clarke

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661994 
Price: $18.95
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breathing for breadth

Salimah Valiani

 

The poems in this collection, in various sections, elaborate on the emotional experience of challenging and trying; explore the ways of accepting vulnerability, and drawing understanding from it; search for beauty in endurance; explore protest and resistance; and finally revolve around the idea of taking risk and learning and becoming through experiences larger than the self and beyond the personal.

 

“…a restlessness of spirit and mind . . . that shines through without succumbing to the usual romantic clichés.”

Ottawa Express

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770217 
Price: $16.95
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C

Canada Geese and Apple Chatney: stories

Sasenarine Persaud

 

In this award-winning collection of stories, Persaud presents us once more with his unique vision of lives, both North American and Caribbean. Here are voices probing at differences which are and aren't: all threaded together by the ancestral India of the protagonists' imagination, the Caribbean of their childhood, the Toronto or New York of their recent years, presented in a style inspired by an ancient tradition in which storytellers move easily in and out of stories and time and history

 

“Persaud’s breathtaking narrative demonstrates its strong affinity with the work of Austin Clark. Here, almost inscrutable demotic slang, once penetrated, reinforces Persaud’s social commentary and nimbly pits self-ironizing postmodernism against the timeless values of narrative.” —The Globe and Mail

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661727 
Price: $15.95
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Cape Town Coolie

Reshard Gool

 

There is no morality left but that of the tiger: brute force.

It is 1948. The Afrikaaner Nationalists are poised to introduce the racist policy of apartheid into South Africa. Their plans include the conversion of District Six in Cape Town into an exclusively white residential district, and the removal of its current residents. As profiteers and politicians converge upon this slum area, its threatened residents valiantly put up a fight. Henry Naidoo is drawn into the fight. Naidoo, a highly principled yet gentle Indian lawyer, realizes that the struggle against apartheid is no ordinary fight for justice. It calls for a brutality he is not equipped with.

 

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661093 
Price: $12.95
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Caribbean Blues and Love's Genealogy

Dannabang Kuwabong

 

In this new collection of poetry, Kuwabong shows a maturity of voice and a larger poetic vision to celebrate love—love for the people of the Caribbean and love between lovers.

In the first part of this collection the love that is celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection with the poet’s African ancestors who were taken captive and sent to the Caribbean. But the focus is not on the brutality of their enslavement, though that is the guiding principle that informs the poetic voice. The poems perform a retrospective search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a seeker of a poetic understanding of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean.

In the second part, Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze of relationships complicated by expectations and disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario especially provides the social and physical landscapes that initiate the personae’s responses to love made tricky by the extreme challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of extreme tenderness that bind the relationships.

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770507 
Price: $16.95
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The Chinese Knot
and other stories
Lien Chao

In this new collection, award-winning author Lien Chao weaves together these emotionally charged short stories focusing on Chinese immigrants in Toronto’s multiracial neighbourhoods.

In Chinatown and mixed neighbourhoods, in condos and tenements, in public parks and in college, the protagonists of these stories find love, face loneliness, confront generational crises, and overcome racial stereotypes as they evolve and grow in this exciting, ever-changing multicultural society.
 
 
 
 

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770439 
Price: $18.95
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Closed Entrances

Canadian Culture and Imperialism

Arnold Harrichand Itwaru and Natasha Ksonzek

 

A tough, hard-hitting look at Canadian cultural institutions that places them in the continuous tradition of the Western imperialistic enterprise that dominated the third world and now dominates immigrant culture in the West.

 

“Arnold Itwaru invites us to re-examine our literary-critical proprieties and join him in a quest to create a discourse that will open up these avenues of inquiry. Canadian literature deserves to be taken this seriously.” —Books in Canada

CRITICISM
ISBN: 9780920661253 
Price: $14.95
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Configurations of Exile

South Asian Writers and their World

Chelva Kanaganayakam

 

Interviews with some of the major South Asian writers from across the globe, including Vikram Seth, Tariq Ali, David Dabydeen, Shashi Tharoor, Bapsi Sidhwa.

 

INTERVIEWS
ISBN: 9780920661475 
Price: $16.95
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Consensual Genocide

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

 

This long-awaited first collection of poetry by queer Sri Lankan writer and spoken-word artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is full of the stories we’ve been waiting for. Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka’s civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high femme rebellions. Consensual Genocide celebrates our survival and marks our rebel memories into history.

