Mordecai Richler’s final book pays homage to his personal heroes and celebrates a writer’s love of sport with his trademark irascibility, humour and acuity. Even while writing his bestselling novels, Mordecai Richler nurtured his obsession with sports, writing brilliantly on ice hockey, baseball, salmon fishing, bodybuilding, and wrestling for such publications as GQ , Esquire , The New York Times Magazine , Inside Sports , Commentary , and The New York Review of Books . Mordecai himself chose the pieces to include in Dispatches from the Sporting Life , and together they give us an intimate portrait of a man who admired the players and prized the struggle of sport—as much as he enjoyed skewering those who made a mockery of its principles. His encounters with Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe (“Mr. Elbows... the big guy with the ginger-ale bottle shoulders”) are by turns bizarre, moving and uproarious. Richler travelled with Guy LaFleur’s Montreal Canadiens (“Les Canadiens sont là!”), but also with the “far-from-incomparable” Trail Smoke Eaters to Stockholm for the world hockey championships, where Canadians are “widely known, and widely disliked.” There are wonderful pieces here about Ring Lardner, George Plimpton, Hank Greenberg and lady umpires, and a marvellous essay on his unlimited enthusiasm for the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports , which includes among its champions Sandy Koufax, “who may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as well as one Steve Allan Hertz, an infielder who played five total games in Houston in 1964 and had a batting average of .000.

Poised to capitalize on renewed political interest following the federal election, the trade paperback edition of What’s Happened to Politics? is sure to be necessary reading for every concerned Canadian citizen. Segmented electorates. Political leaders avoiding debate and dialogue in favour of an endless repetition of sound bites and vanity videos with little substance. Billions of dollars spent on lobbying. It’s clear that Canadian politics is in a sorry state. Through increasingly low voter turnouts and a general lack of engagement in the political process, Canadians have shown that they are dissatisfied and fed up with present-day politics. At a time when Canadians across the political spectrum are frustrated with political gamesmanship, it is more important than ever to find ways to re-engage with our communities, our leaders, and our political institutions. In Bob Rae, Canadians hear the voice of reason they need, and in What’s Happened to Politics? , they finally get an definitive account of the problems plaguing their national politics. Touching on everything from polling to issues of social justice to the way in which political parties package their candidates, Rae identifies the shortcomings of the current Canadian political framework, and what we, as citizens, can do to remedy that. With remarkable insight and startling accuracy, Rae envisions a political forum where citizens are inspired to participate, instead of feeling disenfranchised. Timely, filled with real-world examples, and told from the point of view of an experienced statesman, What’s Happened to Politics? is necessary reading for all Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation. Erudite, engaged, and keenly attuned to the frustrations expressed by Canadians across the political spectrum, Rae shows why he is the leading voice on Canadian politics.

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.Praise for I Cut My Finger:One of Eye's "Best Reviews of 2007""Taddle Creek Recommends" Pick (Summer 2007 issue)"... Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry ... Absurd, surprising, topical, surreal - his new work builds on the mythic significance and brilliance of several career-long metaphors and subjects." (The Globe and Mail)"It is surrealism at its best: written not to dispel the present but to reveal it." (Arc Poetry)"A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." (Taddle Creek)