Bøker utgitt av Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

Making a deal with Odin, the most powerful of the Norse gods, is a bad idea. Sigrene, who is considered one of the lowest of the low in Asgard, the Norse city of the gods, knows any dealings with Odin could get her killed, but after her friend is murdered, she is desperate to get justice for the girl.When Sigrene learns the killer will be coming for her next, she's pushed into action. What can she sacrifice to persuade the Norns, the three Fates, to teach her to spin magic to uncover the murderer's name? Between Odin, the Valkyrie warriors and the dragon who gnaws on the roots of the World Tree, Sigrene makes powerful enemies at every level of the Norse Nine Realms. And every choice she makes leads her into more perilous places. No one alive has ever returned from the deepest of the Hel Realms: how can Sigrene?This unique, epic poem explores little-known Norse mythology and pays special attention to form, sound, and imagery. Sigrene's Bargain with Odin contemplates the age-old quandary of where our loyalties lie, and how to act with integrity to find peace in a troubled world.

The village of Supino looks as sleepy as the opening shot of an old black and white Fellini film. At the newspaper office, Bianca stumbles into a job meant for someone else and a new advice column, Ask Minerva, is born. Soon everyone is engaged in trying to discover the mystery columnist's identity as well as the identity of her correspondents.Seven years have passed since Rosa's husband's disappearance and now he's been declared legally dead. And her secret lover (that all the villagers know about) wants to marry her. Bravo! Except Rosa is uncertain and when she's uncertain she tends to run away. That's why she's taken her son Carlito to Venice for a week. As Rosa's relationship unravels, Carlito does some unraveling of his own and inches closer to uncovering the mystery of his father's identity. Back in the village, Rosa's best friend Assunta is lonely. Perhaps that's why Assunta falls so quickly and naively for Enzo, the smooth-talking bottle cap salesman.Every villager, from the hairdresser to the barman and each one in between, has an opinion on Bianca's column, Ask Minerva! The young hairdresser's assistant has trouble with her marriage to a man with a wandering eye, not to mention other body parts, and at the Kennedy Bar, the men gather to laugh over the columnist, Ask Minerva's advice until they begin to realize that it's their wives who are requesting the advice.

Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field re-envisions what it means to be fat in the colonial project known as Canada, exploring the unique ways that fat studies theorists, academics, artists, and activists are troubling and thickening existing fat studies literature.Weaving together academic articles and alternative forms of narration, including visual art and poetry, this edited collection captures multi-dimensional experiences of being fat in Canada. Together, the chapters explore the subject of fat oppression as it acts upon individuals and collectives, unpacking how fat bodies at various intersections of gender, sexuality, racialization, disability, neurodivergence, and other axes of embodiment have been understood, both historically and within contemporary Canada.Taking a critical approach to dominant framings of fatness, particularly those linked to an "obesity epidemic," Fat Studies in Canada aims to interrogate and dismantle systemic fat oppression by (re)centering and (re)valuing fat voices and epistemologies. Ultimately, the volume introduces new ways of celebrating fatness and fat life in Northern Turtle Island.

Broken Fiction is a collection of short autofictional stories and poems that both offer solace and depict anguish at the collision of memory, loss, and grief. This kind of story-making negotiates a recognition and acceptance of hard truths without resorting to easy resolution.The pieces in this volume are playful and fierce. The narrator's willingness to give attention to where love works or goes wrong, or to the moments when suffering cannot be veiled by a positive attitude--even as the comic or absurd overwhelms the tragic and humiliating--takes us to places that inhabit both memory and fiction. Photographs break the fiction and pull the reader into the inevitable forces of time and loss and death.Broken Fiction invites readers to consider a way through--and sometimes around--illness and love, pain and joy, and gives a droplet of hope in nature's comedy of errors and coincidence.

With its twenty short stories, A Fall Afternoon in the Park invites the reader deep into the interior worlds of Iranian women living in both Iran and Canada.In "Rainy Day," a little girl longs for a doll with golden hair; in "Adopted Child," a successful business professional delays having a baby but then discovers a secret; an educated woman finds herself cleaning the home of a wealthy, illiterate woman to pay the bills in the story "Adam"; and, in the titular story, a family is divided (literally) when the mother loses her job and they must make difficult decisions about their future.In these varied, compelling snapshots of family, friendship, culture, tradition, discrimination, class issues, and struggle, Mehri Yalfani offers glimpses into the challenges and joys of immigrants? and refugees? lived experiences in the Canadian diaspora.

