The Codfish Dream

"You'll meet eccentric shore workers, wealthy guests who arrive by yacht and floatplane, as well as essential guides Big Jake, Lucky Petersen, Vop and Wet Lenny. . . . A deadpan narrative keeps the absurdity coming as earnest RCMP, FBI and Fisheries officers encounter the salmon-obsessed denizens of the island resort. This book is a keeper." —Western Mariner A colourful portrait of life in an eccentric fishing village on the BC coast. After spending fifteen years as a fishing guide on the BC coast, David Giblin decided that the offbeat people and places he encountered during that colourful period in his life had to be preserved. Like any good fishing story, wherein the fish seem to grow faster after they are dead, the forty-seven interconnected narratives in what eventually became The Codfish Dream took on a life of their own. The result is a series of hilarious, strange, keenly observed, true (or mostly true) stories of Giblin’s experiences, held together by a thread of international intrigue that affects everyone in the small community of Stuart Island over one eventful summer, when FBI agents visit the island to investigate insider trading. The Codfish Dream is an unforgettable book imbued with an undeniable sense of place and time.

Tall tales of coastal adventures, colourful locals, privileged tourists, and elusive fish abound in this hilariously offbeat sequel to The Codfish Dream. "David Giblin is a marvellous storyteller."—Ian Ferguson, author of The Survival Guide to British Columbia David Giblin's stint as a seasonal salmon fishing guide on Stuart Island provides a seemingly endless supply of hilarious and bizarre stories that reveal as much about the quirkiness of small coastal communities as they do about human nature itself. Now, in his second book of short interconnected stories set in the 1980s, Giblin introduces us to Gilly, the first female fishing guide to grace the tiny island, whose mere presence is enough to shake the foundations of the very insular, all-male guiding community. With the return of delightfully eccentric characters including VOP, Troutbreath, Lucky Peterson, and Wet Lenny, this rollicking maritime adventure will appeal to anyone who ever gutted a fish and lived to tell the tale.

Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History explores the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry and as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While dreams have been a sustained object of fascination from the ancient world to the present, what sets this period apart is the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences, and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices. Authors Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty examine how the intensification and cross-fertilization of ideas about dreams in this period became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and vernacular domains. In uncovering a complex and diverse archive, Dreams and Modernity reveals how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. Individual chapters in the book explore popular traditions of dream interpretation in the 19th century; the archival impetus of dream research in this period, including the Society for Psychical Research and the Mass Observation movement; and the reception and extension of Freud’s dream book in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. This engaging interdisciplinary book will appeal to both scholars and upper level students of cultural studies, cultural history, Victorian studies, literary studies, gender studies and modernist studies.

Brilliant comeback after 25 years for an inaugural Juniper Prize-winner.

The sixteen articles in The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing are a welcome contribution to the growing interest in Canadian culture, indicating its variety - Aboriginal, Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian culture and their interrelationships are all represented. In classical oratory the term “rhetoric” signifies the art of influencing the thought and conduct of readers and listeners, and this concept is used as an underlying current of debate in this volume. Contributors address the theme of identity and post-colonial disputation in their explorations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing by Elizabeth Simcoe, Catharine Parr Traill and Lucy Montgomery as well as contemporary works by Margaret Atwood, Nancy Huston, Wayne Johnston, Susan Swan, Jacques Poulin and Rudy Wiebe. Quebecoise writer Louis Dupré contributes a compelling reflection on women's writing in Quebec.

Siegfried Lenz is one of Germany's foremost writers, ranking in popularity as well as critical esteem with Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boell. He is considered one of the best short story writers of the post-war generation. These twenty-six stories make up the first comprehensive collection of his short works to appear in English.

The world of dreams is one that the majority of people take for granted. Ignored by most and usually written off as a nonsensical mish-mash of meaningless images, people tend not to consider them important, useful, or revelatory. In this classic volume, Havelock Ellis delves deeply into the realm of dreams to explore their scientific and ethnographic value. Ellis argues that, by examining our dreams, we can learn something of ourselves and even that of primitive man, the mechanisms of belief, and much more. A fascinating study not to be missed by those with an interest in dreams and what can be learnt from them. Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician, writer, eugenicist and social reformer who studied human sexuality. Ellis was also an early researcher into the effects of psychedelics and wrote one of the first reports on a mescaline experience in 1896. Other notable works by this author include: “A Study of British Genius” (1904), “The Dance of Life” (1923), and “Psychology of Sex” (1933). Read & Co. Great Essays is republishing this classic essay now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.