True Confessions From The Ninth Concession

Author and playwright Dan Needles has long delighted readers and audiences alike with his insightful and laugh-out-loud perspective on small-town life, published in such bestselling books as Wingfield's World (Random House, 2011), Wingfield's Hope (Key Porter, 2005), With Axe and Flask (McFarlane, Walter and Ross, 2002) and Letters From Wingfield Farm (Key Porter, 1988). In 1988, Needles and his wife left the city to start a family in a country community located two hours north of Toronto. Together they stocked their farm with sheep, cattle, chickens, pigs and, eventually, four children. Needles' charming chronicle unfolds in essays dated from 1997 to 2016, offering homespun advice for successful country living--like whether to wave from the elbow or to merely raise one finger from the steering wheel when passing a neighbour in the car. He cautions on rural superstitions, such as when his neighbour hesitated before selling him weaner pigs because every time he does the wife of the farmer who's buying them becomes pregnant--which turned out to be true. Here too is the tale of an unlikely friendship between a "borderline" collie ("he's never bitten anything in his life and the sheep are catching on") and an odd duck named Ferdinand, as well as other hilarious stories involving an assortment of farm animals, including the weapon of choice to properly dispatch a rooster-gone-bad; the risks of giving a name to a potential Sunday dinner entrée; and how to outsmart a free-range pig. With his witty insight, Needles shares the art of neighbouring in the country--a place made for visits, and "where a figure walking across your field is more of a reason to put the kettle on than to call the police." True Confessions from the Ninth Concession is a sesquicentennial crop of antics and aphorisms by Canada's funniest farmer--one that presents a wonderful escape for world-weary city dwellers, and affirmative reading for anyone who is from, or has moved to, rural Canada.

Walt Wingfield, the character beloved by thousands in every part of the country, is back with a new and complete book, with a new introduction from the author. Walt Wingfield is a Bay Street stockbroker who quits his job and buys a hundred-acre farm in Persephone Township, Ontario. In a series of letters to the editor of the local newspaper, Walt chronicles his modest successes and spectacular defeats in an age when farming has become difficult for farmers old and new. Dan Needles' rich and charming rural neighbourhood may be difficult to find on a map but it is very close to the Canadian soul. Including a new introduction from Dan Needles, the writer who brought this marvellous world to life 27 years ago, and all your favourite mishaps, triumphs and eccentric neighbours Wingfield's World is the full story of one man's attempt to embrace a less complicated world and how he ends up with more complication and drama, and more love and richness than he could have imagined.

Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for 2003 The creator of the hugely popular Wingfield Farm plays lays bare a beguiling corner of rural Canada Just a few hours north of the city, you’ll find the familiar features of Persephone Township: the hardscrabble farms, the timeless small towns, the laconic local citizens. The fabled turf that is home to Wingfield Farm (immortalized by Dan Needles in five one-man stage productions), Persephone is hard to find on any map but very near the Canadian soul. In Persephone anything can happen and often does. Towering local figures dating back to the township’s murky colonial beginnings land-grabbing speculators, shady railway promoters, heedless despoilers of natural wonders, and spectacularly slippery politicians cross paths with the likes of Sir John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, not to mention the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie and the future King Edward VII. With Axe and Flask tells it all, sparing no Canadian sacred cow in uncovering the township’s checkered past, from the displacement of its original native inhabitants to the recent invasion of the weekenders. You are about to enter a world at once strange and recognizable, where past and present, fact and fiction combine in a potent mix of comedy, pathos and national identity.

Businessman Walt Wingfield yearns for a simpler life, so he buys a 100-acre farm and decides to use horse-drawn equipment. In these humorous letters to a local newspaper, Wingfield chronicles his first three years, including his battles with developers and barnyard disease, and his trials with a former racehorse that can only turn left.

Explores the role of criminal intent in constituting felony in the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury.

"As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. In the Book of Psalms are to be found the history of the people of Israel, the theology and spirituality of the Old Covenant, and a treasury of human experience expressed in prayer and poetry. So too does the work of expounding the psalms recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustine's personal life, his theological reflections and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo."--Publisher's website.