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Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists—agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies—convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book.Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that “[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Informed by her practice of “curation as care,” Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: “it's almost by falling that you live. . . . The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.” Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?” and gestures toward the possibility of this “as yet unlived, unexperienced thing.” Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that “[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which “lays the groundwork for the irruption. . . . The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.”Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.

A concise, searing novel centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda who survive capture by the Lord's Resistance Army.In northern Uganda in the 1990s, girls as young as eleven were abducted from schools and homes by the Lord’s Resistance Army and thrust into the horrors of war. Facing long, perilous treks, gun battles, and underage marriages, while forced to be pawns in political machinations they did not understand, many did not survive. Those who did make it through continue to bear the physical and psychological weight of these terrors.As We, the Kindling begins, we meet Miriam and Helen, two survivors who are now in their twenties but haunted by their years in forced servitude to the Army. In spare, graceful, yet unflinching prose the novel weaves past with present, layering folk tales with taut realism to reveal the rhythm of the girls’ lives before the war, unspooling the circumstances of their abductions and tracing their harrowing journeys home again. Reminiscent of The Buddha in the Attic, this is a luminous novel, full of life and care, that insistently refuses to spectacularize brutality and tragedy.

"A fascinating glimpse into the intersection of art, class, and the complexity of adult friendship. . . . I couldn’t put this book down.” —Waubgeshig Rice, author of Moon of the Turning LeavesAn intimate, explosive story of creativity and friendship between two young Japanese women in 1970s Tokyo.Akemi’s desire for independence and aversion to marriage are unusual in her small village. A gift for drawing allows her to move to a rooming house in Tokyo where she studies medical illustration, finding satisfaction in the precision and purpose of her work. Sayako is the first roommate to pay Akemi attention, and they quickly become inseparable—Sayako drawn to Akemi’s humble origins, so distinct from her own insufferable, wealthy family; Akemi attracted to Sayako’s rebelliousness and her aspiration to be a painter.    As Akemi begins to model for Sayako, their connection deepens. Together, they attend ‘happenings,' encounters arranged by two enigmatic artists, Nezu and Kaori, in random locations, intended to free them from their worldly attachments. Following a devastating betrayal, Sayako disappears, and Akemi becomes determined to find her—and in the process, must newly face herself.    Tender, enthralling, and evocative of the energy of Japan in the 1970s, The Art of Vanishing is the story of a young woman struggling to see and be seen; of authenticity and art; of the thin line between loyalty and obsession.

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONA riveting account of the years, months and days leading up to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the unexpected ways Canadians were involved in every aspect of the American Civil War.Canadians have long taken pride in being on the “good side” of the American Civil War, serving as a haven for 30,000 escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. But dwelling in history's shadow is the much darker role Canada played in supporting the slave South and in fomenting the many plots against Lincoln.     The North Star weaves together the different strands of several Canadians and a handful of Confederate agents in Canada as they all made their separate, fateful journeys into history.    The book shines a spotlight on the stories of such intrepid figures as Anderson Abbott, Canada’s first Black doctor, who joined the Union Army; Emma Edmonds, the New Brunswick woman who disguised herself as a man to enlist as a Union nurse; and Edward P. Doherty, the Quebec man who led the hunt to track down Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.    At the same time, the Canadian political and business elite were aiding the slave states. Toronto aristocrat George Taylor Denison III bankrolled Confederate operations and opened his mansion to their agents. The Catholic Church helped one of Booth’s accused accomplices hide out for months in the Quebec countryside. A leading financier in Montreal let Confederates launder money through his bank.       Sher creates vivid portraits of places we thought we knew. Montreal was a sort of nineteenth-century Casablanca of the North: a hub for assassins, money-men, mercenaries and soldiers on the run. Toronto was a headquarters for Confederate plotters and gun-runners. The two largest hotels in the country became nests of Confederate spies.     Meticulously researched and richly illustrated, The North Star is a sweeping tale that makes long-ago events leap off the page with a relevance to the present day.

"In this vulnerable, honest, beautiful memoir, award-winning writer Charles Foran offers a brief and powerful meditation on fathers and sons, love and loss, even as his own father approaches the end of life. Dave Foran was a formidable man of few words, seemingly from a different era than his sensitive, literary son, Charlie. Among other adventures, Dave had lived in the bush, been snow-blinded, hauled a dead body across a frozen lake on a dog sled, dodged a bullet during a bar fight, and gone toe to toe with a bear. Aspects of his life were like tall tales while others were more somber and enigmatic: A decent father to Charlie and his siblings, and a devoted husband to Charlie's mother, Dave was a tough, emotionally distant man, prone to gruff cynicism and a changeable mood. As Charlie writes: "He struggled most days of his life with wounds he could not readily identify, let alone heal . . . Not only did my father never get over what had happened to him as a boy, he didn't try. Men usually didn't try back then. And we just had to deal." When Charlie turned 55, his father began a slow and, as it turned out, final decline. And Charlie felt something he'd never imagined before: a mysterious desire to write about his relationship with his father. On the surface, the motivation was to help lift an inchoate burden from his father's shoulders, to reassure him that he was loved. But there was also another, more personal motivation. "Late into the middle of my own lifespan," Charlie writes, "sadness took hold of my being . . . I wanted to say so frankly, never mind how glib it sounded, how uncomfortable it made me." In spare, haunting prose, Just Once pulls on these threads--unravelling a fascinating personal story but also revealing its universal context (suggested by the title "Just Once, No More," a quote from a poem by Rilke that applies to all of our brief lives). With its skillful prose, humour, affecting intimacy, and love of life even in the shadow of death and uncertainty, this short but very full book presents a nuanced, moving portrait of a fond but distant father grappling with the end of life as his son acts as witness, solace, and would-be guide while shakily facing his own decline. What story can we tell ourselves and those we love, this memoir asks, to withstand the insecurities of self and the inexorable passage of time?"--

A revolutionary call for a new understanding of how people learn.The End of Ignorance conceives of a world in which no child is left behind - a world based on the assumption that each child has the potential to be successful in every subject. John Mighton argues that by recognizing the barriers that we have experienced in our own educational development, by identifying the moment that we became disenchanted with a certain subject and forever closed ourselves off to it, we will be able to eliminate these same barriers from standing in the way of our children. A passionate examination of our present education system, The End of Ignorance shows how we all can work together to reinvent the way that we are taught.John Mighton, the author of The Myth of Ability, is the founder of JUMP Math, a system of learning based on the fostering of emergent intelligence. The program has proved so successful an entire class of Grade 3 students, including so-called slow learners, scored over 90% on a Grade 6 math test. A group of British children who had effectively been written off as too unruly responded so enthusiastically and had such impressive results using the JUMP method that the school board has adopted the program. Inspired by the work he has done with thousands of students, Mighton shows us why we must not underestimate how much ground can be covered one small step at a time, and challenges us to re-examine the assumptions underlying current educational theory. He pays attention to how kids pay attention, chronicles what captures their imaginations, and explains why their sense of self-confidence and ability to focus are as important to their academic success at school as the content of their lessons.