Bøger udgivet af Guernica Editions

From 1980 to around 2000, Dean Brownrout had an uncanny habit of finding himself at the forefront of cultural shifts--from the emergence of new wave and thrash metal music to the dawn of the commercial internet. No Big Deal is a very humorous and nostalgic journey through a seminal time in the music industry, told in a style reminiscent of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Its unfiltered view into this transforming era includes a glimpse at America's technological influence and culture. And, of course, no show business memoir is complete without appearances by The Rolling Stones, Grace Jones, Bob Dylan, the Beastie Boys, models, actors, and countless other fringe characters and luminaries.

Voice Lessons is a collection of personal essays about a shy introvert's struggle to find her voice--as a singer, a writer, a mother, and a human being. Using traditional narrative and hybrid forms, debut author Eve Krakow explores the early loss of her mother, her innermost anxieties as a young adult, the building of family, the push and pull of heritage and tradition, and more. Juxtaposing shyness in life with boldness on stage, these stories expose the deep-seated need for human connection and belonging.

After witnessing a kidnapping in gritty Piraeus, Greece, a Swiss ex-pat and ex-activist with an energetic five-year-old son vows to put the culprit, his swaggering partner, and the cop protecting them, out of business, relying on home-brew surveillance devices and a loose coalition of allies. All the while, an ethereal narrator -- the spirit of the boy's late father, denied entry to Paradise -- worriedly surveils them. He seeks to unite them with his long-lost brother, but lacks agency. Barely surviving her flash mob's climactic confrontation with the bad guys, our heroine learns that you never know who your friends are until you need them, and even then you still might not know... but that's okay.

Shakespeare Lied is Sky Gilbert's second rumination on Shakespeare to be published by Guernica Editions. It places 'the bard' at the centre of present day debates over 'political correctness.' James Baldwin said Shakespeare's goal was "to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle." Gilbert asserts Shakespeare is not just another dead irrelevant white guy, but that he-- in the tradition of the Greek rhetorician Gorgias, and the scandalous, pornographic poet Ovid -- was a magnificent, and quite intentional, liar. Shakespeare believed the purpose of art was not to teach, but instead to help us transcend traditional notions of truth.

It's an ordinary summer in the twenty-first century. There's a heat wave in Rome, where the poet has just set down her valises. What is she seeking amid the crowds of tourists, she, Italian-born, exiled to America, who speaks the language only haltingly? In the capital's streets, at the railroad station or the museum, an exuberant city life rubs shoulders with a thousand tragedies. Rome is a theatre of recurrent violence, the cinema where you are seated, apprehensive, watching The Double Feature of the Murdered Woman. For six months the poet wanders the city, alert to the phantoms passing by. This book could be the written record of her conversations with ghosts. It's a return to the crime scene, a renewal of vows, face to face with a haunting past: that of Italy, and the blood drenched story of women.

America. After December 7, 1941. Before May 17, 1954. Jim Crow is alive and well. Two women begin trips of discovery. MayBelle Washington, from St. Louis, sends her sons to all-black schools and advocates racial equality. Flo Maxwell, from an all-white Sundown town, travels to St. Louis for breast cancer treatment. She's cured of her physical ailment, but learns about other scourges. Sub-standard public housing. Pearl Harbor and World War II. Racial exclusion in the military. It takes only a traffic accident to bring apartheid American style to a full head. The damaged cars are the same color, but the drivers aren't. Which man should be arrested? MayBelle's son or a white man in Flo's hometown? And who's to decide?

This debut collection by acclaimed translator Sarah Moses is rooted as much in sound and language as it is in story. The 75 tiny fictions that populate Strange Water are evocative soundscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, landscapes, often magical and mysterious, sometimes unsettling. Each story is rooted in a single sentence--a dream sentence, a mistake sentence, a sentence uttered when the speaker thought no one was listening--whose tendrils reach into unexpected places. Moses's attention to the individual word and to sound is echoed in her attention to the physical presence of the line on the page. These compressed-to-bursting-point narratives--preoccupied with bad-mannered neighbours, misunderstandings, coincidences and serendipities, dream states, and subtropical climes--take place in constant movement: between languages, between homes, between continents.

The Sky Above is an engaging book that follows a long and colourful career of an award-winning poet, journalist and photographer intent upon spinning stories, whether they be as momentous as meeting up with Mother Teresa in the basement of a Detroit church or as ordinary as driving through winter storms to watch his sons play hockey.