It seems like a dream gig when Daphne gets the job offer--live in Montreal's Underground City for a full year and blog about the experience. The flip side of the city has all the creature comforts. The year will fly by. Except there's a catch. To collect her whopping bonus for sticking it out till day 365, Daphne must agree never to set so much as a toe outside the territory of the Underground City, submitting to an ankle monitor to keep her honest. Even if the conditions are hardcore, she doesn't have much choice. Out of work, and sole provider for a grandmother whose bank account is on life support, Daphne signs on the dotted line. And that's when her life goes into freefall.Inspired by Daphne, her grandmother comes up with an underground plan of her own, sheltering a family of illegal refugees in her basement. Daphne's initial fury at her grandmother's risky move does an about-face once she meets Chantal, a young runaway holed up in the Underground City, fleeing a threat she refuses to disclose. When Chantal shows up on Daphne's doorstep desperate for protection, Daphne must decide if she's prepared to lay her underground future on the line to rescue a group of virtual strangers from discovery and ruin.

In a near future dominated by institutions, technology, and government control, children are raised in state homes and have no concept of family, with the exception of Terran and his younger sister, Brooke. Together with their friends, Taylor and Simon, they often steal from the local market to subsidize their diet.Running from the authorities after a raid goes wrong and looking for a place to hide, Terran is drawn to a vibrant green glow behind a crumbling city wall. It's an archway with a small opening that has fallen away, like a window into a different world--the world of the Beigfur. The Beigfur once shared the earth with humans, but now exist in a parallel universe where they have learned to live in harmony with nature.Centuries before, the Beigfur used the last of their technology to place a glamour between the worlds to protect themselves from the destructive ways of Man. Climbing through the archway, Terran, Brooke, Taylor, and Simon inadvertently tumble into The Meadowlands, where an unexpected, life-changing adventure begins.Speaking to the confusion of the modern era, The Meadowlands explores society's impact on nature and the environment, the importance of family, and the challenges of coming of age in a world of technology and isolation.

Such a Lovely Afternoon is a dazzling debut collection from award-winning Yukon writer Patti Flather.A feisty young tomboy grapples with gender roles with sometimes hilarious results, a refugee single dad struggles for dignity in his northern community, and a malfunctioning compost toilet and wacky neighbours upturn a woman's island cabin life, among other tales.Against vivid landscapes from Canada's West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon, Flather reveals poignant beauty, compassion and humour in everyday lives, with characters searching for identity and belonging, delving into their resilience and humanity.

Cora James, a 35-year-old Black librarian in Harlem, dreams of being a writer. Torn between her secret passion and the duties of a working wife and mother in 1928, Cora strikes up correspondence with renowned poet Langston Hughes, who encourages her to pursue her dream. Duty frustrates Cora again, this time when she's called upon to fill in for her cousin Agnes while she recovers from a brutal beating by her husband Bud.Working as a cook for a white woman, Cora discovers both time to write and an unlikely ally in Mrs. Eleanor Fitzgerald, who becomes friend, confidante, and patron, encouraging Cora to rise above what's commonly thought of as a woman's lot. Yet, through a series of startling developments in her dealings with the white family, Cora's journey to becoming a writer takes her to the brink of losing everything, including her life.

Alden Patterson, the last living member of a once-wealthy Toronto family, is haunted by the legacy of her grandfather, William Patterson, whose suicide taints the family name. She lives in the decaying Patterson House with Constance, a foundling, and John Hunt, an injured war veteran and the family's former gardener. When Alden is reduced to taking in boarders, she thinks she has found a way to survive until the crash of 1929 leaves her truly desperate and one particular boarder threatens to destroy everything she thinks she wants.

"When Carol Rose GoldenEagle was a child, attending Easter church services, she recalls the annual ritual of the priest presenting plaques depicting the stages of Christ's persecution to his resurrection, referred to as the "stations of the cross." Using these early teachings as a springboard for critical reflections, poems look back, but more importantly, look forward to reclaiming the gifts given by Creator within Indigenous culture. GoldenEagle's searing new poetry collection examines the dark legacy of the residential school system, church and government doctrine, and the ongoing impacts on Indigenous peoples' lives across Turtle Island."--

"This compelling new poetry collection presents Hypatia of Alexandria, the Neoplatonic philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who was murdered by Christians in the fifth century. The dearth of fact and truth about her has led to many false and fanciful representations of Hypatia. Hypatia's Wake addresses these and the reliable truth about her life. The double bind, a situation in which a person is given two different messages one of which negates the other, features largely in Hypatia's Wake. It links Hypatia's life and example to Luce Irigaray's philosophical theory. If you're a woman you're damned if you fail at philosophy, but also if you succeed at it. If we make amends to history and the river of time by waking Hypatia's death, we wake up to her life, and the significance of our loss."--

