The Only-Good Heart

Goobie, Beth

Pedlar Press

Mouthing the Words

By turns harrowing and hilarious, this adroitly narrated winner of the Toronto Book Award re-creates the world in the imagination of Thelma. It's a world in which she can escape some of her more painful childhood realities, like those games her father likes to make her play, where he's the boss and she the naughty secretary. And her mother so fiercely favors her younger brother, the cherubic Willy, that Thelma finds herself perpetually in emotional exile. No wonder Thelma asks practically every adult she meets to adopt her. Along Thelma's bumpy way from a rural English village to Canada to a law degree at Oxford, she meets many potential parents and even makes some friends, but it is with the companions of her fertile imagination&#8212;with the scaredy-baby Janawee, moody and timid Ginniger, and big, strong, stoic Heroin&#8212;that Thelma finds comfort. With them, too, she loses an already tenuous connection to reality, though ultimately Thelma's spirit and humor prove to be as indomitable as her wit. "Moving and comic at once. . . . Hallucinatory, hilarious, and haunting."&#8212;Boston Globe "Prickly, unsentimental. . .a portrait of terrible comic humanity."&#8212;New York Times Book Review "Mesmerizing. . . . Lush, visceral prose . . . rings with an authority rarely found in first novels."&#8212;Washington Post Book World "A novel of astonishing power . . . . An instantaneous classic."&#8212;Baltimore Sun "Elegant . . . sings with an almost Victorian delicacy and sophistication."&#8212;San Francisco Chronicle

CAMILLA GIBB

The Girls Who Dream Me

Beth Goobie

Animal Life In Bucharest is Toronto poet John Degen's debut collection. In 1994 Degen and his Romanian-born wife at the time travelled in Eastern Europe; these resultant poems investigate the complex changes possible in a world and in an individual life. Edited for the press by 2006 Trillium Poetry Award winner Kevin Connolly.

Animal Life in Bucharest

John Degen

Nominated for the 2001 Trillium Book Award, Charisma is the first novel of celebrated Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. Christakos's work has been called "provocative, original and dazzlingly intelligent." A lush, language-centred novel tracing themes of female subjectivity, mothering and bisexuality.

Charisma

Margaret Christakos

"These Personal Effects add up to a life, in all its clutter and grace, its fear and anger and desire. Bloom's voice is a torch, sending its searing, fearless light into the well of self. She knows the well is bottomless, and dangerous. She goes in anyway." - Stephanie Bolster

Personal Effects

Ronna Bloom

"With canny prose, Gaunce demonstrates both the fundamental aloneness of each of us and the miracle of civilized connection we manage moment to moment while the inner self toils away." - The Globe and Mail -- "A wonderful first novel, a true enactment of a certain Canadian life. Highly recommended." - Geist Magazine

Rocket Science

Julia Gaunce Beth Follett

Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America, by artists Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey, is a continuation of their incredibly popular Rangers program, an on-going performance program that questions both the use of the natural world as a model for heterosexuality and culturally held biases about recreation. "Lesbian National Parks and Services was founded in 1997 to increase awareness and sensitivity to our complex, varied and sometimes fragile lesbian ecosystem," the Rangers write. The Field Guide, with its allusion to field guides of the 1050s, is an illustrated compendium of lesbian flora, lesbian fauna and lesbian survival skills.

Lesbian National Parks & Services Field Guide to North America: Flora, Fauna & Survival Skills

Dempsey, Shawna

Humor & Entertainment

The poems in Alice Burdick's debut poetry collection, Simple Master, explore what is required of us to remain human in a strange new world. Burdick focuses on a "silent centre" surrounded by the noise of the city or landscape. The poems investigate language, using colloquial words uncommonly, as the poet hears them. Coherent, ironic, often humorous narratives emerge from the poems' multilayered lines.

Simple Master

Alice Burdick

Rachel Vigier's debut collection is a book of poems about disappearance. The poems are based on the grief enacted through the unsolved disappearance of the poet's sister and Vigier's witnessing of the sudden disappearance of thousands of ordinary people during the terrorist attacks on New York City. This remarkable first work is written from the wrenching uncertainty of shadowy loss and explores both what is missing and what remains.

On Every Stone

Literature & Fiction

Rachel Vigier

Poetry

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Books by Pedlar Press