A three-act play set
in Winnipeg in the late seventies, an Indian immigrant
family (the Bharves), are on the brink of coming apart due to a
clash of values and ambitions. Sharad (the father), a former
scientist, works as a real estate agent; Savitri (the mother) is
a teacher; Veejala (the aunt) is a frustrated scientist at the
university. Jyoti (the daughter) has a white boyfriend and will
probably move out. A crisis occurs as Veejala announces that she
is going back to India and Jayant (the son) is packing to go off
to Montreal. A phone call comes during this tense situation.
Uma
Parameswaran was born in Madras and grew up in Jabalpur, where her
father was a Professor of Physics. She received her B.A. from Jabalpur
University and her M.A. in English and her diploma in Journalism from
Nagpur University. She was a Fulbright Scholar and received an M.A. in
Creative Writing (Indiana University) and a Ph.D. in English (Michigan
State University, 1972).
She has lived in Winnipeg, Canada since 1966. She is currently a
Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg . She is married to a
mathematician and they have one daughter.
. . . an effective
examination of all the issues that immigrants face. It would be an
effective catalyst for discussion in today’s high schools which are full
of youth from every continent.
—
Harriet Zaidman, CM: Canadian Review of Materials
DRAMA / SOUTH ASIAN
ISBN
978-1-894770-35-4
Price: $16.95
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This collection of essays
covers a broad range of topics concerning Tamil culture all over
the world. Tamils, originating in South India and Sri Lanka,
constitute a large part of the diasporic South Asians in Canada,
as well as the United States, Australia, and Europe. This book
is therefore of special relevance to the concerns of
multiculturalism and globalization.
Featuring essays by, Layne
Little, Archana Venkatesan, Susan Schomburg, Anand Pandian, E Annamalai,
V Geetha, Ravi Vaitheespara, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Joseph A
Chandrakanthan, and R Cheran
R Cheran. Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, University of Windsor.
Darshan
Ambalavanar. Has recently completed his PhD in the Study of Religion
at Harvard University.
Five women gather every
Friday night to discuss their writing lives. Isabel, returning home,
where the writing circle are to meet, is attacked in her car at gunpoint
and raped. But she manages to turn the gun on her attacker and shoot
him. In coping with the killing, the disposal of the body, and the
breakdown and recovery of Isabel, we learn about the intersecting
personal lives of the women—Isabel, Carmen, Jazz, Beauty, and Amina, all
successful professionals in today’s South Africa. And when the body is
discovered, and the identity of the attacker revealed, all their
stereotypes fall away. The novel is narrated by all five women in their
individual styles.
Rozena
Maart was born and raised in District Six, Cape Town,
South Africa, and moved to Canada in 1989. In 1992, Maart won the
Journey Prize for Best Short Fiction in Canada. She has a PhD from the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the University of
Birmingham and currently lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and Guelph,
Ontario.
Maart writes with
self-assuredness . . . [A] competent and trustworthy writer.
— Books in Canada
The Writing Circle
is a beautifully written, heartbreaking piece. If your book club is
looking for a book to spark meaningful conversation and bring awareness
to the group, no matter where you live, The Writing Circle
will deliver that and more. — Diane, carp(e) libris
FICTION
ISBN 978-1-894770-37-8
Price: $20.95Amazon can
usBarnes & Noble
us
Chapters.Indigo
canIndependent
canus
Listen to a reading
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Recorded by CHRY FM)
When at age 51, Joshua Éclair—victim of a pygmalianism gone
awry—emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must
explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must
undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this
pass. This is the gripping story of a man’s search for sanity
set in the fictional Caribbean Isabella Island and the various
places Joshua has fled to: Montreal, New York, Tallahassee,
London, Paris and Madrid.
This is a finely accomplished novel about a very modern
predicament: the malformed dysfunctional identity in the global
village.
H
Nigel Thomasimmigrated to Canada from the
Caribbean Island of St. Vincent. He has been a teacher with the
Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, and professor of
American literature at Université Laval. He resides in the
Montreal suburb of Greenfield Park. He is the author of:
Spirits in the Dark (novel),
Behind the Face of Winter(novel), Moving through Darkness (poetry), and
Why We Write: Conversations with African
Canadian Poets and Novelists.
Thomas balances admirably
the functions of the storyteller
and the social-realist observer of human behaviour.
— World Literature Today
"In lean, precise prose,
Return to Arcadia journeys through the unspeakable and
tabooed in the contemporary Caribbean, reminding us that the
brutalities of slavery and colonialism continue to raise
hell and fierce memory in the more secret realms of flesh
and desire."
