National Network for Equitable Library Service

A collection of essays on women and aging from Canadian legend Sharon Butala In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she's grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic - and lettuce.

Ce qui est, est deux fois : une fois comme être générique, une fois comme être singularisé par ses manières. Mais tant que les manières d'être continuent de renvoyer à un être qui les possèdent, tant qu'elles ne sont pas substantialisées, hypostasiées, pour devenir le tout de l'être, la singularité se perd comme se perdent les vagues qui ne se soulèvent au-dessus de la mer que pour mieux y retomber. Pour saisir chacune d'elles dans la singularité de son roulement, il faut voler à l'océan sa substantialité pour la confier à la seule écume qui en déforme la surface.

Big Reader is a collection of essays about memory, identity, loss, and reading from one of Canada's finest essayists. Through every life experience -- from the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner's daughter, to discovering Toronto as an undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind -- Olding crafts exquisite, searingly honest essays about what it means to be a person, to be a woman, and to be a reader.

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America's leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer's work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures.

For the first time, bestselling novelist, columnist, and humorist Lesley Crewe's finest newspaper columns are collected in one place. Not merely razor sharp, Lesley's wit is also ocean wide, taking in everything from the humiliations of breast pumping to the indignities of aging, from the frantic excess of holiday preparations to the homey irritations of a long marriage. As precise in her observations as Jane Austen and as fractious on occasion as Oscar the Grouch, Crewe also has a sweet, tender centre, taking us from a hearty laugh to a good cry in a single paragraph.

An exploration of the earth's last wild frontier, filled with high-stakes stories of people and places facing an uncertain future. On a life raft in the Mediterranean, a teenager from Ghana wonders whether he will reach Europe alive, and whether he will be allowed to stay. In the North Atlantic, a young chef disappears from a cruise ship, leaving a mystery for his friends and family to solve.  A water-squatting community battles eviction from a harbour in British Columbia, raising the question of who owns the water.

This eclectic collection of stories shares with readers many other aspects of Robert's professional and personal experience. He tells a chilling story of being the first RCMP officer at the crash site of Air Canada Flight 621 in 1970, arriving to find the DC-8 and all of its 109 passengers and crew disintegrated beyond recognition. Another tale reveals Robert's long-time association with Frenchie, a Mi'kmaw man who gives him, and readers, an up-close-and-personal lesson in Mi'kmaw traditions and legends.

My Heart Is Not Blind: On Blindness and Perception is a collection of stunning portraits of blind and visually impaired people taken by photographer Michael Nye. Each image is accompanied by an intimate story told by the subject concerning his or her experiences and unique perspective.

“The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied,” writes Jean Barman, “and it is up to each of us to act as best we can.” The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class.

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for "stranger." Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet.