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Our copies for the launch of Phil Hall‘s The Small Nouns Crying Faith (BookThug) have arrived, just in time for tomorrow’s launch!

From 7:30PM to 9:30PM at the Atwater Library Auditorium, Phil Hall will be giving the first Montreal reading for his new book of poetry. The wonderful poet/translator Angela Carr will be hosting the event, and will be interviewing Phil about his work once the reading is over. There will be refreshments, beautiful books for sale and good company. Check this out:

Each copy of The Small Nouns Crying Faith  contains these poem leaflets by Phil Hall, entitled Faith. A considerable acquisition for any and all (CanLit) bibliophiles out there; each leaflet belongs to an 1,000-copy print run. Both the book and its included leaflet are beautifully designed with an all-Canadian design and typeface.

Who knows if we’ll have copies left over after tomorrow? And Phil Hall will be there to sign them!

Hope you can come out and enjoy the evening.

Check out this batch of new releases, including David Ferry‘s Bewilderment, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry: Click on a photo for a closer look, click the title of a book to view information on that title, or just take a look at them in our catalogue (recommended for price checks).

Poetry

• All The Daylight Hours by Amanda Jernigan

• A Rhythm to Stand Beside by Jack Hannan

• Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry

• A Reliquary and Other Poems by Daryl Hine

Literature

• Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt

• Speech Begins After Death: Michael Foucault in Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy

• At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature by Peter Schwenger

• Harlem by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

• Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

• The Devil and the Detective by John Goldbach

• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Volume One: Where on Earth)

• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands)

A scatter-shot of new arrivals, including titles from tonight’s event Poetry Pandamonium! The hardcovers and paperbacks listed below have just been released for sale. Click on a photo for a closer look, click the title of a book to view information on that title, or just take a look at them in our catalogue (recommended for price checks).

 

 

• A Man in Love (My Struggle: Book Two) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

• Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

• The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

• Selected Poems of Derek Walcott

 

• Potty Palooza: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using a Potty by Rachel Gordon, Claudia Gold and Sarah Bergmann

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

• Selected Poems of Denise Levertov

• Little Cat by Tamara Faith Berger

 

• Escape Velocity by Carmelita McGrath

• The house is still standing by Adrienne Barrett

• White Walls: Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya

• Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

• Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt (paperback edition)

• Selected Prose & Poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin

Whew! What a month! April was chock full of great discussions, photo opportunities, and our annual National Poetry Sale was a big success; all thanks to you, Montreal. Now we’re into the month of May, with Kate Zambreno‘s Heroines as our new book of the month, a new book club selection, and a bunch of great events coming up. Read on for for info, or download our newsletter for May here: Argo Bookshop Newsletter – May 2013

Oh, and before we forget to mention it: Consider popping on over to the Cult #MTL (formerly Montreal Mirror) Best of Montreal 2013 voting website and vote for the Argo Bookshop as Best New Bookstore. It should only take you 5 to 10 minutes to fill out their minimum of 25 categories (Best Mexican or Best-Dressed Montrealer, for example). You can access the voting site here. Thanks for your consideration!

New & Latest Arrivals

• Snowflake & Different Streets by Eileen Myles

• A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

• How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel

• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life by Oren Izenberg

• Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin

• 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future by John MacCormick

• Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus

Book of the Month: 20% off Kate Zambreno’s Heroines

“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order–pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” – Heroines

“On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister… Widely reposted, Zambreno’s blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses.” (In it,) Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers’ muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized…

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a (work of literary scholarship). Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it–from T. S. Eliot’s New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional “girl-on-girl crime” of the Second Wave of feminism–she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the “minor” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds.” (MIT Press)

Book Club Update

Another book club choice of ours, Victor Serge’s Conquered City, has come and gone. On to the next one!

Our next read will be The True Deceiver, by the Swedish novelist and children’s author Tove Jansson:

“ Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions. ” (NYRB)

On June 26^th, we’ll get together to discuss the book over some drinks. Everyone’s welcome, and anyone partaking receives a 15% discount off the book.

If you would like to join in for our monthly discussions, send an email to argobookshop@gmail.com in order to receive regular updates.

News for upcoming events coming soon!

Another set of new arrivals! The hardcovers and paperbacks listed below have just been released for sale. Click on a photo for a closer look, click the title of a book to view information on that title, or just take a look at them in our catalogue (recommended for price checks).

Literature:

Hardcover…

• Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet by Sarah Elton

• The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee

Paperback…

• The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker

• Maya’s Notebook by Isabel Allende

• Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

• Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

• Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

This week we’ll be hosting the Montreal launch of the first book Whisk by the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs. Read on for more info, or visit the Facebook event!

Friday April 26th, 7PM to 9PM

Yoko’s Dogs launch Whisk

Written collaboratively in the tradition of Japanese linked poetry or renku, Whisk plays with form and subject matter ranging from the everyday to the intensely lyric, from the urban to the rural. Both humorous and contemplative, Whisk’s verses are linked by means that are neither merely logical nor predictable, with the final emerging poem acting more as journey than story. While drawing on Japanese formal tradition, Yoko’s Dogs’ poetry takes on a distinctly Canadian and contemporary cast that evolved over the course of five years.

Yoko’s Dogs was formed by Jan Conn, Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele and Jane Munro in 2006 around a small tin table at La Maison Verte, a co-op grocery and café in Montreal. Susan Gillis teaches literature and creative writing in Montreal; her most recent books are The Rapids (Brick Books 2012) and Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press 2012). Mary di Michele, poet and novelist, teaches at Concordia University. Her latest published collection is The Flower of Youth, Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems (ECW Press 2011). Jan Conn is a research scientist in Albany, New York, and her latest book of poems is Edge Effects (Brick Books 2012). Jane Munro lives in Vancouver; her most recent poetry book is Active Pass (Pedlar Press 2010).

Big news! Great news! Read on!

On Thursday May 16th at the Atwater Library, the Argo and the QWF will be presenting the Montreal launch of Phil Hall‘s new book of poems The Small Nouns Crying Faith, published by Toronto’s very own BookThug. And it won’t be like any other: On top of a reading, we’ll have an in-house interview between Phil and Angela Carr! Refreshments! A soirée of literature!

“The first word in this new collection by Phil Hall is “raw” and the last word is “blurtip.” Between these, many nouns cry faith within a hook-less framework that sings in chorus while undermining such standard forms & tropes as “the memoir,” “genealogy” and “the shepherd’s calendar.” With a rural pen, these poems talk frogs, carrots, local noises, partial words, remnants, dirt roads, deep breath & hope…”   – BookThug

And!

For any and all interested parties: If you pre-order a copy of The Small Nouns Crying Faith with us now, you can receive the book at 10% off! Feel free to call, email, message us or just talk to us in person if you’re interested.

You can find the event’s listing on Facebook. Feel free to invite your friends, family and acquaintances!

G’day Montreal! As you’ll see below, all kinds of fantastic books have just arrived and are ripe for the taking. Our National Poetry Month sale continues, with 20% off any in-stock poetry title, so take a look at the 15 titles we’ve brought in. Other points of interest are (not limited to) new novels and social criticism, along with a re-print of the tried & true favourite by Porcupine’s Quill, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland complete with wood engravings by George A. Walker.

So scroll on down like the price is right! Click on a photo for a closer look, click the title of a book to view information on that title, or just take a look at them in our catalogue (recommended for price checks).

Literature

• The White Album by Joan Didion

• The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte

• Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto by Shawn Micallef

• Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin

• Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

• Basic Problems of Phenomenology by Martin Heidegger

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (new edition)

Poetry (20% off this month!)

• Whisk by Yoko’s Dogs (come to the reading on April 26th!)

• The Hottest Summer in Recorded History by Elizabeth Bachinsky

• The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner

• Collected Poems: 1944-1949 by Nelly Sachs (Green Integer)

• I Cut My Finger by Stuart Ross

• [Collected] Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

• Timely Irreverence by Jay Millar

• Mercury by Ariana Reines

• Brilliant Falls by John Terpstra

• Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott

• The Deer Yard by Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston

• I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being by Johanna Skibsrud

• Err by Shane Rhodes

• Undark by Sandy Pool

• Contributor’s Notes by Monty Reid

Children’s Lit

• Cave-In by Brian Ralph

• Whitefoot by Wendell Berry

This week we’ll be hosting two launches, one after the other. Read on for more information!

#1

Thursday, April 18th @ 8PM

Daniel O’Leary launches The Lower Provinces

with Steve Luxton & Walid Bitar

On April 18th, Daniel O’Leary will be holding a long-awaited Montreal launch of his book The Lower Provinces (DC Books 2012) at the Argo Bookshop. ‘Presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos’, O’Leary’s latest collection of poems is a combination of recovered early Canadian visionary experiences and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents to create a series of dramatic settings. In it, O’Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country’s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of early Canadian voices who reflect as much on our own as on previous times. In both visionary recovery and faux antique pastiche, O’Leary examines the claims of the present and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight welling up from Canada’s past.

Professor of Canadian Studies at Concordia in Montreal, Daniel O’Leary’s poetry has appeared in Exile, Fiddlehead, the spoken-word anthology Poetry Nation, and in numerous other journals. Aside from an earlier book of poetry, The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères (Ficciones 1991), he has published work on early Canadian print culture in The History of the Book in Canada and is co-editor with Jonathan Wisenthal of What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. A descendant of early Maritime Canadian families, O’Leary was born on New Brunswick’s Fundy coast and was raised there and in Nova Scotia.

The reading will be hosted by Steve Luxton of DC Books and the poet Walid Bitar.

#2

Friday, April 19th @ 8PM

Argo Featured Reading #16:

Mary Dalton launches Hooking with Sue Sinclair

Mary Dalton and Sue Sinclair will be the readers of our 16th Featured Reading at the shop, an evening of Newfoundland-bred poetry combining both Dalton’s dialectic energy and Sinclair’s cerebral explorations.

Mary Dalton will be launching her latest book Hooking, “a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton’s cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton’s lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling and dazzling.” (Vehicule 2013)

Mary Dalton is the author of four volumes of poetry, the latest of which include a limited- edition artisanal chapbook Between You and the Weather (2008), and before that, a full- length collection entitled Red Ledger (2006). Her work has been widely anthologized in Canada and abroad, and has received numerous awards, from the E.J. Pratt award and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award.

Sue Sinclair is the author of four volumes of poetry. Her debut collection Secrets of Weather and Hope (2001) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award, her second book Mortal Arguments (2003) a finalist for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and her third collection The Drunken Lovely Bird (2005) won the International Independent Publisher’s Award for Poetry. She is the first appointed Critic-in-Residence by the CWILA, and is currently working on a philosophy doctorate on the subject of beauty.

A lot of really fantastic stuff just came in. Here’s our newest and latest arrivals from April 6th, with 8 additions to our growing selection of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, including works from Lenin, Machiavelli (not The Prince), De Montaigne and Achebe, who recently passed away. We’ve got more poetry for our National Poetry Month Sale (20% off all poetry), with sleek installments of the new NYRB Poets Series and new novels by James Salter and Sonali Deraniyagala! Check it out, they’re all located below the first photo.

Click on a title of a book in the following lists to view information on that title, or take a look at them in our catalogue.

New Penguin Great Ideas: