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Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) 6 reviews
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Coach House Press, 1990
ABSOLUTELY PEE-YOUR-PANTS FUNNY
"Goodnight, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet)" is the funniest play I have ever read or seen. I am currently playing Constance in a high school production of the play, and the more we go along, the more we discover about the play. Upon first reading, it is an absolutely hilarious twist of Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet." But reading it a second, and even a third time will reveal ...
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Nellcott Is My Darling5 reviews
Golda Fried
Coach House Press, 2005
Nellcott May Be Her Darling, But Alice Is My Hero
Golda Fried takes us deep inside of Alice Charles, her incredibly fresh and naïve character who takes our heart and makes us remember every awkward moment of the path toward womanhood. Alice, our hero, is unsure of herself and awkwardly waiting to have her first real love. When she finally finds him, she has just one problem: her virginity. Nellcott, Alice's first love, is really no darling at ...
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From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings of Guy Maddin2 reviews
Guy Maddin
Coach House Press, 2003
A treat for Guy Maddin fans
This little book is great--a feast of short pieces from the pen of Canadian surrealist Guy Maddin. We have here film and DVD reviews, articles, screenplays for produced and unproduced short films, journal excerpts and miscellaneous bits, all as funny and eccentric as one would expect from the director of "Tales from the Gimli Hospital." (None of this duplicates the material in his "Cowards Bend ...
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Raising Eyebrows2 reviews
Gary Barwin
Coach House Press, 2001
Raising Eyebrows beat Bean Spasms!
Barwin is the most exciting poet to come out of Canada since Ted Padgett and Ron Berrigan moved to Toronto to start the New Toronto School in the 60s. The poems in this engaging, inciteful, and energetic collection build on the work created by bpMcCaffery and Steve Nichol of the TISH Research Group and the visionary free-form poetics espoused by Don Bissett and Bill Coles. Barwin's poems are ...
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Seven Pages Missing: The Selected Steve Mccaffery (Volume1)2 reviews
Steve McCaffery
Coach House Press, 2000
An Inportant Set of Books
This two volume set of Steve McCaffery's Collected Selected and Collected Previously Uncollected (and no doubt Unselected until the current Selected Collected) presents some of the liveliest experimental writing of the latter half of the 20th and teensy-weensy sliver of the fore-part of the fore-play of the forward end of the 21st centuries. You'll find visual poetry, texts for sound poetry, ...
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Darkness Then a Blown Kiss3 reviews
Golda Fried
Coach House Press, 1998
demolishd pedestal
a wand in wander..bliss.. how else culd one begin to describe this book..i read it over n over again.. the tossin of coins which in reality doesnt help u make decisions..the uncertainty in love n life. its a trip all done in ur own backyard. 'i loved him as if we were married' did i relate to that or what. .paint my ceilings black and dun forget the stars. she didnt.
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Lion in the Streets3 reviews
Judith Thompson
Coach House Press, 1992
She is Judith Hear Her Roar!!
Judith Thompson writes like no other playwright I have come across. It is like a poetic version of language we hear every day on the streets. Her mixture of unsettlingly extreme, yet disturbingly real situations and dark humor take the reader on an emotional ride that is not soon forgotten. As an actor,I find the emotional life and depth she gives to each character in a scene (no matter how ...
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House Humans2 reviews
Daniel MacIvor
Coach House Press, 1993
Daniel MacIvor IS modern Canadian Theatre
House opened my eyes to the work of MacIvor and set the standard for contemporary Canadian theatre. Victor's rants and theories are both entertaining and engaging for an audience, and both challenging and rewarding for an actor. MacIvor thrives in the intimacy of smaller theatre spaces where the audience has no choice but to be affected by the action on stage. If interested, be sure to read ...
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Better Than Life6 reviews
Daniel Pennac
Coach House Press, 1994
A wonderful read about how wonderful reading is.
Thank goodness this book has been reprinted. My copy of the original, then entitled 'Reads Like a Novel', has been through so many pairs of hands that it's falling apart. But I suppose that would be a suitable state for a book that's all about the gift of reading. And re-reading. Which is fortunate, because this is very much a book to return to with relish. I'm usually jaded enough not to ...
