News

MLA 2023, San Francisco

Universitas Press will be attending the MLA convention in San Francisco. Come see us at booth 414A! We will be happy to talk to you about our new titles, about our bestselling titles, and about your research and publishing plans. Fingers crossed, this will be an onsite event!

Frankfurt Bookfair 2022

You will be able to find some of our most interesting books at the Gazelle Book Services booths. Gazelle is Universitas Press’ distributor for the UK and European market.

News

New Metonymy Titles

In Fall 2021, we published two titles by local writers.

Personal Attention Roleplay is Helen Chau Bradley’s debut fiction title: an at once eerie and invigorating collection of stories, it spans Montreal neighbourhoods, swimming pools and gym mats, and the dark open road on a tour gone awry. Though their stories are diverse in points of view, length, and form, “Chau Bradley is adept at creating complex characters with inner lives and motivations that feel unique to them, while still being relatable, flawed, and human,” as Billie Gagné-LeBel wrote in a feature article in the Montreal Review of Books.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s second book, The Good Arabs, was our first title of theirs, and it is also genre-defying, containing a short story at the centre of a poetry collection. El Bechelany-Lynch and Chau Bradley both include all-dialogue pieces in their work, and in The Good Arabs these occur as a refrain throughout the collection. The book’s “thoughtful, mutable, quality,” as a McGill Daily review put it, extends through its mapping of Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. 

Earlier, in Spring 2021, we published our first collection of short stories, A Natural History of Transition, by Portland-based author Callum Angus. Cal launched the collection virtually in a number of places, partnering with bookstores and brilliant readers and interviewers in a number of locations to discuss the ongoing nature of transness, the myth of nature as fixed and unchanging, and the element of horror in his work. Again, the collection varies in length and style — the “eight tales show a staggeringly virtuosic range” according to a Gertrude Press review — but readers comment as well on its cohesiveness.

At the beginning of 2021 we published our first picture book, the long-awaited Dear Black Girls, written by Shanice Nicole and illustrated by Kezna Dalz. A brightly illustrated, celebratory ode, this book was sought after by booksellers, community groups, libraries, and a bunch of very tiny readers, some of whom were captured reading the book in extremely heartwarming images which were passed along to the creators.

News

Nunavik nominated for Joe Shuster Award

July 10, 2017 – Author Michel Hellman is nominated for a Joe Shuster Award in the “best cartoonist” category for his most recent book Nunavik.

Michel Hellman wins Bédélys Award

May 20, 2017 – Michel Hellman’s Nunavik is the winner of the 2016 Bédélys Québec Award for “best album”. His previous book Mile End was nominated for the same award in 2011.

Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau nominated for Joe Shuster Award

June 15, 2015 – Vampire Cousins writer Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau has been nominated for a Joe Shuster Award for “best writer”. The book was also nominated for a Bédélys Award earlier this year.

Earthbound receives Réal-Fillion Award

April 10, 2015 – Blonk’s Earthbound was crowned “best debut album” at the Bédéis Causa Awards. The Réal-Fillion Award was previously won by Michel Rabagliati, Jimmy Beaulieu and Pascal Girard.

Zviane wins Joe Shuster Award

September 20, 2014 – Zviane has won the Joe Shuster Award for “best cartoonist” for her bold and innovative graphic novel For As Long As It RainsThe book has previously won the Grand prix de la ville de Québec at last year’s Bédéis Causa Awards.

News

Stage Turns

The Canadian Association for Theatre Research has cited Kirsty Johnston’s Stage Turns for an honorable mention for best book-length publication in English.