(M)othering is a universally understood phenomenon that speaks to the act of becoming something unexpected and entirely outside ourselves. And this book is a collection of writing and art about that. 56 contributors illuminate the kind of gritty, body mind soul transformations that only the mothering myth can evoke. Their work will take you to wonder and wildness, kindness, beauty, grief, love.These writers and artists show us what it means to create, to birth something, to love it, and to suffer loss. They share their truths about being persecuted, fleeing. About trans-generational trauma. Some write of broken women, mothering their mothers and sisters, choosing not to be mothers. Having many mothers. Mothering grown children. Men who want to be mothered. They tackle identity, adoption, abortion, addiction, self-care, sacrifice, nature and nurture, making art, unravelling, invention, loneliness, anger, laughter, and joy. They are queer, Metis, indigenous, French, male, Jewish, Mennonite, descendants of the Blackfoot and the Cree, settlers and immigrants. In unison, they speak about experiences far beyond the pathologizing of the pregnant female body.

In A Knife in the Sky, a journalist's decision to talk and a student's desire to know puts them in the crosshairs of a murderous dictatorship. As the novel opens, Mika is dangerously engaged in the pursuit of truth during Haiti's first Duvalier regime. Nearly thirty years later, her granddaughter Junon witnesses the repressive dynasty's unravelling. Brutal, terrifying, and hopeful, A Knife in the Sky is an homage to those who have survived tyranny.Originally published by les éditions du remue-ménage in 2015 as Femmes au temps des carnassiers, this book, like most of the author's oeuvre, is preoccupied with colonial imposition. Marie-Célie Agnant writes on the ruthlessness of a dictatorship, on humanity, and locates the strength and power of resistance in women.

It is a dreadful thing to be possessed, to be invaded by a spirit woman who commands your body and soul and looks out at the world through your eyes. It happened to me. Pray it will never happen to you.Adele's diary tells the story of her domination by the incubus Lynne, a serving girl in a London alehouse who died a violent death and commandeered Adele's body for eight years. Can Adele be held responsible for Lynne's crimes? Will the evil spirit return and renew her tyranny over Adele's mind?Lynne has moved on into the twenty-first century, but transmigration has left her emotions flat. Lynne is eager to go back to her first life and experience once more the passion she felt for her lover, Jack. To do so, she needs a channel to the past: the manuscript of Adele's diary--if only she can find it.A time-slip novel set in contemporary Los Angeles and eighteenth-century London, The Loneliness of the Time Traveller is a story of love, crime, and adventure combined with fantasy, a little bit of Jane Austen?style irony, and a healthy serving of social criticism.

Gilda Peterborough has always worried about her twin, but when Pete deletes his Facebook page, she goes to red alert. Meanwhile, Pete and Gilda's mother Beth frets about both of her twins, neither of whom seem to be thriving. When Pete abruptly decides to move away from Edmonton to Montreal, Gilda decides to track him down. Beth tries to help by befriending Pete's former co-worker.Pete (a.k.a. Philippa, a.k.a. Phil) is intersex, a biological fact Gilda believes is the root of all Pete's social problems. As far as Pete is concerned, however, the problems all lie with his twin, who is always on his case. Both Beth and Gilda hope to find Pete and somehow reconcile the family's unresolved past, which is haunted by the influence of Ralph Peterborough, a father who has never accepted his children for who they are.In Montreal, Pete meets Philip McDonald, owner of the bed and breakfast where he and Beth lived when they were on the lam more than twenty years ago. Through Philip, Pete meets members of the LGBTQIA+ community and expands his quest for liberation in ways he never expected..

On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada's 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night reconnaissance mission, an hour's paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she's ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she's meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.

These twelve short stories dive deep into imaginary worlds where everyday life is marked and marred by war. They speak of wounded love, captured women, confinement, talismans, borders, wolves. They give expression to the voices of Afghan women who would like to change the fate of people like Nâzboo, Khorshid, Hamid and so many others.Originally published by Éditions Le Soupirail in 2019, this collection was the first volume of short stories by Afghan women to appear in France. This edition from Inanna Publications brings these stories-and their unique perspectives-to English-speaking readers for the first time. The collection includes stories by Wasima Badghisi, Batool Haidari, Alia Ataee, Sedighe Kazemi, Khaleda Khorsand, Masouma Kawsari, Mariam Mahboob, Toorpekai Qayum, Manizha Bakhtari, Homeira Qaderi, Parween Pazhwak and Homayra Rafat.

