Elaine Kalman Naves

In the winter of 1868 a name Montreal society associated with art, good breeding, and culture became fodder for scandal mongers. The Notman name, synonymous with fine photography, was suddenly making headlines featuring the words "abortion" and "suicide."
A dozen years earlier, two brothers fled their native Scotland . They were attracted to Montreal by its reputation for making the fortunes of go-getting Scotsmen. One was destined for fame, the other for notoriety.
William Notman, the older brother, eventually owned the largest photography business in North America. His subjects ranged from royalty, Governors General, and the Fathers of Confederation to Sitting Bull and Harriet Beecher Stowe. His studio immortalized the faces and baronial mansions of the merchant princes of Montreal's legendary Golden Square Mile-the Molsons, Redpaths, Allans, and Van Hornes.
By contrast, Robert, the younger brother, was drawn into a drama which shook up Montreal's polite society. After he seduced the beautiful and ambitious Margaret Galbraith, a student at the McGill Normal School, he arranged an abortion for her with an up-and-coming young doctor who soon after committed suicide.
The subsequent trial of Robert Notman became cause-célèbre in the newly minted Dominion of Canada in 1868. Portrait of a Scandal depicts a society that distanced itself from sexual misconduct, while it lapped up its every detail.

Includes 20 William Notman photographs.

Shoshanna Wingate

Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life—how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate’s first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles—mother, wife, daughter—in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems that explore the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces. Marked by a vision broad enough take in both a pigeon fancier neighbour and a murderer on death row, Wingate tracks the moments that—midstep, midway, midlife—alter us from who we might have been to who we are now. “The days depart in minor steps,” she writes, “then slip away for costume change.” Radio Weather is a memorable debut by a poet of exceptional promise.

Edward Carson

"An immense precision is necessary," announces Edward Carson in Bird Flock Fish School , a collection of poetry that sees language as an example of "emergence," the spontaneous interaction of behaviours by which birds flock and fish travel in schools. These shimmering poems-which attempt to surprise the reader out of familiar ways of understanding nature, mortality, loss and love-articulate a vast, roving philosophical curiosity channelled through urgent form.
Using a voice both sophisticated and simple, forged in unadorned couplets tuned to near-hallucinatory clarity, Carson's poems invent a new way of perceiving, a world where "everything unites, at odds with itself."

Elise Moser

New prose from Québec.


Taking its title from a story in the collection, this anthology brings together the best prose writing in Quebec—all short pieces—from the winners and finalists of the last three years of the Quebec Writing Competition.

Montreal’s CBC Radio and the Quebec Writers’ Federation created the competition in 1999 which resulted in four previous anthologies: Telling Stories, Short Stuff, In Other Words, and Minority Reports. The winning stories are broadcast on CBC Radio and published in Maisonneuve magazine.