From the Ann Saddlemyer Awards Committee:

“Johnston’s Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre marks a substantial intervention into Canadian theatre studies from the dynamic perspectives of disability arts and disability-led performance. The core of her study is composed almost entirely of ‘on the ground’ research of companies in Canada who are testing assumptions about disability through performance. Her choice of companies attests to the work of groups and organizations across the country using theatre to combat the systemic discrimination and medicalization of differently abled bodies. Johnston’s commitment to a wide range of primary material practices – which include dialoguing with artists, researching the mandates and structure of companies, evaluating funding policies, and analyzing productions and festivals – challenges readers to understand disability arts in Canada as a context-specific and politically inflected praxis. Disability and disability arts are not uniform concepts and categories in this study as demonstrated in Johnston’s original case studies of Workman Arts, Theatre Terrific, Stage Left, and Realwheels to name just a few groups. This textured materialist analysis is accompanied by detailed and thoughtful readings of Stage Left’s Mercy Killings or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story and Workman Arts’ Vincent expanding the canon of Canadian theatre studies. Stage Turns seeks to understand how disability artists bring politics to the stage through stories that are compelling because they are vital sites of activism.”

 

To learn more about Stage Turns, or to order online, click here.


Finalists for Canada Prizes announced

Celebrating the best Canadian scholarly books across all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, the Canada Prizes are awarded to books that make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

The following MQUP books are finalists for the 2013 Canada Prize in the Humanities.

 

The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales

Edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet

Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world – flora, fauna, and aboriginal.

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.

The Codex Canadensis won the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the 2012 Melva Dwyer Award and is a selected entry for the AAUP Book and Jacket Show.

More on The Codex Canadensis
Wilson_Mcgee2Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2
The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868
By David A. Wilson

After a tumultuous career as a revolutionary in Ireland and an ultra-conservative Catholic in the United States, Thomas D’Arcy McGee moved to Canada in 1857, where he became a force for moderation and the leading Irish Canadian politician in the country. Determined that Canada should avoid the ethno-religious strife that afflicted Ireland, he articulated an inclusive, broad-minded nationalism based on generosity of spirit, a willingness to compromise, and a reasonable balance between order and liberty.

As someone who took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethno-religious community, and who attempted to balance core values with minority rights, McGee has become increasingly relevant in today’s complex multicultural society.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2 won the 2012 Canadian Political History Prize and was shortlisted for the 2012 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 1 won the 2010 Raymond Klibansky Prize and is the co-winner of the 2008 James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize.

More on Thomas D’Arcy McGee


Sandra Djwa is a Finalist for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize

Djwa

McGill-Queen’s is delighted to announce that Journey with No Maps: A Biography of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa is a finalist for the the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction. The Charles Taylor Prize recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing and emphasizes the development of the careers of the authors it celebrates. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at a gala luncheon and awards ceremony at The King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto on Monday, March 4th. More information here.

Congratulations, Sandra!

Read an excerpt from Journey with No Maps.

To learn more about Journey with No Maps, or to order online, click here
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.  


 

The Merger Delusion finalist for Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

 

Djwa_journey

Peter Trent’s The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

About the Award

The finalists were selected by a jury of politician and political scientist Ed Broadbent, columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin. The prize will be presented in Ottawa at the Politics and the Pen Gala on March 6, 2013.

Now in its twelfth year, the prize is awarded annually to a non-fiction book that captures a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and enhances our understanding of the issue. The winning work combines compelling new insights with depth of research and is of significant literary merit. Strong consideration is given to books that, in the opinion of the jury, have the potential to shape or influence Canadian political life.

About The Merger Delusion

Powerless under the country’s constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality – a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the Parti Québécois government, The Merger Delusion is a sharp and insightful critique by a key player in anti-merger politics.

Peter Trent, mayor of the City of Westmount, Quebec, foresaw the numerous financial and institutional problems posed by amalgamating municipalities into megacities. Here, he presents a stirring and detailed account of the battle he led against the provincial government, the City of Montreal, the Board of Trade, and many of his former colleagues. Describing how he took the struggle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Trent demonstrates the ways in which de-mergers resonated with voters and eventually helped the Quebec Liberal Party win the 2003 provincial election.

As the cost and pitfalls of forced mergers become clearer in hindsight, The Merger Delusion recounts a compelling case study with broad implications for cities across the globe.

Click to read an excerpt from The Merger Delusion

 

To learn more about The Merger Delusion, or to order online, click hereFor media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.