Bøger udgivet af McClelland & Stewart

Shortlisted for the 2024 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction AwardWith honesty, love, and humour, in this moving memoir, Kelly S. Thompson explores her relationship with her older sister, Meghan. Tested by addiction, abuse, and illness, the sisters’ relationship crumbles, only to be rebuilt into an everlasting bond.Kelly Thompson and her older sister, Meghan, are proof that sisterhood doesn’t always equate to friendship.    Growing up within a military family, the girls were close despite being temperamental opposites—Kelly, anxious and studious, looked to her big sister for comfort, and Meghan, who battled kidney cancer as a toddler, was gregarious and protective. But as she approached adulthood, Meghan spi­ralled into a cocaine and opioid addiction, and Kelly’s relationship with her sister was torn apart.    Their paths diverge as they live their own lives, and it is only when Meghan becomes a mother that she and Kelly tentatively face past hurts and reexamine what sisterhood really means. But their reunion is threatened when Meghan receives a shocking new diagnosis on a day that should be one for celebration. Now, as the family reels at the prospect of the biggest loss imaginable, Kelly and Meghan must share all that they can in the time that they have, using their mutual sense of humour to chart a course through the darkest of days.    At once funny and heartbreaking, Still, I Cannot Save You is a story about addiction, abuse, and tragedy, but above all, it is a powerful portrait of an enduring love between sisters.

"A great painter lies on his deathbed, synapses firing, writhing and reveling in pleasure and pain as a lifetime of chaotic and grotesque sense memories wash over and envelop him. In this bold and brilliant short work of experimental fiction by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Max Porter inhabits Francis Bacon in his final moments, translating into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. Writing as painting rather than about painting, Porter lets the images he conjures speak for themselves as they take their revenge on the subject who wielded them in life. The result is more than a biography: The Death of Francis Bacon is a physical, emotional, historical, sexual, and political bombardment--the measure of a man creative and compromised, erotic and masochistic, inexplicable and inspired."--

From the distinct and vibrant voice behind Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi comes the story of pursuing a dream and defying the odds, reminding us all of hockey's power to unite.BoninoBoninoBonino!Ask a hockey fan if they have heard the wonderfully electric call of Nick Bonino's overtime-winning goal from the 2016 Stanley Cup Final and they will almost surely answer with a resounding yes! That's because video clips of the Hockey Night in Punjabi broadcast immediately went viral, amplifying the profile of Harnarayan Singh, the voice behind the call. Growing up in small-town Alberta, Harnarayan was like many other kids who dreamed about a life within the sanctum of the game they idolized. There was only one small difference--he didn't look like any of the other kids. And when he sat down on Saturday nights to tune in to Hockey Night in Canada with the rest of the nation, he couldn't ignore the fact that the broadcasters or analysts didn't look like him either. Undeterred, Harnarayan worked his way from calling imaginary hockey games with his plastic toy microphone as a child, to funding secret flights from Calgary to Toronto every weekend in the early days of Hockey Night in Punjabi, to making history as the first Sikh to broadcast an NHL game in English. Full of heart, humour, and bursting with personality (and maybe a few family prayers for Wayne Gretzky), One Game at a Time is the incredible and inspiring story of how Harnarayan Singh broke through the longstanding barriers and biases of the sport he loves. But more than that, Harnarayan blends his unabashed love of hockey with a refreshing and necessary positive message about what it means to be a Canadian in the world, making him one of the most influential ambassadors of the game today.

An original, inventive--and visually stunning--exploration of place, identity, language, and experience from the acclaimed poet, novelist, and sound performer.GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALISTQWF A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY FINALISTThe poems in Kaie Kellough's third collection drift between South and North America. They seek their ancestry in Georgetown, Guyana, in the Amazon Rainforest, and in the Atlantic Ocean. They haunt the Canadian Prairie. They recall the 1980s in the suburbs of Calgary, and they reflect on the snowed-in, bricked-in boroughs of post-referendum Montréal. They puzzle their language together from the natural world and from the works of Caribbean and Canadian writers. They reassemble passages about seed catalogues, about origins, about finding a way in the world, about black ships sailing across to land. They struggle to explain a state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere, and they map the distances travelled.

