Eighty-nine-year-old Regina and ninety-year-old Jackie met in 1955, an era when women were rounded up and jailed simply for dancing together or dressing like a man. On a cold winter day they manage to get themselves out of the house with the help of TJ and Ramon, two young men from their working-class neighborhood in Western Massachusetts. They tie their long-dead Christmas tree to the top of their car and, using a screwdriver in place of a broken gearshift, slowly make the drive to the dump. This is also the day when everything changes. During the course of their adventure, memories are triggered. Their history as a passionate and devoted, but troubled couple at the intersection of historic cultural and political change unfolds via scenes from the past—including their first meeting during a police raid on a bar and Regina's epiphany that she could truly love another woman. In the early years, they often live apart as they flee landlords who discover their secret. As their journey leads them to seek jobs and a sustainable life, they are sometimes separated—but always find their way back to each other. Combining the pathos and social significance of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and the humor of The Golden with a cast of diverse characters worthy of the musical Rent, Fishwives chronicles a lifetime through the eyes of two old women behaving badly.

Shortlisted, Taste Canada Awards 2023 - Culinary Narratives Part love story, part survival story, part meditation on family dysfunction, this offbeat memoir chronicles the unpredictable life of a young wife and mother on Gabriola Island. In 1989, twenty-three-year-old Margot Fedoruk left Winnipeg and her volatile Slavic-Jewish family for the wilds of BC to work as a tree planter and to contemplate her mother’s untimely death from cancer. There, she met Rick Corless, a burly, red-headed sea urchin diver, and soon found herself pregnant and cooking vegetarian meals for meat-eating divers on Rick’s boat, The Buckaroo, as they travelled along the rugged northern BC coastline. Eventually, the unlikely couple settled on Gabriola Island to raise two girls, dig for clams, keep chickens, clean houses, and make soap to sell at the local market. As she washed windows with stunning ocean views, Margot also wiped away lonely tears, determined not to repeat the same mistakes as she had witnessed during her parents’ marriage made in hell. Through dark humour, vivid descriptions, and quirky characters, Margot’s reflections on marriage, motherhood, isolation, food, and family paint an unforgettable portrait of a modern-day fishwife left behind to keep the home fires burning. True to its title, Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives is a memoir infused with recipes, from the hearty Eastern European fare of Margot’s childhood to more adventurous coastal BC cuisine.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney. Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as: the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class how the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form. Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time, creating a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities, resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.