Showing posts with label Ducharme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ducharme. Show all posts

14 December 2020

The Dusty Bookcase Christmas Gift List



A trying year all around, right? The Westons have been making out like bandits while we've been obsessing over our PC Optimum points balances. If any good has come out of this pandemic, it's found in communities coming together. Our family isn't alone in choosing to buy our meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, jams, and honey directly from local farmers.

Take that, Galen Weston!

While we have no local book publishers in Merrickville, Ontario, our household has become even more focussed in spending its money on titles published by Canadian houses. And so, for the first time in Dusty Bookcase history, I present a list of Christmas gift recommendations, beginning with limited editions offered by Biblioasis. The pride of Windsor, the publisher has this year been offering attractive  numbered and signed hardcovers of some of its most recent titles.


I took out a subscription myself, and then found myself spoiled by all sorts of additional treats, like this collection of Indie Bookseller Trading Cards.

No fool I, my package of cards remains unopened. Imagine how much it'll be worth in 2040!

The most recent limited edition, Jason Gruriel's Forgotten Words, was accompanied by advance reader's copies of Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin and Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto. Also included was this brilliant chapbook:

Take that, Jeff Bezos!

Give a loved one a subscription, if you can. If you've got more or less to spare, the rest of this inaugural Dusty Bookcase Christmas Gift List is as follows:


They Have Bodies
Barney Allen
Ottawa: University of
   Ottawa Press

The literary debut by a novelist I've suggested is Canada's strangest. First published by Macaulay in 1929, I'd been on the hunt for an affordable copy for years. At $29.95, this reissue is a steal. Gregory Betts' informative introduction and notes made me feel I'd really got away with something.

Swallowed [L’Avalée des
   avalés]
Réjean Ducharme [trans
   Madeleine Stratford]
Montreal: Véhicule

L’Avalée des avalés was taught in my Québecoise wife's high school, but not mine; this anglo-Montrealer was well into his thirties before he'd so much as heard of it. The greatest French Canadian novel of the 'sixties is here in the hands of one of our most talented translators.

Hearing More Voices:
   English-Canadian
   Women in Print and on
   the Air, 1914-1960
Peggy Lynn Kelly & Carole
   Gerson
Ottawa: Tecumseh

A study of unjustly neglected English Canadian women novelists, short story writers, humorists, historians, journalists, and broadcasters, including Dusty Bookcase favourites Edna Jaques and Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.
The Complete Adventures
   of Jimmie Dale, Volume
   Two
Frank L. Packard
[np: Michael Howard]


The second in Michael Howard's series of annotated Gray Seal adventures, this volume covers The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale and Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue. It all leads me to wonder why the Gray Seal hasn't made it to television. Walt Disney would agree.

06 September 2014

George-Étienne Cartier at 200



Such a young country. I'm still kind of a kid – really – and yet I remember Canada's centennial celebrations. So, it makes no sense – not really – that today, 6 September 1919, should mark the 200th birthday of George-Étienne Cartier. Yet it does.


A son of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, one hundred years after his birth, one hundred years ago today, saw the dedication of the most glorious monument in the Dominion.


The program for the unveiling, a two-hour affair, includes Benjamin Sulte's "La Statue de Cartier" and "The Statue of Cartier" by Gustavus William Wicksteed, both dating back to the 1885 installation of the statue on Parliament Hill. I think William-Athanse Baker's tribute to Cartier would've been more appropriate.

from George-Étienne Cartier
Benjamin Sulte
Montreal: G. Ducharme, 1919
Two hours. Imagine. Charles Joseph Doherty, Robert Borden's Minister of Justice spoke. What can we expect today from Peter Mackay?


Related posts:

01 June 2011

Global Warming as Nationalist Dream




Erres boréales
Florent Laurin [pseud. Armand Grenier]
[Montreal]: [Ducharme], 1944
221 pages


This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through



24 June 2010

Encore!



Une deuxième chanson pour la fête de la St-Jean. Composed by George-Étienne Cartier, "Avant tout je suis canadien" follows his better-known "Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!". It was first sung 175 years ago today at a banquet of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and was later adopted by les Fils de la Liberté. A president of the former and a member of the latter, Cartier seems a problematic figure for the Société and its allies. I've twice seen "Avant tout je suis canadien" attributed incorrectly to "les Patriotes". Manfred Overmann makes this mistake, and includes this song by a leading Father of Confederation in his Anthologie de la poésie indépendantiste et souverainiste.

This version is taken from the third volume of Benjamin Sulte's Mélanges historiques (Montreal: Ducharme, 1919).


Related post: A Song for la Fête de la St-Jean