A corporate worker abruptly quits his job to make the world's greatest mozzarella cheese; a widowed Bed and Breakfast owner dishes out advice along with spoonfuls of his deceased wife's last batch of jam to the suitor who buys a house sight unseen hoping the woman he loves will move in with him. There is the new mother who takes a lover right under her doting husband's nose, the young boy who flees one dangerous country to start a new life in another, and the transgendered son who discovers his mother's clairvoyance. The characters in these stories are not afraid to take tremendous risks. From El Salvador to Cape Cod to Antarctica, from a secluded Italian Snake Festival to a packed subway car to a World War II bomber, in this collection of stories men and women cling to ambitions, thwarted love, and misguided assumptions, as they dream to reinvent themselves, seek revenge, foresee the future, recapture that which has escaped their grasp, or merely survive. Fueled by passions and desires, they must choose between illusion and reality despite all repercussions.

Abandoned as a child, Melanie Forsythe seeks stability and belonging after her mom's boyfriend is left to raise her. Despite her raw deal, Melanie grows up to have a head on her shoulders and a strong bond with her stepdad. But her dream of having a family of her own is shattered when she suffers tragedy and betrayal. Forced to confront the kind of dysfunction that robbed her of a conventional upbringing, Melanie must choose between giving up on her dream of having a family or embracing a different form of motherhood.

Blending the everyday with the unexpected, Like a Trophy From the Sun is a book of poetic tableaus stirred, whipped and beaten together. Its ingredients include surreal dreamscapes, a pinch of gallows humour, and a wistful nostalgia for the here and now, along with the cracked shells of fragmented blessings. These untitled prose poems attempt to contemplate and articulate the extraordinary world we sleep through, dream in, and wake up to. A world of ghost towns, wrong numbers, eight-legged light bulbs, and broken sunsets, where "even dead leaves look and sound leaf-like if there's enough wind." The manuscript highlights the joy and bafflement of living in our bewildered mixed-up world.

From Syringa Vulgaris, or the lilac tree exploding into life only to expire in its prime, Syringa is a literary thriller set on New Year's Eve in Berlin where the labyrinthine story of a decades-long love affair is retold by an ex-journalist as he awaits his own assassination. The doomed couple's only living link is an AWOL German soldier named Hissel, hired to kill three people connected to the woman's disappearance, but his own disappearance months earlier becomes the missing puzzle piece as the clock ticks down to each character's fateful moments of atonement and brutal revenge.

Stripes, Stripes, Stripes & Stripes is a whimsical, quirky tale about two zebras, a donkey, and a zebra finch - all named Stripes - who are at odds with each other over their names and their identities. This unlikely foursome soon learn the meaning of inclusiveness, respect, and acceptance of others, thanks to a wise and diverse group of animals they meet on their journey to self-discovery and friendship.

Stanzas for a Travel Memoir. Southwest of Italy is an ode to the deep value of the things that are out of our control-history, place, emotion, coincidence, the community of friendship. The title refers to one of the most apparent intents of the text, which is to trace the relationship between Sardinia and the American Southwest, particularly in the layering of time and culture. Though this relationship is subtly played, even understated, because the book also aims at tracing deeper themes, such as those of hope, illusion, and cultural mediation. It is densely composed in a hybrid style, merging lyrical prose and travel essay. Narrative,

A sometimes satirical reflection on hope in a time of hopelessness, the poems in I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought use stubborn humour to grapple with the anxiety of moving forward during late capitalism. While many of the poems are set in Newfoundland, the book also echoes the universal experience of loss, leaving, returns, and never being able to return. The first section of the manuscript, titled "Some Disasters," introduces real and imagined catastrophes. The St. Lawrence tidal wave, the history of resettlement, and the Muskrat Falls debacle stand next to poems that live in an imagined future where the capelin refuse to roll and snow refuses to fall. The second section is titled "I dreamed I was an afterthought." Here, the eclectic poems turn to a more personal perspective of place, my struggles with mental illness, and a feminist exploration of familial relationships. In "Of No Returns," movement through time and space is tinged with the same lurking fear of irreversibility, a fear which has been amplified during the pandemic. There is a yearning for the "before times," a time which may or may not exist.

The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald's novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby's great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

In this dark comedy taking place over twenty-four hours, a blizzard pummels Toronto as a beloved high school teacher coerces his teenage student to assist in his violent suicide forcing the student, his best friend, the friend's bulimic mom, and a down-low cop to outrun each other, the storm, and the ghosts haunting them. I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley is a breathtaking and hilarious novel about the lengths people will take to erase themselves in order to matter.

