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Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China

Guy Delisle

The follow-up graphic novel to the acclaimed Pyongyang: A Journey to North Korea
Shenzhen is entertainingly compact, with Guy Delisle’s observations of life in a cold urban city in southern China that is sealed off from the rest of the country by electric fences and armed guards. With a dry wit and a clean line, Delisle makes the most of his time spent in Asia overseeing outsourced production for a French animation company. By translating his fish-out-of-water experiences into accessible graphic novels,Delisle is quick to find the humor and point out the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. Yet he never forgets to relay his compassion for the simple freedoms that escape his colleagues by virtue of living in a Communist state.
Maggie Cassidy

Jack Kerouac

Written in 1953, published in 1959 (after the 1957 publication of Kerouac's On the Road made him famous overnight) and long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town is one of Kerouac's most accessible works.
The Tin Flute (New Canadian Library)

Gabrielle Roy

The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding, this moving story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love.

An affecting story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during the Second World War, The Tin Flute won both the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Fémina of France. The novel was made into a critically acclaimed motion picture in 1983.
Kamouraska

Anne Hebert, Anne H\xe9bert

Translated into seven languages, Kamouraska won the Paris book prize and was made into a landmark feature film by Claude Jutra. A classic of Canadian literature by the great Québecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnières: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor. Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love.
My New York Diary

Julie Doucet

It's 1991 and Julie Doucet abruptly packs her bags and moves to New York City. Trouble follows: a jealous boyfriend, insecurity about her art, worsening epilepsy, and a tendency to self-medicate with booze and drugs. One of D+Q's backlist best-sellers comes back with a new cover design by legendary cartoonist Julie Doucet.
In the Shadow of the Wind

Anne Hebert

On a hot summer night in 1936, Olivia and Nora Atkins go for a stroll along the beach in Gaspé. They never return. When the body of one of them is washed ashore days later, the tiny community of Griffin Creek is electrified. The teenagers have been murdered. But by whom?
The Road Past Altamont

Gabrielle Roy

First published in French in 1966, The Road Past Altamont pierces to the heart of a child's world, craeting a delicate, yet substantial network of impressions, emotions, and relationships. In her writing, Gabrielle Roy allowed "nothing extraneous or false to stand," according to the translator, Joyce Marshall. The literary style of Roy, whose fiction reflects her childhood on the Canadian prairie, has often been compared to that of Willa Cather.

The Road Past Altamont takes a sensitive French-Canadian girl, Christine, from childhood innocence to maturity. Four connected stories reveal profound moments during her early years in the vastness of Manitoba. Christine's testament to Grandmother's creative power, her great adventure with an old gentleman at Lake Winnipeg and her clandestine one with a crude family of movers, her journey through time and space with aging Maman—all these characters and events convey Gabrielle Roy's preoccupation with childhood and old age, the passage of time and mystery of change, and the artist's relation to the world.
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

Gaetan Soucy

Alone with their bullying father on a vast estate, a sister and brother speak a language and inhabit a universe of their own making. When the old man commits suicide, they are forced into contact with the villagers and their cloak of romance and superstition quickly falls away to reveal shocking truths. Balancing naiveté with carnality, Soucy employs his signature playfulness, plot twists, and fascination with guilt, cruelty, and violence in a narrative tour de force where nothing is quite what it seems.
Les Belles Soeurs: (Revised)

Michel Tremblay

Michel Tremblay's classic joual play. Cast of 15 women. "A tart but human satire on Canadian life and aspirations". -- Vancouver Sun
The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

Michel Tremblay

Tremblay's first novel is an affectionate and funny chronicle of the lives of a family in its community. "A comic tour de force covering one day in the life of a Montreal street". -- U of T Quarterly
The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

Michel Tremblay

Tremblay's first novel is an affectionate and funny chronicle of the lives of a family in its community. "A comic tour de force covering one day in the life of a Montreal street". -- U of T Quarterly
Vaudeville!: A Novel