Luke Gray is happy with the way things are. He's finally settled into married life with pragmatic, level-headed Julia, free from his family's absurdities and the chaos of his childhood. Even his mobile-bird factory seems less like a curse he can't shake. But things change when Julia decides they should have a baby... and nothing happens. A trip to the fertility clinic leads to loosened boxers, hormone injections, and some time alone with a plastic vial and a stack of dirty magazines. How could things sink so far, so fast?His male pride in shreds, Luke finds himself fending off intrusive questions about his sperm from his mother, and avoiding further involvement in his philandering father's affairs. And with Julia more and more a stranger determined to succeed, it's no wonder Luke begins to fantasize about a single, young employee's bee-stung lips. But when complications put Julia in the hospital, Luke is forced to confront his tangled feelings about family, children, and commitment, and decide what he will, or won't, do for love. The Bird Factory is a high-energy, darkly humorous novel about surviving your family and starting a new one, about the stupid things good men do, and why women put up with them. It introduces David Layton as a sharp observer of human fallibility and a striking new fictional voice.

In this beguiling collection of short stories and memoirs, first published in 1969, Mordecai Richler looks back on his childhood in Montreal, recapturing the lively panorama of St. Urbain Street: the refugees from Europe with their unexpected sophistication and snobbery; the catastrophic day when there was an article about St. Urbain Street in Time; Tansky's Cigar and Soda with its "beat-up brown phonebooth” used for "private calls”; and tips on sex from Duddy Kravitz.Overflowing with humour, nostalgia, and wisdom, The Street is a brilliant introduction to Richler's lifelong love-affair with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants.

A literary syncopation on the theme of food, Comfort Me With Apples earned Joe Fiorito rave reviews and enthusiastic fans when it was first published in 1994. One writer declared it was "a small miracle of prose.” A rich buffet of diverse short essays, Comfort Me With Apples is about the appetites of the soul as well as the body.Fiorito's range is wide: from the ingredients for the best chili dog in the world to the recipe for chicken soup for the courting soul; from the sharp portrait of a young boy's real hunger to the olfactory pleasures of a proper barbecue. His guests include an Inuk whom he takes to a sushi bar, an old man in pajamas, Julia Child, several daddies, a woman with a seductive appetite, and Hercules. You are invited to join them. B.Y.O.B.

"Memory opens for me through my body. I slip back because I catch a smell, hear a sound, or hold an evocative flavour on my tongue. But these single-sense glimpses of or gusts from the past are often fleeting. More compelling for me, more total, is when my whole body, the entire surface of my skin, and my muscles' movements connect me to my old self. Especially it is the movements of summer, when more of me meets the elements, while I am swimming, or feeling my bramble-scratched legs against hot rocks. Or when I am experiencing the lovely lassitude that fills me at the end of a long afternoon of sun and water as I stand slicing tomatoes for my supper, while corn boils, and sun falls in the window on a pile of raspberries in a bowl. All my senses, all, are alive.” - from I'll Tell You a SecretA delightful, beautifully written and thoroughly engaging story of coming-of-age in the 1950s that focuses on Anne Coleman between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, and her relationship with "Mr. MacLennan” (Canadian literary figure Hugh MacLennan), which played out in the summers in the village of North Hatley, Quebec, a picturesque resort that has been known to attract artists and writers and the upper-classes. In prose that is intimate, visual, and resonant with immediacy, Anne Coleman brings us back to summers in the 1950s, revealing the eccentricities of North Hatley and its residents, but most of all focusing on her special friendship with a man many years her senior. Independent, individualistic, sensually alert, as a young girl Anne Coleman did not fit the mould. Later, when Anne is eighteen, she leads a double life, one which follows the course of a romance with Frank, the dark, brooding European young man who has a strange hold over her, and the enigmatic Mr. MacLennan, whose own feelings for Anne suggest themselves to her in ways that are at once confusing, tantalizing, and deeply important. Along the way, the story also offers a wonderfully evocative portrayal of the 1950s, its sexual repressiveness and mores. The beautiful village of North Hatley comes alive in vivid ways. This is a unique coming-of-age story by a writer who writes sentences that cut to the bone.

At the end of the Second World War, a survivor of Auschwitz makes her way home to Hungary. Of all her family, only she and one sister have survived the camps; her young officer husband disappeared into Russia years before. Believing herself a widow, Shoshanna falls under the protection of an older man who, like her, lost everything in the Holocaust. She gives birth to this man's child by the time her beloved soldier returns, and she has to make a choice that will cloud her life - and her daughter's - ever after. Elaine Kalman Naves is the daughter whose earliest memories are of growing up with the consequences of that decision. Shoshanna raised Elaine with a torrent of family lore and all-too-vivid memories: the glamorous and eccentric aunts; handsome suitors and faithless husbands; death by order of the state and murder at the hand of a lover.Shoshanna's stories, haunting and vivid, were both a gift and a burden to her daughter. This is a lush and exotic family memoir set against momentous events yet timeless in its truth-telling lessons.

Women at Mid-life Tell the Truth about What Really Matters in Work, Relationships, and the Rest of LifeFrom the bestselling author of What Next? comes a deliciously frank and inspiring look at contemporary women and the life choices they make."I am feverish with all the possibilities,” says one woman, of her life now. "I lost myself, my sense of being because I had to conform to an alpha male world. I would come out of meetings sick to my stomach, not because of what had happened in the meeting but because of what had happened to me,” says another of her life in a corporate organization. So just what does this generation of women, the first to "have it all,” have to say for themselves today? Lots, it turns out. Rueful, funny, bitchy, wise, women at mid-life are tired of trying to please and continually biting their tongues. They have worked, married, had children, divorced, chosen to stay home, and learned lots of life's lessons — and they are more than happy to dish it all out for us.Through the skilful lens of renowned life coach Dr. Barbara Moses, the voices of over one thousand women are focused on the issues surrounding career, family, love and sex, friendship, and society. Through them, we see a brilliant snapshot of an entire generation, one that first tackled the glass ceiling and fought for equality at home and at work. We hear what they think of their lives now, of the choices they have made, what has made them happy, and what they would change for the second half of their lives. In Moses's capable hands, these voices become welcome advice from a host of friends, a road map for future choices. Dish is addictively readable and full of wisdom, and it will change the face of self-help. A sample of the voices in Dish:"My boss, the VP of HR, said, 'We really need to promote work-life balance in the company. Let's have a meeting Monday morning at seven-thirty to discuss it.'”"I'm proud of myself for ending the marriage . . . asserting my right to feel good about my life and being strong enough to do it.”"I practise Marxist (Groucho) monogamy. I wouldn't have an affair with anyone who would have an affair with me.”

The dazzling grace of A Strange Relief marks the debut of a singular young poet, Sonnet L'Abbé. In her delicately architected, but toughly envisioned poems, L'Abbé surveys the world and finds it both beautiful and unjust. She portrays that complex world with luxurious rhythms and a vocabulary that invites us to marvel at language's infinite possibilities. Whether she is writing about living in Korea in "Cheju Diary,” or about the Aral Sea in "Nomads,” she shows a keen sensitivity that can at once bear witness to the experience of the cultural outsider while vividly imagining the internal struggles of people whose stories are rarely heard within our borders. But these poems, which span the earth, are also literally about shaping that earth. A Strange Relief is very much about making: making who we are, how we live, and also about making poetry itself. L'Abbé's lyric sequences play on the ear with formal measures and headstrong lines that reinforce her thrillingly varied, but interconnected themes of politics, geography, and love.

Since time immemorial, the Porcupine caribou herd has ranged the Arctic in a 2,800-mile annual trek between its winter feeding grounds inland and its summer calving grounds on the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. In 2003, the caribou were joined on their spring journey, possibly for the first time ever, by two humans: wildlife biologist and writer Karsten Heuer and his wife, filmmaker Leanne Allison.Where the herd once roamed through unpopulated wilderness, it now treks from one country to another. This may well be its downfall, for under its calving grounds lies enough oil to keep the United States going for six months. Nowadays in Washington, that's considered a lot of oil, enough to justify imperilling this venerable herd. Determined to let the world know what will be lost if drilling takes place, Heuer and Allison accompanied the 123,000-strong Porcupine caribou for five months in an uncharted course over mountain ranges, through deep snow, and across semi-frozen rivers. En route, the heavily pregnant caribou and heavily laden humans alike were stalked by wolves and grizzlies newly awake from hibernation — and ravenous.An adventure story like no other, Being Caribou reveals the drama and beauty of the migration and brings home the enormity of the loss that will surely be felt if drilling goes ahead.

In this definitive and meticulously researched account of the Jewish experience in Canada, award-winning and critically acclaimed author Allan Levine documents a story that is rich, accessible, often surprising, and epic in its scope. Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it.Seeking the Fabled City is a story that unfolds over 250 years--from the decade after the conquest of New France in 1759, when small numbers of Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent arrived in British North America, through the great wave of Russian and Eastern European Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, to the present, in which Canada's large Jewish community, no longer hindered by the anti-Semitism of the past, is free to flourish. This is a chronicle of a people that takes place at hundreds of locales across the country--mainly in the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, but also in west coast and maritime villages and tiny prairie towns--in a riveting drama with a cast of thousands.Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it.