The dozen stories in this collection chronicle the life of Karl Pringle, a wannabe philosopher who had once been enrolled in the graduate Philosophy program at the University of Toronto where he imagined himself as an Ubermensch, a Superman derived from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. But he was summarily dismissed from the program after punching out his academic supervisor. Now Karl lives in a decrepit apartment above a butcher shop in Toronto's Kensington Market, is unemployed and very much rootless. The stories in The Philosopher Stories follow Karl as he moves from one strange episode to another, none of which end well. Although Karl likes to think of himself as an Ubermensch, in the bleakest moments following his many mishaps, he seems to know better, that perhaps he is only fooling himself with his grandiose dreams. That he is nothing more than one of life's rejects, an out-and-out failure. Nuanced and multilayered, funny and yet achingly sad, these stories depict a young man grappling with life's big questions, including love, finding a place for oneself in an uncaring world, morality, success, and fate.

Howard O'Hagan was one of the first native-born westerners to make a mark on Canadian literature. The purpose of this collection of essays on the works of O'Hagan, edited by Sergiy Yakovenko, is not only to refresh scholarship on his best known work, Tay John, but also to break the vicious circle of ignoring O'Hagan's other works--his later novel The School-Marm Tree (1977) and his short stories and sketches, collected in Wilderness Men (1958) and The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station and Other Stories (1963). This volume offers two original articles on The School-Marm Tree, by Renée Hulan and Carl Watts, and Albert Braz's profound study of O'Hagan's Wilderness Men. Among the other contributors: Joseph Pivato, D.M.R. Bentley, Kylee-Anne Hingston, Jack Robinson, Sergiy Yakovenko, and something from Howard O'Hagan himself.

From the author of the international bestseller The Quincunx "Palliser's novel shares some superficial similarities with last year's Booker winner, Prophet Song - a family in crisis navigating an authoritarian regime - but is a more well developed and satisfying work." --The Guardian Set in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a well-intentioned man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide. Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy's pitiless hatred of the girl's community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside unlocks a darkness that threatens to derail them all. From the internationally bestselling author of The Quincunx (over a million copies sold worldwide), comes a deeply unsettling psychological novel about the hideous decisions that people are forced to make when living under tyrannical regimes.

The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father's glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.

Jamison Everett, a shy and lonely man with few friends, is a retired high school English teacher. When his artist sister, Monna, who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease, calls and asks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to leave his apartment in Minneapolis and temporarily relocate to her remote Montana town. Perhaps, in caring for his sister, he will find the friendship he longs for. But Monna's fiercely independent husband, Ben, has a different game plan. Parkinson's has robbed Monna of her ability to paint, and if the doctors won't cure her, then by god he'll do it -- by sheer force of will. Jamison, summoning his courage, offers to help, and an alliance is born. Yet neither man can know how much their nascent friendship will ask of them. Only Monna senses what is coming.

Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old (Born, Not Made) to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways (Blasting Molly Rockets), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother's wish to protect her sister (Able to Pass) to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank (Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish), these stories pulse with Botha's signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity (Soulmates) to those who hold on at all costs (Dark and Lilac Fairies). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.

Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor's poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child's visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.

This flip book is comprised of two novellas: In Sickness and In Health - Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be "normal". By age 45 she has a "normal" life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love. Yom Kippur in a Gym - Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can't accept her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, is planning suicide. Rachel worries about losing her job. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.

In experimental lit veteran Brian Dedora's third novel, prose fragments and narrative threads come in and out of focus as, on a winter's night, a reveller in an upscale Toronto restaurant begins the most dangerous of things: a journey into memory. Is he a narcissist or is he among the wounded? What is it to be gay in a small desert town and in the heart of a sprawling city? The Apple in the Orchard navigates the truths and half-truths of a traveller, a loner plunging through city streets and into the woods, a Canadian wrapped in the myths of the North and tangled in the snare-traps of the urban. As this layered, undulating novel explores class tensions, a family in disintegration, and how the effects of sexual abuse wind through generations, and while cameos by voyageurs, cowboys, Black Robe, and Grey Owl flicker to life and vanish again, the tragic story of the unnamed Her emerges in verbal snapshots.

A Blueprint for Survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, "Seeds," which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, "the beautiful cell."

Skater Girl is a collection of intensely personal essays, an archaeology of the self. Robin Pacific sifts through the midden of consciousness to find shells, potsherds, a broken piece of mirror. Themes of art, spirituality and social justice run like a current through otherwise disconnected pieces and fragments, many as short as one paragraph. Further, ideas about aging, loss and mortality colour many of them. The book is about the formation of Robin Pacific's many selves, about creativity, spiritual seeking, and the dream of a more equal society.