The Supreme Orchestra

We know how Simone met the man who will become, for a time, her fourth husband. We know what she does (artist), her age (older than she looks), her friends (a veritable menagerie), her habits (frustrated homebody). What remains to learn are the things she still doesn't fully understand herself, like her role in the affair of the Port Merveille diamond, also known as the Supreme Orchestra. The Supreme Orchestra is many things at once: a geopolitical thriller, an art-world exposé, a digressive social study, a mischievous parody. In the line of master ironists like Walser and Nabokov, with a comic timing reminiscent of Hergé and a Flaubertian infatuation with le mot juste, David Turgeon has created an oeuvre like no other in Quebec’s fertile literary scene.

We know how Simone met the man who will become, for a time, her fourth husband. We know what she does (artist), her age (older than she looks), her friends (a veritable menagerie), her habits (frustrated homebody). What remains to learn are the things she still doesn't fully understand herself, like her role in the affair of the Port Merveille diamond, also known as the Supreme Orchestra. The Supreme Orchestra is many things at once: a geopolitical thriller, an art-world exposé, a digressive social study, a mischievous parody. In the line of master ironists like Walser and Nabokov, with a comic timing reminiscent of Hergé and a Flaubertian infatuation with le mot juste, David Turgeon has created an oeuvre like no other in Quebec's fertile literary scene.

"Complete with head lines, head notes, statements of cases, points and authorities of counsel, footnotes, and parallel references." (varies.)

In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature? A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her. Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own. Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.

Every orchestra in the world oscillates between crisis and survival. This perpetual movement makes innovation, both in organizational form and in artistic product, vital to the sustainability of the symphony orchestra. Based on case study research in Flanders, Amsterdam and London, this book reflects on the sustainability crisis of the orchestra by framing it as a legitimacy crisis that affects both the orchestra’s artistic and organizational identity. The aim of this book is to explore the dynamics between various and often conflicting factors in the orchestra’s quest for survival, and to show how these organizational dynamics relate to the orchestra’s repertoire. By highlighting the importance of every organization’s specific environment to which it needs to adapt, this book illustrates that the orchestra field is not a field that relies on best practices. The book reflects on conventional as well as innovative orchestra models, making the comparative point of view relevant for academic or practice-based researchers, orchestra managers, policymakers and subsidizing bodies interested in sustainable and future-oriented orchestra management.

Four cases in which the legal issue was “race” — that of a Chinese restaurant owner who was fined for employing a white woman; a black man who was refused service in a bar; a Jew who wanted to buy a cottage but was prevented by the property owners’ association; and a Trinidadian of East Indian descent who was acceptable to the Canadian army but was rejected for immigration on grounds of “race” — drawn from the period between 1914 and 1955, are intimately examined to explore the role of the Supreme Court of Canada and the law in the racialization of Canadian society. With painstaking research into contemporary attitudes and practices, Walker demonstrates that Supreme Court Justices were expressing the prevailing “common sense” about “race” in their legal decisions. He shows that injustice on the grounds of “race” has been chronic in Canadian history, and that the law itself was once instrumental in creating these circumstances. The book concludes with a controversial discussion of current directions in Canadian law and their potential impact on Canada’s future as a multicultural society.