For many Canadians, the small province of New Brunswick on Canada's scenic east coast is "a nice place to visit but no place to live," plagued for generations by outmigration and economic stagnation. In The Fiddlehead Moment Tony Tremblay challenges this potent stereotype by showcasing the work of a group of literary modernists who set out to change the meaning of New Brunswick in the national lexicon. Alfred Bailey, Desmond Pacey, Fred Cogswell, and a formidable group of local poets and cultural workers – collectively, New Brunswick's Fiddlehead School – sought to restore New Brunswick's literary reputation by adapting avant-garde modernist practices to the contours of the province, opening it to the contemporary world while also encouraging writers to make it their subject. The result was a non-urban form of modernism that was as responsive to technical innovation as to the human geographies of New Brunswick. By placing New Brunswick writers and critics at the forefront of Canadian literature in the midcentury modernist project, Tremblay adds an important new chapter to our understanding of Canadian modernism. The Fiddlehead Moment is the first critical examination of this group's considerable influence. Whether through Bailey's ethnomethodology, Pacey's critical ordering, or Cogswell's editorial eclecticism in the Fiddlehead magazine and Fiddlehead Poetry Books, authors in New Brunswick, Tremblay argues, had a profound impact on writing in Canada.

Despite an impressive post-secondary education and a body of work that spans more than twenty books and seven decades, Elizabeth Brewster’s quiet humility in the face of ‘all that tradition’ of the Western literary canon belies her contribution to Canada’s cultural history. Perhaps fittingly, her poems demonstrate a sense of isolation, a quest for selfhood, a desire to understand and to be understood. Often conversational in tone, her poems are direct and characterized by a deliberate economy of language and freedom from the restrictions of traditional form. Editor Ingrid Ruthig examines the aesthetic touchstones, stylistic shifts and thematic range in the poetry of a woman ‘whose work is included in critical anthologies while her name is missing from their introductions.’ The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential Elizabeth Brewster is the twenty-second volume in the increasingly popular series.

Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth. Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.

A History of Canadian Fiction is the first one-volume history to chart its development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history. Highlighting the people who have shaped and are shaping Canadian literary culture, the book examines such major figures as Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Thomas King, concluding with young authors of today whose major successes reflect their indebtedness to their Canadian forbearers.

My entire life has been one big search for “the meaning of life.” Where do we come from, why are we here, and where do we go when we die? John Muir taught that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” so I took his advice and started exploring. I learned that by practicing meditation and the art of mindfulness in Nature we can connect with the life all around us. The lessons we learn in the wild can help us tap into the sacred mystical dimension of this extraordinary natural world in which we live and share with the entire biosphere.

"How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also fun to read . . . Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.