In Dusk in the Frog Pond, Rummana Chowdhury presents new narratives about the lived realities of Muslim women as they navigate life, be it in Bangladesh, on the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto or along the riotous waves of the Atlantic in New York. These eight powerful stories follow a series of intrepid Bangladeshi women as they confront the issues of migration, displacement, nostalgia, cultural assimilation, marriage and-above all-identity and loneliness. Despite the challenges facing them, these compelling characters seek out happiness, whether in arranged marriages, romantic relationships or in shaping their individual destinies. Each tale is a depiction of the tensions, active as well as simmering, between culture, tradition and history and the modern world. The collection is a compendium of both joy and sorrow, never forgetting the eternally burning fire of hope that lives and dies within all of us.

In The Sleep of Apples, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with passion and consummate skill about nine closely linked characters who walk the tightrope of survival. Set in a gritty Montreal neighbourhood that's been slowly gentrifying over the last two decades, troubled teenagers and an experienced psychiatrist, a truck driver permanently scarred by a near-fatal accident and a recreation therapist struggle to build a community and make their lives-and their deaths-meaningful. Fierce, original and bracingly honest, these unforgettable stories speak to the author's Jewish heritage, her experience as a cancer survivor and as loving mother to a gay son and a transgender son. The stories dramatize that families are what we create, not necessarily those we are born into, illuminating how we all live imperfect lives: We love what we have and mourn what we've lost. Readers are witnesses as these indelible characters gain strength, insight and empathy through their struggles and suffering. They each bear the scars of trauma but possess the gift of resilience.

Set in 1990s New York, Slow Reveal paints an extraordinary portrait of artists who defy the arbiters of culture and challenge social norms. Art, addiction and family dynamics capsize the Kanes when they discover the parallel life of Katharine, film editor, mother, lover and wife."A poem is never finished, only abandoned," wrote Paul Valéry, an outcome echoed in her decade-long affair with Naomi, a lesbian poet. Katharine's marriage to Jonathan collapses in his struggle with sobriety when he's ostracized for politicizing art and abandons his career for advertising. Faced with confrontations from her two grown daughters, an installation artist and an aspiring writer, Katharine hangs onto her former life. When unforeseen tragedy strikes, devotion and commitment are not the guardrails that keep their work or relationships on track but rather a form of entrapment.A captivating story about relevance at the end of the 20th century, the novel questions the voracious demands of contemporary society through a riveting portrayal of turbulent family life, impacted by art shaped by the media and influenced by social and political injustice. Success is redefined by the courage to embark on the artistic process, as risky, messy and unpredictable as building intimacy and trust in love.

Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman's Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges-the barriers in their way. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental, from nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. Through articles, poetry, essays, and visual art, disabled women share their experiences with employment, relationships, body image, sexuality and family life, society's attitudes, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In their own voices, they explore their identity as women with disabilities, showcasing how they continue to challenge the physical and attitudinal barriers that force them to the edges of society and instead place themselves at the centre of new and emerging narratives about disability.

It's not easy "choosing not to choose," especially for a nonbinary teen in 2007.Corey was born intersex, but their father and stepmother didn't make a big deal about it. Then Corey's dad dies suddenly. Now Corey's disapproving mother wants Corey to "pick a side". Corey's old enough to say no to medical intervention-but not old enough to avoid being held in a youth psych ward when their mom makes an issue of Corey's refusal to conform to the gender binary.In the psych ward, Corey makes friends with Kim, a teen girl diagnosed as anorexic-or is she? As they work to unravel their pasts, they discover that Kim's situation is even more dangerous than either of them had ever imagined.

When a young woman is subjected to a violent attack, the impact of colonialism, patriarchy, and who we choose to love are thrown into sharp relief. Daria is an immigrant woman living in Toronto, and as she begins to tell her story, the reader is pulled into different worlds, travelling to various timeframes and locations in an unending awe-inspiring Matryoshka play, where one story leads to another and another and another. The novel explores the stories of multiple characters-the Indo-Portuguese-Canadian sexual predator; the idealist and resilient Mozambican freedom fighter; the wondrous Iberian Roma circus; the Christianized Muslims and Jews; the mystical Nubian master who knows how to capture black matter; the fascist dictator whose ruthless cousin delivers unthinkable punishments inside the closed walls of Tarrafal, the infamous Cape Verdean prison of the Portuguese colonial regime-and countless other personalities, some wretched, some redeemable, some otherworldly, who defend visions and ideals and fight for dignity, power, and recognition.Moving back and forth between Canada, Portugal, Mozambique, and Cape Verde, Daria is a magical realism historical novel where fact and fiction intermingle to create a spellbinding world of complex political, familial, and cultural dynamics.

