Winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, China Blues explores the urban pastoral through poetry and fiction. Donnell's protagonist wanders Toronto, recalling his small-town Ontario boyhood and commenting on a range of contrasting subjects, from pop culture to war.

Long admired for his books of poetry, most recently China Blues and Dancing in the Dark, David Donnell’s poems continue to surprise and amaze us with their cool jazz of spontaneity and imaginative logic. A sensual and intellectual feast, Sometimes a Great Notion is a deconstruction of the contemporary artist’s life; it’s also a tough, compassionate look at the future of the future and our philosophy of love. Culinary adventures and geography juxtapose with Japane...

Winner of the Governor General’s Award, this collection of Donnell’s best poetry pulses with the realities of home, street, and working life. His ironic wit and lyrical passages make for a fantastic read complete with his signature deadpan style and post-modern sophistication. “Making it in the City,” “Lakes,” and “The True Story of Pat Garrett” are but a few of the titles included in this eclectic compilation.

In this collection of poetry, Donnell examines his past and childhood memories in narrative confessions. The poems offer perspectives about city life, including the stresses and ironic staples of urban living.

An eclectic collection of poetry and fiction, Dancing in the Dark tackles themes of music, culture, philosophy, love, literature, and beauty. In a series of pieces that are deeply personal though not autobiographical, Donnell evokes both high and low culture, in one moment recognizing the impossibility of desire, but acknowledging his work’s connection to “The Boss,” Bruce Springsteen, in another. He evokes music and the objects of everyday life with clarity and grace.

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. ...

The New Yorker is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years, it’s also been a hoot. In fact, when Harold Ross founded the legendary magazine in 1925, he called it “a comic weekly,” and while it has grown into much more**,** it has also remained true to its original mission. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in a hilarious new collection, one as satirical and witty, m...

With a sprightly dose of insightful inspiration, a sprinkling of practical advice, and a bounty of exuberant stories by great writers, O's Little Book of Happiness features some of the best work ever to have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. Inside you'll find Elizabeth Gilbert's ode to the triumph of asking for what you want... Jane Smiley's tribute to the animal who taught her about lasting fulfillment... Shonda Rhimes's secret to trading stress for serenity.....

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, Geo...

Mothers of the 1950s were wasp-waisted, dutiful, serene, and tied to the kitchen with apron strings. Or so we thought. This collection of searing and startling poetry and prose unties the stereotype and reveals women who were strong, wild, talented, wise, mad, creative, desperate, angry, courageous, bitter, tenacious, reckless and beautiful, sometimes all at once. The fifty-six contributors from across Canada and the world include multi-award-winning poets, novelists, and essayists, as wel...

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these...

Picking up her story in the late ’60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning when she is a poetry student at Oxford. Her education extended beyond the classroom to London’s swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales, and a posh country estate.After Oxford, Cathy returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. Not one to shy away from a challenge, she teaches at a high school where police es...