Grey All Over

"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment..." Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff ([email protected]), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts of Actis' dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness "the pragmatics of intuition" in all the ways we read, live, and love. "When a loved one dies, there's all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collect, sort, document, store, and discard. Andrea Actis has taken the stuff surrounding her father's death and created a book that is, like grief, in turns heartbreaking, wise, chaotic, drunk, wry, and always unflinchingly honest. This powerful testament of survival is for anyone who has felt the 'déjà vu in reverse' of grief. It is for the living." --Sachiko Murakami, author of Render "Love letter, experimental poem, meditation, conversation with the dead--Andrea Actis's compelling debut is unlike any memoir I've ever read. In one passage, Actis digs out the biggest piece of bone she can find in the vessel of her father's ashes and gently bites on it. Reading Grey All Over I had a similar sensation. Ash. Bone. Love." --Jen Currin, author of Hider/Seeker "This absolutely beautiful work makes plain that seriousness feels like love." --Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live.

Army engineer Eduardo Torres is caught up in the world's raging oil wars when he stumbles onto the plans for a quantum-energy battery. This remarkable device could slow civilization's inevitable descent into environmental disaster, but Torres has other plans. Forming a private army, he uses the device to revive an abandoned space colonization effort in an ambitious campaign to lead humanity to a new life in a distant solar system. The massive endeavor faces many challenges before the fleet finally embarks for the Holzstein System many light-years away. But even as the feuding colonists struggle to carve out homes on alien worlds, they discover that they have not left their old conflicts and inner demons behind. Nor are they alone on this new frontier. Awaiting them are inhuman beings who strike without warning or explanation--and who may spell the end of humanity's last hope. Epic in scope, yet filled with searing human drama and emotion, A Grey Moon Over China is a monumental science fiction saga by an amazing new talent. Its original publication by Black Heron Press was named one of the "Best Books of 2006" by Kirkus Reviews. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The New York Times bestseller and “a rich brew of dystopic fantasy and deadpan goofiness” (The Washington Post) from the author of the Thursday Next series and Early Riser Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception. And Eddie Russet wants to move up. But his plans to leverage his better-than-average red perception and marry into a powerful family are quickly upended. Juggling inviolable rules, sneaky Yellows, and a risky friendship with an intriguing Grey named Jane who shows Eddie that the apparent peace of his world is as much an illusion as color itself, Eddie finds he must reckon with the cruel regime behind this gaily painted façade.

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada's former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. The Grey Islands is the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty. Bent, I circle the building grubbing and rooting. Every shingle and stick I lift yields bait. Things Carm ate and didn't eat, turned to worms. A kind of organic shadow of the man. - from The Grey Islands Praise for The Grey Islands: [The book] illustrates? how the outsider becomes an insider by becoming a supplicant, renouncing the role of saviour and honouring the culture of the people among whom he has decided to make his home. - Adrian Fowler, from the Introduction.

In Baghdad, Lina is trying to lead a normal life, but politics keep intruding. Violent government coups are almost annual events and it's difficult for a child to understand what's going on or who to believe. The need for secrecy means Lina cannot tell her best friend that they are just waiting for the right moment to flee. It is the 1960s and Lina is part of the dwindling Jewish community... Mona Yahia was born in Baghdad in 1954 and escaped with her family to Israel in 1970. In 1985 she moved to Germany to study fine arts and has remained there ever since. Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for Fiction 2001 'Yahia rolls Baghdad around her tongue, savouring its suks, smells, and sweetmeats (reading her makes one hungry). This is a truly exotic novel, but it's also a coming-of-age work in which the almost imperceptible transformation from childhood to adolescence is saltily observed and never sentimentalised. Yahia's prose courses with insight and wit. Her deftness of touch means that, despite its subject-matter, this novel never becomes a bleak tale of religious persecution, but remains a fresh story about adolescent experience in adversity - with parallels in the most unlikely places.' Anne Karpf, The Guardian 'The novel powerfully conveys the author's outrage, as well as her nostalgia for her native land.' The Times 'Yahia's writing evokes both the sensuality of domestic intimacy...alongside the horror of public hangings...When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad is most politically sophisticated, and also most poignant, when it explores questions of language and identity.' Alev Adil, Times Literary Supplement

Reproduction of the original: Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal by Sarah J. Richardson