Fall 2025
Wrestling with Cadence
by Dennis Lee
2025 • Essays
"One of the finest poets in the English language.”— Paul Vermeesch
A career-spanning collection of critical and personal essays from a titan of Canadian literature.
Building and expanding on his previous volume of essays Body Music, Dennis Lee looks back on what has driven him as a poet: the mysterious germinating force he calls cadence. At once a stealth memoir and an essential study of how a poet writes, Wrestling with Cadence is the definitive history of a beloved Canadian poet in his own words.
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Dennis Lee is among the finest poets now working in English. The author of more than forty books, he is highly regarded for his meditative and erotic poetry, as well as his unforgettable collections for young people such as Alligator Pie. He wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’s hit children’s series, Fraggle Rock, and in 2001 was named Toronto’s first poet laureate. Heart Residence, his collected poems, was published in 2017. He lives in Toronto with his wife, the novelist Susan Perly.
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An “extraordinary collection of essays.” — Margaret Atwood on Wrestling With Cadence
“One of the finest poets in the English language.” — Quill & Quire
“Canada has produced many competent poets but few absolute masters. ... The Gods confirms the presence of a master: Dennis Lee.” — Mark Abley, Maclean’s
“Constantly, throughout his work about intensely personal matters, Lee achieves perhaps the hardest quality for a poet to attain, a memorable directness and simplicity. Which is in turn a token of his preeminence.” — Christopher Levenson, EVENT
“Lee, like every great poet, cannot be catalogued or filed under any given poetic category. He is an exponent of the real; his lines are essentially prophetic.” — Gwendolyn MacEwen
“Dennis Lee’s poems are important to me above all because, more consistently than those of anyone else whose work I know, they manifest a full awareness of the poem as a form of musical score.” — Denise Levertov, Descant
“An astonishing batch of poems – unwieldy, tough-minded, shot through with passages of knotty and uncompromising beauty.” — Perry Nodelman on Civil Elegies in the Winnipeg Free Press
“Civil Elegies is our Waste Land. ... It gave the city and the nation a sacramental landmark for a secular age.” — Nick Mount
“One of the most extraordinary bodies of work in contemporary English poetry.” — Paul Vermeersch
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Published by Stonehewer Books, September 2025
234 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
$22.95 CAD / $16.95 USD
Wrestling with Cadence is available to order through your local bookstore, Indigo, and Amazon.
$22.95 CAD / $16.95 USD
Softcover: 9781069236203
eBook: 9781069236210
$25.95 CAD / $19.95 USD
Softcover: 9781069236227
eBook: 9781069236234
To Linger With You
by Donna Nebenzahl
2025 • Memoir
A "riveting memoir... recounted in lush and gorgeous, vivid prose."— Montreal Gazette
Donna Nebenzahl grew up in the 1950s amid a large, close-knit Portuguese family in the colony of British Guiana. Nurtured by her loving grandparents, she never inquired why her mother lived a continent away nor asked about her father’s early death. Nor did she know why, as a devout young Catholic, she had a Jewish family name. After the colony headed toward independence and she had moved to Canada, Nebenzahl began to explore the difficult issues that her family history raised. The answers emerge gradually in this luminous, compelling memoir that explores the aftermath of loss and the true meaning of home.
Read an excerpt here
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Donna Nebenzahl grew up in the 1950s, part of a close-knit Portuguese family in the South American colony of British Guiana. Nurtured by loving grandparents, she spent her childhood never asking why her mother lived a continent away or the reason for her father's early death. Nor did she know why, having been brought up Catholic, she had a Jewish last name. As the colony gained independence and she moved to Canada, Nebenzahl began to explore the difficult issues that her family history raised. The answers emerge gradually in this luminous, compelling memoir that explores the aftermath of loss and the true meaning of home.
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“In Donna Nebenzahl’s To Linger with You, a quest to fill a psychic void morphs into a rich family history replete with secrets and surprises. Nebenzahl’s sensuous appreciation of her tropical home in British Guiana is bulwarked by careful research and a clear eyed reckoning with the legacies of slavery and indentured servitude. To Linger with You speaks of, and to, the parts of our personal heritage that don’t seem to add up — and then suddenly do. This fascinating and carefully observed memoir deserves a wide readership.”
— Elaine Kalman Naves, author of Shoshanna’s Story and Journey to Vaja“Donna Nebenzahl enjoyed an idyllic childhood in British Guiana, or so she thought. Her maternal grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles had enveloped her in love. All she lacked were parents. Her eventual need for the truth about the past led her to ask a few hard questions: Why did her father die young? Why did her mother abandon her? And just who were her father’s parents? Nebenzahl’s discovery of the answers turns this beautiful memoir from a nostalgic evocation of Caribbean privilege into something richer, deeper and more troubling.”
