National Network for Equitable Library Service

Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics seeks to dislodge the often unspoken white universalism that underpins literary production and reception today. In this personal and thoughtful book, award-winning author Wayde Compton explores how we might collectively develop a poetic approach that makes space for diversity by doing away with universalism in both lyric and avant-garde verse. Poignant and contemporary examples reveal how white authors often forget that their whiteness is a racial position.

Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, and dissident art in the Soviet Union, among myriad other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design. In Tabula Rasa, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he began but never completed or published.

Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by: TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly. As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril.

This "celebration of the world of books" (Kirkus) is "a real page turner!" (Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan) that "feels like a love letter" (USA Today) to booksellers and librarians - as told to the greatest storyteller of our time, James Patterson. To be a bookseller or librarian...You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates "book joy" by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, "You've got to read this.

A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska's personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation's collective view of the world.

Systematic, practical, complete - an essential resource for anyone who works with words. Proofreaders are like goalkeepers: the last line of defence against mistakes that slip past their hard-working teammates. While proofreading is obviously not the only important job in the writing process, it is a necessary one - last, but definitely not least. The best proofreaders know that efficient and precise proofreading requires more than grammatical and mechanical expertise.

In Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions, Jon Gordon makes the case for re-evaluating the theoretical, political, and environmental issues around petroleum extraction. Doing so, he argues, will reinvigorate our understanding of the culture and the ethics of energy production in Canada. Rather than looking for better facts or better interpretations of the facts, Gordon challenges us to embrace the future after oil. Reading fiction can help us understand the cultural-ecological crisis that we inhabit.

We look around and feel as if book culture as we know it is crumbling to dust, but there's one important thing to keep in mind: as we know it. What happens if we separate the idea of "the book" from the experience it has traditionally provided? Lynn Coady challenges booklovers addicted to the physical book to confront their darkest fears about the digital world and the future of reading. Is the all-pervasive internet turning readers into web-surfing automatons and books themselves into museum pieces?

Twenty-six writers in Canada were asked to contribute pieces of original work describing how they see writing today. From Atwood's opening, through writing from Indigenous writers, the reader is given a sense of how twenty-seven of the country's finest writers see their world today. With an introduction by the editors, Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Tessa McWatt.