Janice Kulyk Keefer

IN THIS EVOCATIVE NOVEL, Janice Kulyk Keefer beautifully imagines Katherine Mansfield’s brief but brilliant life through the desires and the passions of her readers. In 1986, shortly before the centenary of Mansfield’s birth, Monty, a disillusioned New Zealand scholar, impulsively steals a letter intended for his writer-father. Intrigued by the letter’s offer of new Mansfield material, Monty is inspired to try to redeem his failed career. Arcing gracefully from New Zealand to Europe to Chicago and finally to Windsor, Ontario, Thieves is at once a brilliant mystery, an absorbing love story and a haunting study of what makes us whole.

Thieves

Gathering to exchange racy books, gin, and gossip, a group of first-generation Ukrainian Canadian women shares the summer of 1963 at Kalyna Beach, a time during which their collective innocence gives way to a sense of larger possibilities. Original. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Ladies' Lending Library

A summer of innocence and discovery, understanding and belonging: a bittersweet tale of mothers, daughters, friends and lovers in 1960s cottage country.

Ladies Lending Library

A goat stays with a family of refugees during World War II but then they return to their homeland without the goat.

Anna's Goat

This book examines the nature and scope of the work of Mavis Gallant, the noted Canadian short story writer and novelist, who delights readers with the elegance and authority of her prose while disconcerting them with the sharp edge of her vision. Examining her fiction, journalism, and work in the theatre, Keefer explores her preoccupation with "the prison of childhood," and the constricted world of women, as well as her continual concern with the function of memory. Keefer also focuses closely on both the rewards and the problems that readers encounter in any sustained engagement with Gallant's work, raising important questions about the nature of contemporary fiction and Gallant's unique Canadian perspective.

Reading Mavis Gallant

From the award-winning author of Honey and Ashes and Thieves, The Ladies' Lending Library is a richly evocative story for anyone who has longed for the heady days of bygone summers and the risky promises of change. During the languorous summer of 1963 - before the Beatles, before JFK - the women of Ontario's Kalyna Beach anticipate the long holiday season ahead... With their husbands away in the city, the wives break up monotonous days of children and chores by gathering together for their weekly 'lending library' - an excuse to exchange 'daring' novels and the latest gossip. As heavy waves pound the sand and the sun beats down on their beach-cottage steps, gin is poured, secrets are shared and they become ever closer. Meanwhile, their adolescent daughters are making discoveries and forging intimacies of their own... Consumed by thoughts of marriage and sex, by memories of the past and longing for the future, innocence gradually gives way to new understanding. And as the summer gradually draws to an end, the women of Kalyna Beach come to realize that nothing will be quite the same again...

Claire Weissman Wilks

Natalka Husar

Goran Petkovsky

A unique collaboration that explores themes of love and family, this collection features poems that are based on works of art placed alongside the very works that inspired them. It includes paintings by Natalka Husar; drawings, monotypes, and lithographs by Claire Weissman Wilks; and photographs by Goran Petkovsky.

Midnight Stroll

Solomea Pavlychko

A collection of stories from Canada and Ukraine. Typical is Ways of Coping, set in 18th century Ukraine and written by Myrna Kostash, a Canadian-Ukrainian. As a Polish lord forces himself on his Ukrainian maid, the woman finds comfort in the thought the Cossacks will soon revenge her in kind.

Stories from Canada and Ukraine

Two Lands, New Visions

Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand writer whose stunning career was cut short by tuberculosis, was "a woman with as many names as she had masks, as many roles as she had selves, most--perhaps all of them--false." Credited with revolutionizing the short story in English, yet often relegated to the fringes of the literary world, Katherine Mansfield was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf, who once said, famously, "She is the only writer I have ever been jealous of". In 1988, shortly before the centenary of Mansfield's birth, Monty, a New Zealand scholar, impulsively steals a letter intended for his writer-father, who has devoted his own life to the pursuit of Katherine Mansfield's. Intrigued by the letter's offer of new Mansfield material, and determined to upstage his emotionally distant, awkward father, Monty travels to Chicago and embarks on an odyssey to decode a seemingly minor love affair of Katherine's youth. Thieves is a masterful re-imagining of her brief but extraordinary life, unfolding how the writer's fierce ambition and forceful presence collided with the more ordinary possibilities of those who loved and admired her. Central to her story is the figure of Garnet Trowell, a violinist and father to Katherine's only--miscarried--child. It was to Garnet, from whom she parted when they were both just twenty, that Katherine wrote a series of passionate letters that he kept for the rest of his life. These letters, stolen after Garnet's death, reveal to Monty not only a dramatically new reading of Katherine's life and character, but also an understanding of the perilous shape his own life has assumed. Arcing gracefully from New Zealand to England, Europe and finally Chicago and Windsor, Ontario, Thieves is at once a brilliant mystery, an absorbing love story and a haunting exploration of what makes us whole and human.

Janice Kulyk Keefer

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