—Thomas
Glave,
State University of New York
FICTION
ISBN 978-1-894770-38-5
Price: $20.95
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These evocative and complexly
intriguing poems suggest a variety of modern issues. Combining the
real with the imaginary, the logical with the intuitive, the mystical
and the mythical, and both oral and written traditions, they bring
together different geographical, temporal, and cultural spaces to
explore spiritual alienation and the nature of being, and the power of
language both to liberate and to oppress.
“‘Wearing glasses of water’ . . . refers to suffering and the very act
of crying. This suffering comes across in different ways: the suffering
of the poetic self, the loss of loved ones, the witnessing of
exploitation of humans by humans, animals by humans . . .”
— from a
statement by the author.
Irene
Marques holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, a Masters in French
Literature, and Bachelor of Social Work. She was born and raised in
Portugal and emigrated to Canada at the age of twenty. Irene has published
poetry, academic articles, and short fiction in various Canadian and
international journals.
POETRY
ISBN 978-1-894770-39-2
Price: $16.95
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edited by Gurbir Jolly
Zenia Wadhwani
Deborah Barretto
Once Upon a Time in Bollywood
presents an extravaganza of essays on globalization and contemporary Hindi
cinema (“Bollywood”). The wide-ranging analytic strategies in the
collection—including ethnographic self-reflection, literary comparison, economic
contextualization, and biographic study – bear witness to Hindi cinema’s
aesthetically elaborate and politically entangled treatment of postcolonial
concerns. Together, these essays invite fresh, critically informed engagements
with many of the key issues and creative tensions that continue to shape the
world’s most prolific film industry. For connoisseurs and critics of Hindi
cinema alike, Once Upon a Time in Bollywood presents stirring insights
into popular culture.
Featuring essays by: Susan Dewey, Monika Mehta, Radhika Desai,
Nitin Deckha, Jenny Sharpe, Ravinder Kaur, Usamah Ansari, Sonia Benjamin, Ahmad
Saidullah, Jennifer Thomas, and Florian Stadtler.
Gurbir Jolly is
currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities at York University. One day he hopes to
figure out what Leonard Cohen meant when he wrote, “There's a blaze of light in
every word.” He also aspires to make Bollywood adaptations of Stanley Kubrick
films.
Zenia Wadhwani works in the non-profit sector during the day and spends
her evenings and weekends loving and promoting South Asian arts and culture. She
is an active volunteer, a recipient of the Action Canada Fellowship and a
part-time PhD student in the Communication and Culture program at York
University.
Deborah Barretto works for a women's organization in Toronto. She
re-discovered the fun in Bollywood films with her ten-year-old son. In her spare
time, she reads and plays the piano.
CULTURAL STUDIESISBN 978-1-894770-40-8
Price: $25.95
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Martin Genetsch Arguing that globalization is no longer a
term defining only international cash flow but also includes the flow and
exchange of cultures, this book examines the works of three major Canadian
writers of South Asian origin and born in three different parts of the
world—MG Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. To demonstrate the
complex, textured identities of his authors of choice, Martin Genetsch shows
that these and other writers not only negotiate their Canadian identities
but also explore themselves in the cultures, histories, and geographical
locations they come from. The result is a fine study of an important and
defining aspect of Canadian literature.
Martin Genetsch has studied German, English, and Media Studies in
Germany, England, and Canada. His research interests include cultural
theory, postcolonial literature, Shakespeare, and poetry. Currently he
teaches Shakespeare at the University of Trier, and English and German to
highly gifted children at a secondary school in Germany. He has published
papers on postcolonial literatures, cultural theory, popular culture, and
didactic issues in foreign language teaching.
Bilingual English and Yiddish Peretz Markish
foreword by
Elie Wiesel
translated by Mary Schulman edited by Mary Schulman, Joan Braman,
and David Weintraub
This collection brings together in
English the work of one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets of the
Soviet Union. Suffused with a consciousness of suffering, homelessness, and
inevitably, the Holocaust, these modernist poems are meditative, elegiac, and
prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement,
war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish’s Eastern
European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and
universal.
Considered the “Jewish Byron” by many, Peretz Markish (1895–1952) was
born in Volhynia, Ukraine, and went on to write forty works in Yiddish, twenty
of which were translated into Russian. In 1921, in Warsaw, he formed the group
called The Gang, which struggled against realism in literature, and he coedited
the expressionist Khaliastre Almanakh, which contained illustrations by
Marc Chagall. His own poems expressed Jewish sorrow and hope. In 1926 he
returned to the Soviet Union where he produced his best-known works, including
those expressing Soviet patriotism and his grief at the extermination of the
Jews. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939, and executed in 1952, accused
of Jewish nationalism.
This book includes both the English translation and the original Yiddish text.
BILINGUAL POETRY
ISBN 978-1-894770-42-2
Price: $29.95
Songs to a
Moonstruck Lady
TSAR books can be
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