"This is not just a collection of poems and short stories; it is a granary of artistic abundance! For here, will you find a rich variety of masterfully crafted pieces in a range of style, including those that draw from the African oral storytelling tradition. It is a montage of pieces of literary art, curated in a manner that allows for the ‘strict grammarian’ forms of expression to coalesce with those given to poetic licentiousness."
Whichever your favourite genre is, this anthology of East African literature has delivered something that has not been served to readers in many years. It is a fitting gift to the lovers of literary art in this first quarter of the 21st century.
This is not just a collection of poems and short stories; it is a granary of artistic abundance! For here, will you find a rich variety of masterfully crafted pieces in a range of style, including those that draw from the African oral storytelling tradition. It is a montage of pieces of literary art, curated in a manner that allows for the ‘strict grammarian’ forms of expression to coalesce with those given to poetic licentiousness. The anthology’s poetry is rich and sundry, mirroring the diverse spectrum of literary expression to be found across the East African region. Verb repetition – a familiar linguistic form often used to create a sense of frequency or emphasis in many Bantu languages – is at play as the persona in Aquagasm playfully draws us into her romantic entrancement with nature.
She dip dips in the Ocean with her toes, Smack smacks the waves with her breasts Lick licks the sand with her fingers Point points at the sky with her nose
Ngonjera, a Swahili word for a conversational poem with more than one persona’s voice, comes to the fore in Who Will Marry Her? This conversational form, a characteristic of many an African poetry recital rooted in the oral poetic tradition, is more overtly recognizable in the opening line of Poetic Justice:
First wait I tell you!
The anthology’s short stories section features some of the finest writing yet, both in terms of form and meaning. Thematically, the writings cover a range of issues, from the societal to the personal. This way, you have terrorism juxtaposed with romantic cravings; political disenchantment residing side by side with justice and gender equality issues; sexual exploitation and human/family relations finding acres of space in both the prose and the poetry, and an unmissable glimpse into racial and ethnic issues. In some cases, the themes have a bearing on the style employed.
Whichever your favourite genre is, this anthology of East African literature has delivered something that has not been served to readers in many years. It is a fitting gift to the lovers of literary art in this first quarter of the 21st century.
- Josh Mali
Featuring:
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva • Lydia Kasese • Bigoa Chuol • Kagayi Ngobi • Raïs Neza Boneza • Sitawa Namwalie • Betty Kituyi • Josh Mali • Gervaz Lushaju • Laban Erapu • Julius Ocwinyo • Billy Kahora • Sam Okoth Opondo • Troy Onyango • Dennis Mugaa • Aress Mohamed • Dessale Berekhet • Alex Teyie • Lucky Grace Isingizwe • Barbara Oketta • Lilian Akampurira Aujo • Jameela Siddiqi • Derek Lubangakene • Rosey Ssembatya • Sophie Alal • Ayeta Anne Wangusa • Carey Baraka • Muthoni wa Gichuru • Neema Komba • Regina Asinde • Dilman Dila • Muthoni Garland • Davina Philomena Kawuma • Abraham T. Zere • Tim Baroraho • Bob G. Kisiki • Julius Ocwinyo • Acan Innocent Immaculate • Beatrice Lamwaka • Hilda J. Twongyeirwe
The FLQ have bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange. The streets are charged and a referendum is called on secession. Frederick E. Bryson captures a defining moment in Canadian history in his latest novel "Crossing to Tadoussac".
"Crossing to Tadoussac" evokes the experience of being a Quebecker in the reader, awakening the historical and spiritual struggles that have formed the province and its people.
438 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-1-926716-00-8 | Softcover
An American jet fighter pilot is shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, his body is found. An American team travels to the jungles of Laos to recover the remains of the pilot for burial at home. But upon arriving, they must deal with corrupt government officials, a police chief out on a personal vendetta and suspicious, reluctant villagers who believe it is their sacred duty to conceal the remains of the pilot from them.
5 x 8 | 296 pages | ISBN 978-1-926716-36-7 (pbk.) | Softcover
THE MATCHSTICK GIRL brings LGBT undercurrents to nineteenth-century Russia, as our young protagonist struggles with class differences, schoolgirl relationships and her search for self-empowerment._x000D_
“Through this fast-paced novel, replete with kidnappings, espionage and fugitive war criminals, Abraham Boyarsky captures the Chassidic communities, their lives and their voices.”
Sender Pleskin is a self-proclaimed trauma specialist dedicated to serving his Chassidic community and to ‘gently’ nudging it into modernity.
When a Bubmer Hasid child falls inexplicably into a coma, Sender and his team jump to action. Hunting down leads in his investigation, Sender follows the signs that he interprets to be Divine Providence as they lead them down a circuitous path that will test not only his faith, but all he was and is.
5. 5 x 8 | 228 pages| ISBN 978-1-926716-40-4 (pbk.) | Softcover
Lock 7 is the highest and last lift up the historic Welland canal. In this literary novel, it is also the dominant metaphor for Leo’s final life epiphany. The one that always seems to come too late...
230 pages | 5" x 8" | ISBN 978-1-926716-50-3 (pbk.) | Softcover
Rathwell’s writing is “a fistful of sentences written with the subtlety of a geisha and the terse certainty of stainless steel.” - John Olson, Author
“There must have been a bad bite. Something had gestated. He wasn’t imagining it. There were wet, frozen pebbles tumbling in his veins. There was a sugary sense of euphoria, a smell of orange blossoms, of piss, of diesel.”
