A novel from the dark heart of early twentieth-century Alberta, featuring a new introduction by Dr. Lily Cho. A bully cattle rancher upends the lives of everyone he encounters and a pandemic makes those lives even more precarious. A full century after its first publication, Cattle remains a story of brutality. A curious Canadian mixture of Hardy and Steinbeck,Cattle is built on the deep contradictions of a settler ideology, asking readers to not look away from the many modes of violence bound up in Canadian history. Our Throwback books also give back: a percentage of each book’s sales will be donated to a designated Canadian cultural organization. Royalties from sales of Cattle benefit Central Alberta Women’s Emergency Shelter.

Madame Butterfly (1898) and A Japanese Nightingale (1901) both appeared at the height of fin-de-siecle American fascination with Japanese culture, which was in part spurred by the Japanese exhibits on display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. These two novellas -- usually dismissed by literary critics and scholars because of their stereotypical treatment of Asian women -- are paired here together for the first time to show how they defined and redefined (often subversively) contemporary misconceptions of the "Orient." This is the first reprinting of A Japanese Nightingale since its 1901 appearance, when it propelled Winnifred Eaton to fame.

John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly introduced American readers to the figure of the tragic geisha who falls in love with, and then is rejected by, a dashing American man. Although Long emphasized the insensitivity of Westerners in their dealings with Asian people, the self-annihilating, ever-faithful Cho-Cho-San typified Asian subservience and Western dominance in ways that audiences continue to find appealing even today. Eaton's A Japanese Nightingale, in contrast, has been long forgotten. Yet it provides present-day readers with a fascinating counterimage of the suicidal geisha: Eaton's heroine is powerful in her own right and is loved on her own terms. Eaton's novel is also significant for its hidden personal nature. Although she wrote under the Japanese pen name of Onoto Watanna, Eaton was half Chinese. Living in a society that was virulently anti-Chinese, she used a Japanese screen for her own problematic identity.

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry. In "Me: Book of Rembrance "her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora's search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton's reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry. Despite the silence of the text, "Me: A Book of Rembrance " reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, "I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored," she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America's Anglo preference.