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Unreasonable Hours (Passport Books (Series).)2 reviews
Julio Cortazar
Coach House Press, 1995
truly jarring stories
For this tiny volume of stories, I feel most of all a frequent hunger to reread. This collection provides a fine introduction to Cortazar's writing, for those who do not want to dive into Hopscotch or The Blow-Up without evidence of the author's skill to turn tales. There are two stories in this volume that I utterly love. The one presents a rather twisted world of the late high school or early ...
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Fidget1 review
Kenneth Goldsmith
Coach House Press, 2001
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000
FIDGET KENNETH GOLDSMITH. Coach House (www.chbooks.corn) $15.95 paper (I l2p) ISBN 1-55245-076-7 Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000 Readers familiar with poet and visual artist Goldsmith's No. 111. 2.7.93-10.20.96, perhaps the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry, wondered what he might possibly do for an encore. The answer came on June 16, 1997-Bloomsday ...
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Secular love1 review
Michael Ondaatje
The Coach House Press, 1984
Beautiful
I wasn't too surprised to learn that Michael Ondaatje is an incredible poet. "Speaking to You (From Rock Bottom)" is gorgeous. I am very happy to own this book.
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Shiva's Really Scary Gifts1 review
John Scott, Ann MacDonald
Coach House Press, 2002
An almost unbelievable character!
John has been a friend of mine for many years now, and I've always been amazed at some of the absurd and hilarioius situations that he finds himself in. I'm glad that he finally got a few of them in print. The reader of these stories may find some of them hard to believe, but if they ever got a chance to meet John in person, they'd soon realize just how true they all are. I know of a great ...
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The Port Dalhousie Stories, The1 review
Dennis Tourbin
Coach House Press, 1998
port dalhousie stories
this is a truly great canadian coming of age book. it's hillarious, realistic and probably all true. it's also great becasue it offers a detailed glimpse into the southern ontario music/teen scene of the early and mid sixties, a period and area pretty much ignored (in favour of yorkville) and not well documented in hindsight. i read it when i was about 16 and really enjoyed it. note the cover art ...
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Almost Japanese1 review
Sarah Sheard
Coach House Press, 1998
JUST GOOD. JUST NOW. FRECKLE.
Sheard has always been able to create captivating images. This is particularly true of her very appealing first novel, ALMOST JAPANESE, an exhilarating account of a young girl's infatuation with a Japanese symphony conductor, a man widely believed to have been inspired by Ozawa. In that novel there are exquisite evocations of Canada (Emma's parents give her "a red canvas canoe with ...
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New Plays for Mature Actors: An Anthology1 review
Bonnie L. Vorenberg
Coach House Press Inc, 1987
superb collection of plays for senior actors
Book contains ten scripts selected from two nationwide play searches. Most of the scripts are comedies with female roles, lovable characters, and provocative plots. The plays vary from short 15-minute pieces to longer works that can be used for both beginning or advanced actors. All have been tried before audiences and are low or no royalty. Script is in large print and easy to use. Great ...
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Pulpy and Midge1 review
Jessica Westhead
Coach House Press, 2007
Delightfully deadpan
Wow! What a great debut novel. Devastatingly deadpan. Loved the characters even as I was despising them.
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Blue1 review
Geraldine Rahmani
Coach House Press, 1981
What a wonderful voice(s)
Blue is such an extraordinary book that bridges the gap between poetry and prose. It's a mystery told through a very unique voice wherein each page is split into various characters. In some chapters, there are two narrators with one voice at the top of the page and another at the bottom. Other chapters are split into three narrators: one at the top, a second in the middle, and the third at the ...
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Paper City1 review
Nathalie Stephens
Coach House Press, 2003
Ink Filled Nights in the Paper City
Paper City is built largely in prose-esque paragraphs, with recurrent reference to language and languages (Stephens also writes in French), and with recurrent allusion to logic & linguistics. The work is pervaded by a Beckett-like sense of the despair of living and relating inside a paper/language city (the anxiety of reference), untranslatability, unspeakability. In what one might by now ...
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Milk Chicken Bomb, The1 review
Andrew Wedderburn
Coach House Press, 2007
The Secret Life of Boys
In "The Milk Chicken Bomb," Wedderburn mixes boyish wonderment with small-town torpor in a way that is by turns funny, heartbreaking and mysterious. The narrative builds through a disparate series of events, featuring a cast of characters as colorful as the Alberta prairie is bleak. Mixed throughout are the super-hero dream sequences and mischievous deeds of the troubled young narrator. All the ...
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