Gaetan Soucy

In Vaudeville! no one is who he or she appears, including Xavier, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary. After Xavier falls into a hole, he suffers bizarre humiliations and eventually loses his job. Soon he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show in which violence and ugliness blend like a cartooni with comedy and music. Vaudeville!, Gaétan Soucy's fascinating tableau, dares us to look into the darkest sides of the human experience.
The The Complete Poems of Emile Nelligan (French Writers of Canada Series)

Emile Nelligan

This edition of Nelligan's poems, with a critical introduction by the editor and translator, is the first complete translation of Nelligan's poetry from its original French. Its publication has been authorized by the Emile Nelligan Foundation. With this book the author hopes to persuade the reader that Emile Nelligan, "the most brilliant and original of the poets of the Ecole Littéraire of Montreal," was also the finest Canadian poet of the nineteenth century. In this view he is seconded by the American critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote: "The accepted idea [in Canada. . . is that the poetry of English Canada is excellent and better than their fiction, and it irritates them to be told that the best Canadian poet was French."
La Sagouine

Antonine Maillet

The premise is deceptively simple: a dirt-poor charwoman and former prostitute leans on her mop and tells her life story. But what a story! As she reminisces and rants, telling stories about herself, her friends and neighbours, the priest and his church, and every other aspect of life in her village, she is actually telling the story of Acadie. More than 25 years after its first publication in English, La Saguoine is available once again, this time in a new translation. Wayne Grady, one of Canada's most distinguised translators, faithfully recreates Acadian speech for an English readership in this new edition, bringing out the cultural richness of the language as well as La Saguoine's strength of character and irrepressible humour. La Saguoine launched the careers of both Antonine Maillet and the actress Viola Léger. with sales of ver 100,000 copies, it brought the existence of Acadian literature to a wide and admiring audience. This new edition will introduce it once again to a new generation of English readers.
Lilies

Michael Marc Bouchard
A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (New Canadian Library)

Marie-Claire Blais

In her third and most powerful novel, Marie-Claire Blais explores, with sober compassion and realistic detail, a season in the life of Emmanuel, the sixteenth child of a poverty-stricken farmer’s family in rural Quebec.

First published in 1965, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel established Blais’s international reputation when it won the Prix France-Québec and the Prix Médicis of France. The novel has been translated into 13 languages.
La Poesie quebecoise des origines a nos jours (Typo)
My Most Secret Desire

Julie Doucet

“One of the most promising of the younger graphic novelists.” —Charles McGrath, The New York Times Magazine
Considered by many to be the most influential female cartoonist ever, Julie Doucet created an iconic body of work in the ten short years she solely devoted herself to her trailblazing comic-book series Dirty Plotte. Her comics are densely inked and detailed with a pulsating neurosis from a decidedly female point of view that set the comic-book world on its head when the series debuted. Doucet returns to comics after a five-year hiatus with a reworked edition of her dream journal My Most Secret Desire, complete with never-before-published material.
My Most Secret Desire is considered to be Doucet ’s most innovative work, exploring the longings, pressures, and exploits of the feminine subconscious. Nightmarish tales of pregnancy, menstruation, sex changes, and boyfriends haunt Doucet’s nocturnal psyche with a feverish and surreal pitch.
Sans Souci

Dionne Brand

A moving collection from one of the foremost Canadian writers of her generation.
Next Episode

Hubert Aquin

"First published in 1965 as Prochain Épisode, Hubert Aquin's Next Episode is a novel of its time, informed by the author's active participation in Quebec nationalist politics. In the novel, a young separatist writes an espionage story in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal prison where he has been detained. The book provides a searing first-person account of terrorism about to be perpetrated by the novel's narrator." -- CBC Radio, Canada Reads. A member of the FLQ idles away his time in a Montreal psychiatric hospital by writing a quasi-autobiographical spy thriller set in 1960s Switzerland. The volatile hero of this flamboyant novel within a novel reunites with his long-lost lover and fellow revolutionary "K" only to embark on a mission (on K's request) to assassinate a wealthy RCMP informer known as H. de Heutz. Twice, he is handed a perfect opportunity to complete his mission and twice, Hamlet-like, he falters and fails. Like Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Next Episode captures the mood of muddling desperation and hysteria experienced at the ground level of a terrorist operation.