 

“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's words leap off the page–urgent, sumptuous writing that demands, and deserves, a wide audience. I'm listening.”
— Anna Camilleri, author of I Am a Red Dress,
editor Red Light and Brazen Femmes

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770293 
Price: $16.95
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D

Dancing in the Dust

Kagiso Lesego Molope

 

It is the turbulent 1980s in apartheid South Africa, when even the ordinary life is full of danger and uncertainty. What will tomorrow bring? Tihelo, a thirteen-year-old girl, lives with her older sister Keitumetse and their mother Kgomotso. Kgomotso works as a maid for a white household in the city and has to depend on the neighbours to keep an eye on the girls; one day she does not come home.

Dancing in the Dust is a moving story of growing up in a fearful, oppressive society, where the only comfort for the young is dream and romance, and the only free option that of rebellion.


“. . . cinematic in clarity . . . Molope makes her reader see and understand . . . feel the enormity of apartheid’s atrocity.”

The Globe and Mail

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770019 
Price: $18.95
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Dark Antonyms and Paradise

The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz

Chelva Kanaganayakam

 

The poetry and prose of Rienzi Crusz are about many things—exile, identity, family, religion, politics, and racism—and this work is an attempt to demonstrate that the various facets are a result of a holistic vision that transcends narrow labels. Crusz is best known in Canada as a diasporic writer, committed to exploring the complexities of living between and among two worlds. This study goes beyond binary formulations to argue that while such markers are necessary, a full understanding of the poet's achievement requires that personal history, the political context of migration, poetic influences, and readership in Canada be taken into account. A carefully researched and definitive study, Dark Antonyms and Paradise offers an insightful reading of the work of a major Sri Lankan Canadian poet.

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661680 
Price: $15.95
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Divine Elemental

Raywat Deonandan

 

Raised abroad in the west, Kalya returns to her ancestral village in India, and into her life arrives an odd Greek Canadian entomologist come to study the quixotic fig wasp, native to the village's peculiar ecosystem.  His name is Iskandar Diamandi and he is obsessed with the Indian march of Alexander the Great.  In the life histories of both Alexander and the wasp, Iskandar sees hidden universal truths and his own roadmap to Destiny. 

This tale of romance between unlikely lovers explores the divides between science and religion, East and West, male and female, ancient and modern, and the extent to which perception defines reality.

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770088 
Price: $18.95
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Domains of Fear and Desire

Urdu Stories

Muhammad Umar Memon

 

Urdu stories by some of the best and most renowned writers of the language, brought to the English reader in accurate modern translations.
 

 

“Superb... the 21 stories are both exotic and accessible.”

—The Globe and Mail 

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661215 
Price: $15.95
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Downfall by Degrees and Other Stories

Abdullah Hussein

 

Downfall by Degrees takes the reader on a journey that explores the nature of alienation and exile. The drawing rooms of Lahore's high society, the ghettos of Britain, an estate in the Pakistani countryside, the bedroom of a beautiful woman—these are the settings for these stories of love and identity, longing and becoming, exile and return—stories that probe with masterful precision and exquisite balance the condition of the modern man at odds against himself. 

FICTION
ISBN: 9780920661024 
Price: $11.95
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Drums of My Flesh

Cyril Dabydeen

 

In a central park in Ottawa's Sandy Hill, Gabe, an immigrant from Guyana (South America), explores the past in the company of his young Canadian-born daughter. But this novel goes beyond the traditional innocence to reality plot, as it also embraces a quest for spiritual beingness in a compelling setting fraught with irony. Grounds shift as characters come fully to life; tropical and temperate zones merge; the past and present form intermittent shadows. Gabe's story of growing up in an Indian family struggling to live traditionally in faraway Guyana, and Christian, Hindu and Muslim worlds come together, as the plot unravels, and we continually move back and forth faced with new realities, new awakenings.

". . . a beautifully rendered, intellectually challenging, and deeply satisfying addition to Dabydeen’s oeuvre."
Dr Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Ryerson University

Winner of the 2006 GUYANA Prize - the Best book of fiction

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770255 
Price: $18.95
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Dying in a Strange Country

Tahira Na