Daniel is in the twilight of his life, tormented by doubts, of cuckolding, illegitimate children, horrors of war and the inanity of all human activity. A miraculous childhood survivor of the Nazi prison camps at Bergen-Belsen, Daniel recounts how he is shipped to Canada when the war is over...
182 pages | 5.5" x 8.25' | ISBN 978-1-926716-57-2 (pbk.) | Softcover
Call it America. Vast the tumble-rocket-particle-wave shows the world in a rush to arrive depart and become and forget and remember everything all at once. Call it history. Call it time and memory the way water is the measure of the clock your bones the measure of love. I mean everything passes. I said the earth is a sentry, everything passes and nothing escapes. Call it home; call it exile in a kingdom of rain. - Empire Burlesque, Charles Talkoff
276 pages | 5" x 8" | ISBN 978-1-926716-42-8 (pbk.) | Softcover
A modern and radical work, Unfictions dramatizes the way in which we react to such an information-rich environment in all of its glorious simultaneity--the beginning of a type of 'New Realism' in letters – reflecting faithfully a society so saturated with events and quotations that it can no longer distinguish between them and their relative meanings.
288 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-0-9809108-6-5 (pbk.) | Softcover
From hitch-hiking across the 49th parallel to plane trips to Montreal, road trips to Halifax, drinking in parkades and jamming in friends’ lofts, Unwanted Hopeless Romantic Morons captures the trials and disenchantment of a disconnected generation. Lost in the vastness of Canada, the “Dead-at-25s” isolated in suburbia are lured somnabulistically to cities where they find further alienation and disappointment.
"The prose flows, liquid with passion..." Levi Asher, Literary Kicks.
172 pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 978-0-9809108-9-6 (pbk.) | Softcover
Richard King’s new novel, ACCOUNTING FOR CRIME, takes you inside the world of business gone right and people gone wrong in a roman a clef that combines intrigue, love triangles, tough talking cops and cold-blooded mobsters.
5 x 8 | 308 pages | B&W | Softcover | ISBN 978-1-926716-07-7
Set in Montreal, Ensemble takes us through the throes of existential crises as lives and marriages are overturned by a man’s restless yearning.
A philosopher is suddenly forced to face the questions he lectures on when they materialize out of the theoretical and into the practical after he falls for a student in his class. Meanwhile his wife, an accomplished musician is left to deal with the disintegration of their marriage and the new silence that descends upon her life as she dissects her husband’s inner workings and confronts the object of his desire. Told in clinical honesty, Ensemble deconstructs love and relationships in the 21st century.
4.72 x 7.48 | 148 pages | ISBN 978-1-926716-29-9 (pbk.) | Softcover
“For now, there is Baldie Fitzgerald. He doesn't know it yet, but he too will be changed.”
Sarah. On a wall in a house in Florida she collects postcards and photos from a hundred years ago: Baldie, the young man with one short leg; Ora, the girl with a wandering eye; Jack the chairboy: all three come alive under Sarah's probing gaze.
God’s Wife and the Synonymous X, Jesse Chase's first novel follows the protoganist on his search for a new cultural and literary theory while he champions an ethics of self-recovery and rehabilitation of personal narrative in a world of masks, capitalism and oppression.
170 pages | 5.5 x 8 | ISBN 978-1-926716-43-5 | Softcover
222 pages | 210mm x 148mm | ISBN 978-1-926716-81-7 (pbk.)
Estuaries, translated by Tiago Silva, brings to the English-speaking world one of the most powerful works of Portuguese neorealism: Esteiros by Soeiro Pereira Gomes.
“They were the sons of men who were never children…”
Discover a foundational novel of Portuguese neorealism — In "Estuaries", Tiago Silva’s translation brings the haunting beauty and political urgency of Soeiro Pereira Gomes’s original to today’s readers.
With lyrical clarity and historical urgency, Estuaries reintroduces a forgotten Europe and a timeless call for justice. This new translation is both faithful and fearless, reviving a classic for a new generation of readers who are unafraid to confront the past.
"Perfect for fans of social realism, European history, and international literature."
"A lost gem of Portuguese resistance literature enters the English canon."
"All the fireworks of James Joyce's Ulysses its sleight of hand, and the streaming consciousness of Faulkner are at play..."
"...a unique roller coaster, and it's not one you want to get off."
--Author, Mark Jay Mirsky
Haystacks Kane is a 607-pound professional wrestler and dedicated butterfly collector. He’s been preyed upon, his innate kindness and gentle good nature harvested by unscrupulous promoters and conniving managers; an ex-wife who keeps him on the hook for alimony; fellow denizens of the sordid netherworld he inhabits; and the raucous ravenous crowds with a thirst for violent cheap thrills. After suffering a severe injury in the ring, Haystacks lies in his hospital bed, unable to speak and struggling to uncover the deeper truths of his existence.
Schlam’s exceptional talent as a writer shines through in this novel, as he skillfully weaves together a tapestry of voices, perspectives, and emotions to create a powerful and thought-provoking literary work that is sure to leave a lasting impression on readers.
Price$33.77
300+ pages, 50+ contributors, 10+ countries
"This is not just a collection of poems and short stories; it is a granary of artistic abundance! For here, will you find a rich variety of masterfully crafted pieces in a range of style, including those that draw from the African oral storytelling tradition. It is a montage of pieces of literary art, curated in a manner that allows for the ‘strict grammarian’ forms of expression to coalesce with those given to poetic licentiousness."
Whichever your favourite genre is, this anthology of East African literature has delivered something that has not been served to readers in many years. It is a fitting gift to the lovers of literary art in this first quarter of the 21st century.