— Mark Abley, author of The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind“This is a gorgeous gift of a memoir. Donna Nebenzahl is one gifted and righteous keeper of her family stories, which are remembered and recounted here in cinematic detail. From her childhood in the home of her well-to-do grandparents, who came to what was then British Guiana from Portugal, to her life as an emigrant to Canada, Ms. Nebenzahl’s family story is redolent with love and loss. To Linger With You can be read as a high praise song to one family and the Edenic landscape of the author’s childhood home; but it is also a testament to the strength and resilience of immigrants, and a welcome and clear-eyed commentary on the many cultural influences that shaped the modern Caribbean.”
— Lorna Goodison, prize-winning author of From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island -
Published by Stonehewer Books, October 2025
248 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
To Linger With You is available to order through your local bookstore, Indigo, and Amazon.
$25.95 CAD / $19.95 USD
Softcover: 9781738993383
eBook: 9781738993390
Unorganized Territory
by David Gurr
2025 • Memoir
“One of Canada’s most formidable writers” (Toronto Star) returns with a witty and touching memoir of a boyhood in British Columbia.
Best known for his spy thrillers, here Gurr recalls his own youth in vivid prose. Hovering over it all, unseen but not unfelt, is a dark family secret guarded closely by the author’s parents. Gurr tells the story of his topsy-turvy early life with great panache, an exceptional memory for colourful detail, and a wry sense of humour.
Unorganized Territory is a “wickedly unconventional memoir” written with “wonderful freshness and sharpness”: “[t]his is the stuff, many readers must feel, of which the most enduring memories—and memoirs—are made.” (Theo Dombrowski, The British Columbia Review).
Read an excerpt here
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David Gurr is the acclaimed author of several novels, including Troika, The Voice of the Crane, and The Ring Master, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Before launching his literary career, Gurr served with the Royal Canadian Navy as an executive officer and computer systems analyst. He subsequently alternated between writing books and building distinctly West Coast houses. He lives in Victoria, BC.
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Troika
“Gurr makes a stunning debut … moving right up there with the big boys in the spy business.”
— Publishers Weekly“An event in Canadian publishing history.”
— Derrick Murdoch, The Globe and Mail
The Ring Master
“An extraordinary achievement, a work of richness and virtuosity to which a reviewer can scarcely do justice.”
— Alberto Manguel, The Globe and Mail“The most extraordinary book I have read [this year].”
— Lord Robert Skidelsky on his favourite books of 1987, The Sunday Telegraph“Dazzling.” — Vancouver Sun
The Voice of the Crane
“The Ring Master and, now, The Voice of the Crane place Gurr at the forefront of Canadian fiction … and in the company of such major twentieth century figures as Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Pynchon, Siegfried Lenz, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Yukio Mishima … From behind the black curtain comes the voice of a master storyteller, and it is a voice we should listen to.”
— Sherrill Grace, Canadian Literature“Gurr now ought to take his place as one of Canada's most formidable writers. This is an extraordinarily complex and inventive book …”
— Bruce Serafin, Toronto Star -
Published by Stonehewer Books, September 2025
316 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
Unorganized Territory is available to order through your local bookstore, Indigo, and Amazon.
$22.95 CAD / $16.95 USD
Softcover: 9781738993369
eBook: 9781738993376
Buying on Time Again
by Antanas Sileika
2025 • Short Stories
“A moving and entertaining collection of short stories… that has the unified feel and trajectory of a novel.”—Quill & Quire
First published in 1997, when it was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto Book Award, Buying on Time has become a favourite of Canadian readers and a staple of this country’s immigrant fiction. Now updated and featuring a previously uncollected story, Buying on Time Again is sure to move and delight a whole new generation.
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Antanas Sileika is the author of six works of fiction and two personal histories, including most recently the novel Some Unfinished Business. The first edition of Buying on Time was nominated for the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and his novel Provisionally Yours has been adapted for both film and television. Beyond writing fiction, Sileika worked as a journalist and taught for many years at Humber College, eventually becoming director of the Humber School for Writers. He is now retired and lives in Toronto.
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Funny, discerning, sharply observed... Reading [these stories] is as easy as breathing.”
— The Montreal Gazette"Welds humour, tragedy, and personal embarrassments we all live through in a colourful and memorable way."
— The Globe and Mail -
Published by Stonehewer Books, 2025
304 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
Buying on Time Again is available to order through your local bookstore, Indigo, and Amazon.