Véhicule Press

Perilous Passage

Arthur Mayse

Drug-runners threaten the West Coast!

A semi-conscious man looks about a boat's cabin as a woman presses a wet cloth to his forehead. She's young, her nails are short, and her small hands are calloused. When another man tries to enter, she grabs a gun: "If you come down here, Joe, I'll shoot you."

For a moment, the intruder doesn't move. "I don't want your damn' old hulk," he tells her. When the woman threatens a second time, he leaves. "You'd better too," he says. "She's near sunk."

So begins the story of Clint, a reform school runaway, and Devvy, an orphaned farm girl saddled with a deceitful drunk of a stepmother. Clint and Devvy are pushed together as they struggle against the corrupt, criminal, violent adults trying to exert control over their lives.

Perilous Passage first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been published in hardcover, paperback, and in Swedish translation. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1952.

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Swallowed

Réjean Ducharme

A New Translation of Réjean Ducharme’s Debut Novel That Rocked a Generation

In 1966, Réjean Ducharme, then a 24-year-old unknown, published L’Avalée des avalés, the debut novel that would go on to serve as a zeitgeist for several generations of French-Canadian readers.

Over the last fifty years, it has become a cornerstone for a culture, taught in high schools and universities as the foundation of modern Québécois literature. Astoundingly, an English-language edition of the book hasn’t been in print since 1968, and has never before been available in Canada.

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Little Housewolf

Medrie Purdham

Medrie Purdham's Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry—close observation, exact detail, precise sounds—not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild"). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.

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Nectarine

Chad Campbell

Memory—how we retrieve and replenish it—is at the heart of Nectarine, Chad Campbell's visionary second collection. Figures, cities, and landscapes from the author's life shift in and out of these dreamlike poems that explore the “unaccountable, uncountable” ways in which our past keeps speaking to us: through objects, through paintings, through colours, and through the spectre of places that map themselves over the places we live in. Subtle, unsettling, compressed, and full of incandescently beautiful language, Nectarine is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.”

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Culture in Transit

Sherry Simon

Reflections on the art of literary translation.

Translators connect languages and landscapes, sparking conversations that enlarge our imagination. In Canada, where translation has had an especially important role to play, the nature of the connections has changed. These wide-ranging essays, by Canada’s most prominent translators, chart a journey that begins with the sharp divides of English and French in the 1970s and then confronts the much more complex explosion of identities today. Engaging with the politics of meaning but also with the creative role of the translator, these beautifully-written reflections illuminate a practice that is today finally receiving due recognition.

Contributors include Wayne Grady, Rhonda Mullins, Michelle Hartman, Erin Moure, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Linda Gaboriau, Sheila Fischman, Kathy Mezei, Philip Stratford, Louise von Flotow, Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, William Findlay, David Homel, Jane Brierley, Katia Grubisic.

Culture in Transit was originally published in 1995. This edition, with a new introduction by Sherry Simon, has been revised, and expanded to include four new contributors to reflect changes in the translation scene over the last decades.

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