The Sentimentalists

In this Giller Prize-winning novel, a daughter tries to uncover the truth about her dying father, a veteran haunted by his past--but she also discovers truths about herself along the way. Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge just as his daughter's present comes sharply into focus.

"A hypnotic meditation on memory . . . reaffirms the potential for storytelling to offer clarity and redemption." —New York Times Book Review In this riveting debut, a daughter attempts to discover the truth about the life of her father, a dying Vietnam veteran haunted by his wartime experiences. Powerful and assured, The Sentimentalists is a story of what lies beneath the surface of everyday life.

Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.

The complete short fiction of Morley Callaghan appears as he comes into full recognition as one of the singular storytellers of our time. In four volumes, several stories are collected for the first time, two of which--"An Autumn Penitent” and "In His Own Country”--have been out of print for decades.

The Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the sentimentalist theory of reflective autonomy as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory, and political practice today. The sentimentalist description of the reflective process is more empirically accurate than the competing rationalist description, and can guide scientists investigating the processes by which the mind formulates moral and political principles. Yet the theory is much more than merely descriptive, and can also contribute to the philosophical project of finding principles--including principles of justice--that wield genuine normative authority. Enlightenment sentimentalism demonstrates that emotion is necessarily central to our civic life, and shows how our reflective sentiments can counterbalance the unreflective feelings that might otherwise lead our political principles astray.

Poets have always wrestled with the mutability of things (particularly or life and love) and with the problem of conveying the true shape of human emotion and experience through the often inadequate tool of language. The poems in Johanna Skibsrud’s new collection, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being, employ the tentative and uncertain characteristics of language to their advantage, pulling the reader headlong into the fray as the poet endeavours to give shape to her experience. "In many ways, I see the collection as one long love poem," says Skibsrud, "The title poem was written very quickly, and with what, for me, was relative ease one morning last spring, and since then I have altered it very little–something that is also unusual for me. The poem is particularly important to my conception of the collection as a whole because of the way that it is able to speak, I think, from–and to–a space of desire inhabited, simultaneously, by conflicting and conflicted states of mind. It is, I think–despite, or rather because of its title–the most accurate and honestly-felt love poem that I have so far been able to write. Also, though, I think of the poem in reflexive terms: as in part about the act of writing, which is itself an act of desire and so, like all desire, bound always by the limits of its own terms. Just as the literal object of the poem is held in relief by the blank space of the page, however, so we are shaped, whether we choose to recognize it or not, by what is invisible to us–outside of what we assume to be the limit of ourselves and our world. Poetry allows us, importantly, I think, to push against that limit. It makes room for those paradoxes at the root of our experiences of language and selfhood–an acceptance and exploration of which is, I think, integral, to any genuine attempt at expression of being. It allows for transformations, for becomings: becoming a bear, for example, becoming a word. Love allows for this, too. In fact, I don’t really know where the space of one ends and the other begins."

From the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists comes the story of a revolution on an imaginary island. "Reading Island is a searing, vertiginous experience. Hailing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to interrogate our current moment in history, Skibsrud has created an uncanny and uncomfortable representation of power deeply corrupted. The text feels both historic and futuristic; it is discomfiting and necessary. Don’t look away." - Erin Wunker, Notes From a Feminist Killjoy On an imaginary island, one whose socio-economic divide runs deep, an insurrection is brewing. Over the course of a day, the lives of two women--one a rebel, one a diplomat--will be forever changed. Lota is a restless islander who works at a fish factory but is looking for a larger life. When she meets charismatic leader Kurtz, her life comes into sharp focus. Together, Kurtz's group of misfits plot to overthrow the island's occupying power. They plan to charge the embassy. They plan to capture Ø Com's outer station--the gateway to the entire empire's wireless operations. History does not--Kurtz urges her soldiers--have to repeat itself. As the past and future converge on this one day, a new world order is within reach. They cannot fail. Rachel is an anxious diplomat who is counting down the final hours of her service on the island. Her family has fled to the capital after escalating racial tensions have put her daughter's safety in jeopardy. She is eager to follow despite the fissures that are starting to show in her marriage. But when she arrives at the embassy and hears gunshots ringing through the corridors, she knows this is no ordinary day. As the hours lengthen and Rachel is held captive, she begins to wonder if she'll ever see her loved ones again and what her complicity has meant as the sinister operations of her government start to surface. Part fantasy, part parable, Island deftly explores essential questions of history and responsibility. It asks us to consider our legacies of cultural imperialism and the hidden costs of our wireless world. Urgent, illuminating, and thought-provoking, it asks us how we can imagine a future that does not run along the exact same lines as the past.