Soldiers Hunters Not Cowboys

CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023 THE TORONTO STAR 'MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR' ‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity. An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She’s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home. And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city. Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment. "Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker’s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art." – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time "In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo." – Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats "Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any." – John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts

The books, the loves, and the conscience of J. Robert Oppenheimer: a novel about the man who invented the atomic bomb.

"Catalogue d'oiseaux began as notes sent to poet Aaron Tucker's long-distance partner. Not initially intended for publication, the writings moved, over time, into a long, lyrical, confessional love poem. Following the couple on travels across the globe--from Berlin to the Yukon, Porto to Toronto--this poem is expansive, moving sensually through small, intimate spaces and the larger world alike. Traced through art, architecture and the cultural life of varied cities, Catalogue d'oiseaux lives between geographies and chronologies as a kaleidoscopic gathering of the many fractals that make up a couple's life. This is a stunning work; a celebration of the depth of adult love, and the elemental parts of life that make it so."--

"It's 1934, and Toronto is stalled in the Great Depression. Pickpocket Mona Kantor is scraping by on small change, while Eli Morenz, city reporter for the Daily Star, struggles to wring news stories out of the subdued metropolis. When a chance photo drives Eli into the Jewish underworld Mona inhabits, he finds he's stumbled onto the story of his life." - From the publisher.

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very different mayors, Toronto managed to so quickly oscillate from one extreme to another, and how the city might proceed from here. Some Great Idea includes behind-the-scenes tales from the Miller and Ford campaigns, and explores recent turning points like the city's core service review and the mayor’s con?ict-of-interest trial. Through personal history, keen reportage and revelatory analysis, it shows how the fundamental principles of diversity and democracy that have made Toronto such a vibrant, dynamic 21st-century city can produce an unlikely politician like Ford. And how those same principles have vividly and repeatedly insisted that such politicians are only part of a larger, messier and more productive urban politics. This is a story about both Toronto's past and present, how the city has relentlessly and collaboratively reinvented itself. But it's also a story about Toronto's future, and what that future might mean for all global cities. This is a story that says you can ?ght city hall. Edward Keenan serves as senior editor and lead columnist at The Grid magazine in Toronto, Ontario. An eight-time finalist at the National Magazine Awards, he has written for and edited at Eye Weekly, Spacing magazine, and The Walrus.

The 2012 One Book Toronto title Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls. Alex was witness to this first episode. He's a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex's sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend - the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body's chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever. Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. 'The depth of her understanding ... fills this book with moving scenes and striking perceptions.' --The Globe and Mail (about Between Mountains) 'With pitch-perfect prose, Helwig shows huge compassion and an ability to make Toronto come alive.' --NOW 'stellar ... meticulous and poignant realism' --Montreal Gazette

More trees. Hydrogen-fuelled cabs. Urbiology. A new model of taxation. Solar panels on big-box stores. The art of salvage. Composters for dog poo in city parks. Retrofitting our urban slabs. Gardening the Gardiner. Ravine City. What would make Toronto a greener place? In the third volume of the uTOpia series, dozens of imaginative Torontonians think big and small about sustainability. From suggestions for changes to our transit system and more mixed-use neighbourhoods to a tongue-in-cheek proposal for a painted line aroudn the city and a short comic book about Toronto in the year 2057, GreenTOpia challenges the city and its residents to rethink what it means to be green in a metropolis, and how to take their love of the city one green step further. Other pieces include an interview with Mayor David Miller and a breakdown of the ecological impact of our morning coffee. GreenTOpia features photos, maps and a 56 page green directory of resources, organizations, incentives and programs promoting sustainability in the GTA.

If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, food-security concerns, how chefs are trained: how a city nourishes itself might say more than anything else about what kind of city it is. With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-safety policy, of feeding the poor, and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree. Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto – and, by extension, every city – sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork.