Stephen Zeifman / reading, with audience

Antonio D’Alfonso

Daniel David Moses / James Clarke

Doug Richardson, Exile’s Man on the Saxophone
Writer/Translator Ray Ellenwood, Screen Writer/Director David Sobelman, Exile Editor-Emeritus Barry Callaghan

Chris Doda, Exile Editor and Archivist, with Michael Callaghan, Exile Publisher
Gabriela Campos with Maria Luisa de Villa (Mexican/Canadian artists)

A novel that probes the heart of the contemporary malaise: how a man without faith navigates through the moral and ethical dilemmas of modern life. Ben Calder, an artist teaching at one of Canada’s oldest independent girl’s schools, is beginning to unravel. In October a girl arrives at the school from Italy. Her mother and Ben were in love in high school and when the mother arrives in Toronto for her daughter’s eighteenth birthday, the daughter’s jealousy precipitates Ben’s fall. The Ben Calder Story completes the Toronto Trilogy, which includes The Family Man and The Good Friend – Zeifman’s two previously published novels. A novella, Peripheral Vision, is also in print.

A filmmaker who makes documentaries on hit-men, Fabrizio Notte is invited to show his latest piece, a work of fiction, at a film festival in Montréal. The reviews have been mixed and his family is in trouble. What’s happened? Has he sold out? Is he a loser? An imposter? The trip to his hometown also serves as a pretext for an existential pilgrimage towards love and belonging. His search leads him, on a Friday in August, back through time, through this vast, moving landscape that is memory, to his first love and, ultimately, to himself.
In its baroque, multi-layered style tinted with both lyricism and humour, Antonio D’Alfonso, like his character, pursues this quest in an authentic language, rooted in the sources of real life and in the universal search for meaning that makes us human.

We have grown accustomed to false bread, robots, androids. Box-office success creates dead cultures, it fossilizes what should palpitate with passion. Success excludes. If the spotlight falls on false bread, and if that false bread is not strong enough to carry the expectations of buyers, people turn away, dissatisfied. Culture is what is left over when there is no more money, after the robots and androids have disappeared. Gambling with Failure is a personal journey into an understanding of how a "weak culture" can become what really counts in the end, how a failure today may be the great work of tomorrow.

A collection from the prize-winning First Nations dramatist and poet, 18 essays and talks exploring the nature of story telling, the possibilities of a "collective past," tricksters, "medicine shows," and those stalking ghosts who have pale faces.
"Moses’ voice is firm and assured, but oddly hard to define, combining a loose colloquial sprawl and a pared-down tenseness with a mythic imagination and an everyday chattiness. He writes in a world in which everything is not only possessed of consciousness, but seems engaged in thoughtful consideration of itself." –Maggie Helwig, Books in Canada

Clarke, a Justice of the Ontario Court, follows up on his successful poetry collections with further humorous yet painful reflections on the ambiguity within the finalities of the law.
"Poets and writers, lovers, those who have lost someone they love, anyone who has ever had the feeling that life is not fair will find something to take away from his poetry." –Susan Musgrave