Toronto writer Barry Callaghan's new novel takes us on a tour of the life of a war photographer as he searches for his childhood love through a war-torn African nation. The story of Adam Waters' quest moves effortlessly, and artfully, around various times and places. Short scenes flow beautifully; each one reveals exactly what it needs--and no more--to give meaning to the succeeding one.

Barry Callaghan and Joe Rosenblatt, poets of perspicacity, pizzazz, and probity, have been combative, ecstatic compadres for over 40 years, with Callaghan donning an array of chapeaus, the man of belles lettres and hog flaneur-on-the-hoof from Smooth City, while Rosenblatt decades ago declared his unconditional allegiance to the buzzzers, chirpers, and purrers of the natural world, to remain at peace by his pond, aloof from the human horde. This most unlikely pair are conjoined by their shared dedication to the Word, to those rare moments of ascendent insight that are contained in bedrock language, to disputation about all matters of gravity and gullibility, and to the sharing of extraordinary paintings and ink drawings come from their nether surreal and noumenal worlds. Hoggwash, a convergence by epistle, is a tribute not just to their enduring friendship but to the life of the imagination itself. There is no record of correspondence like this, anywhere in the world.

Chronicling the struggle to put into words the horrors, insights, and tribulations that ultimately shaped a nation's character, this new/expanded edition (based on the original edition of 2001) presents both the major and "unknown" Canadian voices of World War I. Also contains a Preface, Foreword, Introduction, Afterword, Biographies, "Tommy's Dictionary of the Trenches" (A Lexicography), A Glossary, Selected Bibliography, and Questions for Discussion and Essays.

Celebrating three Russian literary greats-Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Voznesensky-this collection of their writing presents new translations of a combined 44 poems and includes both Russian and English text. Nearly 20 artworks-from colour monoprints to black-and-white collages, illustrations, and photographs-by Pushkin, Voznesensky, Amadeo Modigliani, Nikolai Tyrsa, and Claire Weissman Wilks are also included, opening an artistic dialogue with the poems and the reader. Alexander Pushkin is, perhaps, the greatest of Russian poets and considered the founder of modern Russian literature. Anna Akhmatova is Russia's singular female poet and perhaps the greatest in Western culture. Andrei Voznesensky was considered one of the most daring writers of the Soviet era, and before his death he was both critically and popularly acclaimed. These three master poets are brought together with masterful translations that engage their many complexities and are a must for personal or academic interests in Russian literature or poetry in general.

This is the story of 29-year-old Albie Starbach, a reclusive man who is the caretaker of a large rooming house, with a day job as a crossing guard. He is a caring man. But he is also a dangerous man… living in a world that to him is threatening because he feels he has been wronged, and he is resentful. He has wired the rooming house with dynamite, and every time he goes out, he sets a timer. He had better get back in time or the house will blow. Often, it is not easy to get back; out on the streets desperado cowboys in the trees talk to him, “working women” taunt him, the police accost him. His only companion is his legless mother who, in a wheelchair in their basement rooms, conducts day-long derisive arguments with the television, as if all those people were alive in her room. Living together at the bottom of their world, mother and son feed each other their rage, their righteous indignation, their sense of moral singularity. Determinedly alone, determinedly wounded, they are embattled, and their story is very much a story of our time, and the world had better watch out because this caretaker is prepared to take everyone with him.

A celebration of the whole of Claire Wilks' work and her presence in the world as a woman of great character and a singular artist, the book presents her career-with ample selections of her drawings, sculptures, and monoprints-including appearances in Rome, Stockholm, Jerusalem, Zagreb, New York, Venice, Mexico City and, of course, her home town, Toronto. In the company of her works are commentaries, critical responses, poems, photographs, and art by many who were touched by her career and personality.

When Things Get Worst is the story of a young woman from a world of horse dealers and stone pickers, religious zealots, and gratuitous killers. It is the evocative tale of those who, having lost everything else, retain their dignity in a declining, often dissolute world. Haunted by death and her local history, by religious ecstatics and cynics of the Word, by the repressed who are raping the countryside, as if farms were no more than gravel orchards, this young woman continues to move forward. In the face of the vengeance that others are wreaking on life, she never loses faith in herself, her family, or in the earth, on whose behalf she finally, in a moment of apocalypse, acts. Sensual and perfectly pitched in its depiction of thought in a language that is specific to the rhythms of southwestern Ontario, When Things Get Worst is a moving, lyrical testimony to the force of the human spirit.

Pauline tells her personal story of growing up through paradoxes and insights that blend social, religious, and moral textures. Her world is populated by people who turn to violence or sink into quiet despair--it is a world damned. Pauline, her family, schoolmates, teachers, and friends are driven by tempestuous individual imperatives and the social deprivation they encounter. Full of satire, fantasy, energy, and lyricism, this chronicle portrays a reality that neither poetry, nor dreams, nor Pauline's fantasies can weaken.