Non-Fiction Books
Conversations with a Dead Man
by Mark Abley
2024 • Biography
REVISED AND EXPANDED WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
When he died, Duncan Campbell Scott was known as a first-rate poet and devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work in the Department of Indian Affairs, he's considered one of history's worst Canadians. When word of this reaches Scott's ghost, he returns to the land of the living, asking poet and journalist Mark Abley to clear his name. In this book of imaginative non-fiction, Abley evokes a man who wrote vibrant poems about Indigenous people while also instituting policies designed to destroy Indigenous culture.
“Abley has produced something seemingly inconceivable: an intelligent, absorbing and, yes, entertaining book about an infamous Canadian villain” — Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Maclean’s
The Death of Tony
by Antanas Sileika
2024 • Memoir
The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario — a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases — Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds.
“Intelligent and observant... illuminates the experiences of a little-discussed ethnic group while probing the meanings of real and imagined homelands. A thoughtful reading experience.” — Kirkus Reviews