A sequel to First Gear: A Motorcycle Memoir, Horses in the Sand is a collection of stories that document a queer Métis woman's journey from her sparse beginnings as a child to becoming a tradeswoman, teacher, and artist. With courage, humour, and frank honesty, the stories describe what it was like to grow up as a girl who was starkly different from normal and how coming out became a lifelong process of self-acceptance and changing identities. Potvin's tales also speak to the difficulties in participating in and maintaining healthy adult relationships when childhood foundations are rooted in violence and trauma, culminating with a triumphant account of fulfilling a long-time dream of buying land and building a home with her own hands. Ultimately, this memoir is a celebration of making art, telling stories, and of finding her birth father, a family of half siblings, and an Indigenous community whose presence she had always felt, but to which she never knew she belonged.

It's 1942, and the Nazi Juggernaut continues to crush Europe, while on the island of Newfoundland the loss of a generation awaits. Two girls who are best friends heading into their last year of high school visit a local park-and their lives are changed forever. The beautiful, talented Angela faces loss and then a darkness, a darkness so shameful that she cannot share it with anyone, not even her best friend. Dorothy faces the prospect of becoming the island's first "lady lawyer," one who offers hope for women seeking salvation from the chauvinism that dominates domestic life. A fearless examination of the monumental barriers that have stood in the way of women, My Best Friend Was Angela Bennett is a story of how a friendship endures through the most difficult of times.

The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn't believe in mental illness. As the author embarks on a PhD at the University of Oxford, a lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates in an explosive hospital stay that sees her achieve liberation through psychosis. Her journey from terror to acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts biomedical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each asking, "What does it mean to be normal?" and "Should we be sane in an insane world?"

In Bloodroot, Betsy Warland traces how a mother and daughter's shared gender can shape the very anatomy of narrative itself. In her mother's final year, Warland quietly discovered how to disentangle a crucial, concealed story that had rendered their relationship disconnected and fraught. Warland weaves a common ground that moves beyond duty and despair, providing both questions and guideposts for readers, particularly those faced with ageing and ill parents and their loss.The 2000 edition of Bloodroot broke new ground in memoir form and uncharted storytelling. The 2021 edition, reprinted by Inanna for the launch of its InannaSignature Feminist Publications series, includes a new foreword by Susan Olding and a new essay by Warland that explores subsequent questions, insights and tenderness only the passage of time can enable.

Lawrencia's Last Parang: A Memoir of Loss and Belonging as a Black Woman in Canada is a snapshot of the author's life after the passing of her grandmother Lawrencia, the woman who raised her. Written in the style of a patchwork quilt that takes the reader back and forth between past and present, she examines her grief from the perspective of a Canadian-born Black woman of Caribbean descent, and she begins to question her identity and what it means to be a Black Canadian in new ways. This means exploring her childhood in Trinidad and her adult life in Kingston, Ontario, a predominantly white city; her experience of raising a mixed-raced child; and the meaning of her interracial marriage.Given love and protection by the grandmother who raised her, she belongs to Trinidad, but she was born in Canada. Thus, she occupies what she describes as a third space, needing both Trinidad and Canada, loving both, and belonging fully to neither. In Canada, she struggles with issues of racism almost on a daily basis--everything from "where are you from?" to nurses who come to see the Black woman who gave birth to a white baby, to resentful students at the university where she teaches. Within the academy, she is again in a kind of third space as a "sometimes professor," where archetypes of the Black body (mammy, jezebel, matriarch, and welfare mother) clash with the position of authority she holds in the classroom.Simultaneously a memoir, a eulogy, and an academic analysis, the book offers an insightful exploration of race in Canada, one that complicates these issues through the lens of identity and loss, but also through a prism of privilege.

In the tumultuous 1970s while women, African Americans, and the gay and lesbian communities march for equality, three sisters wrestle with the legacy of their family's Holocaust past. Memory's Shadow is a compelling story of sisterly conflict and loyalty, the broader politics of sisterhood, and the power of the human spirit to rise when faced with the unimaginable recurrence of tragedy.