Straight Razor and Other Poems brings together Salvatore Ala's new poems and selections from his privately published broadsides. It is a beautiful and original collection. Both formal and lyrical, it is the work of a determined and committed craftsman.

Straight Razor and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

Ala, Salvatore

United States

Biblioasis

From Sarajevo, with Sorrow

Goran Simic

When Sprinting from the Graveyard was published in 1997, Goran Simic’s poems were severely altered out of the fear that they might offend Western sensibilities.” These newly translated poems restore all that is offensive, despairing and necessary to our understanding of war by capturing the poems’ original power and humanity. In addition, this collection contains both previously unpublished poems, written under the candlelight” of the siege, and new poems returning to the sniper’s alleys and bunkers of Sarajevo. From Sarajevo, With Sorrow is a disturbingly resonant, timely and important collection.

From Sarajevo With Sorrow

Simic, Goran

Literary

From Sarajevo, with Sorrow: Poems

These eight stories deal with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, war and its aftershocks prominent among them, where the reality is often much more surreal than fiction.

Yesterday's People

It is 1984. The latest recession is said to be over, and in the steel city of Hamilton, things are picking up. For Paul, however, an ex-rock guitarist and current art gallery attendant, life has slowed to the pace of a still life on a wall. He badly needs a jolt -- and he gets one. Soon after the arrival of an exhibition of Surrealist art, puzzles start to multiply around him. Before long, he is trying to find his way in a maze that includes a chess problem, violent death, Paul Klee, cocaine, bikers, a strip club and its art-patron owner, and a host of clashing egos and agendas in the gallery. And then there is Claudia, a young artist with a quick brush and a caustic tongue, who may know more than she is saying about the mysteries Paul is chasing. Catalogue Raisonné is a novel about the mystery of art and the art of mystery, and the power of both to awaken sleeping senses.

Catalogue Raisonne

Barnes, Mike

In this sparkling collection of stories drawn from the surreal edge of life, playful irony vies with more poignant evocations of solitude, mortality, and the dawn of sexual awareness  all bodied forth in a language that is precise, elegant, and immediate. Storytellers are liars, but as Picasso said, art is the lie that tells the truth,” and deceit is a motif here: lies of omission or commission, in words or in deeds, to gain love or repel it, and beyond, to what our lies tell of the rift between body and soul, dream and fulfillment: the essential, often comical ambiguity of human existence. What do we really want? What do we need? And what happens if  or when  we gain the objects of our desires? From the strange erotics of household appliances and grocery shopping, anguish of an unexpected haircut, curious negotiations with sex  including the mystically transformative power of a bikini  to the shock of a child’s first encounter with death, perverse seductions of imagination, tranced midnight zones of travel, and the dark revenge of a life unlived, this collection explores the borderland between inner and outer realities, creating a sharply etched portrait of fraught consciousness struggling for balance between the pains and sudden pleasures of being alive.

Bright Object of Desire

Adams, Michele

Contemporary

<div>First published in 1969, Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada remains as refreshing, innovative and important today as it has in every previous incarnation. Sophisticated, playful, crafted, sly, self-referential and extremely funny, it marks the beginning of a long and important, if unfortunately under appreciated, career by one of Canada's best humorists and innovative story-tellers.</div>

Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada

SMITH, RAY

Humor & Satire

"Engaging, stirring, and hard to put down."—The New York Times Book ReviewFirst published in 1979, Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood, a whimsical boy from the Florida backwoods whose shocking sexual awakening propels him into the world of murder and extortion that roils beneath the surface of 1950s America.

Lunar Attractions

BLAISE, Clark

"Early on in this rambling, easygoing account of his career, Mason mentions three outstanding classics of [the] subgenre: Charles Everitt's The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, David Randall's Dukedom Large Enough, and David Magee's Infinite Riches. The Pope's Bookbinder belongs on the same shelf."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

The Pope's Bookbinder: A Literary Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

MASON, David

Arts & Literature

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