Avi Friedman

In Neighbourhood: Designing a Liveable Community, renowned architect, professor and urban planner Avi Friedman describes the planning of a new neighbourhood in Middlesex Centre, a rural municipality in southern Ontario. Friedman explores how good and bad design affect our homes and civic life. In his quest to build a new kind of neighbourhood, Friedman talks about personal architectural and community touchstones that have informed his work through the years.

Over the past decade or more, worrisome signs—climate change, depletion of natural resources, unrelenting urban sprawl, the tyranny of the automobile, the decline of face-to-face human contact—have motivated us to radically rethink home and community design. In Avi Friedman’s view, these issues have combined to force us to question fundamental practices and come up with better solutions.

Émile Nelligan

A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization in 1899, he had already produced an impressive body of work. Translating Nelligan’s “essential” poems, along with a sharp introduction contextualizing his legacy as one of the “first poets to write openly about suicide, neurosis, and psychological breakdown,” Marc di Saverio has given us a rivetingly fresh version of Nelligan for a new generation.

Bill Haugland

Portals takes the reader down a dark path into a dystopian realm of alternate realities and horror. Newspaper reporter Colin Dalhousie tracks scores of human disappearances dating back to the mid-1800s. What he discovers reveals a chilling pattern of events.This apocalyptic tale portrays an epic battle between good and evil. Is there such a thing as a multiverse, where doorways into alternate realities truly exist? Are prophecies from The Book of Revelation reflected in cataclysmic 21st-century events like climate change, extreme weather, and political landscapes shifting sharply to the right? Is humanity experiencing the End of Days? Is it too late to reverse course?

Mélanie Grondin

Guido Nincheri’s work has been appreciated by connoisseurs of stained-glass windows and frescoes in church interiors scattered across Canada and New England. Although considered to have been the most prolific religious artist in North America, his work is not well known. The Art and Passion of Guido Nincheri provides intimate glimpses into the life story of this man of great artistic integrity, and introduces the reader—with 36 colour plates—to a sampling of the churches and one of the non-religious buildings Nincheri decorated, which exemplify his ideals of beauty, decoration, and the public aspect of art. In addition to churches in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Edmundston, and many other cities, Nincheri decorated Montreal’s Château Dufresne Museum and the Roger Williams Museum of Natural History in Providence, Rhode Island.

A native of Prato, Nincheri trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Stile Liberty. The young artist and his new wife arrived in Montreal in 1913 by way of Boston on the eve of the outbreak of World War I. The author was privileged to have access to both family stories and the rich archival resources documenting the studio, business and private life of the artist.