Taxes connect us to one another, to the common good, and to the future. This is a book about taxes: who pays what and who gets what. More than that, it’s about the role of government, about citizenship and our collective well-being, about the Canada we want. The contributors, leading Canadian practitioners and scholars, explore how taxes have become a political “no-go zone” and how changes in taxation are changing Canada. They challenge the view that any tax is a bad tax and provide broad directions for fairer and smarter approaches.

This is a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned with public policy and public affairs, economics, and political science and to anyone interested in challenging the conventional wisdom that lower taxes and smaller government are the cures to what ails us.

Alex Himelfarb is the director of the Glendon School of Public and International Aff airs and the Centre for Global Challenges at York University. A federal public servant for twenty-eight years before his retirement in 2009, he served as Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to Cabinet for three prime ministers, as Canada’s Ambassador to Italy, as Deputy Minister of Canadian Heritage, and in senior positions in numerous ministries and agencies.

Jordan Himelfarb is an opinion editor at The Toronto Star. Previously he was the editor of The Mark and the Arts and Ideas editor of This Magazine. His writing has appeared in many of Canada’s foremost newspapers and magazines. He is also co-editor of the music website Said the Gramophone, one of Time Magazine’s top blogs of 2009.

Strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) involves lawsuits brought by individuals, corporations, groups, or politicians to curtail political activism and expression. An increasingly large part of the political landscape in Canada, they are often launched against those protesting, boycotting, or participating in some form of political activism.

A common feature of SLAPPs is that their intention is rarely to win the case or secure a remedy; rather, the suit is brought to create a chill on political expression. Blocking Public Participation examines the different types of litigation and causes of action that frequently form the basis of SLAPPs, and how these lawsuits transform political disputes into legal cases, thereby blocking political engagement. The resource imbalance between plaintiffs and defendants allows plaintiffs to tie up defendants in complex and costly legal processes. The book also examines the dangers SLAPPs pose to political expression and to the quality and integrity of our democratic political institutions. Finally, the book examines the need to regulate SLAPPs in Canada and assesses various regulatory proposals.

In Canada, considerable attention has been paid to the “legalization of politics” and the impact on the Charter in diverting political activism into the judicial arena. SLAPPs, however, are an under-studied element of this process, and in their obstruction of political engagement through recourse to the courts they have profound implications for democratic practice.

Examines computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, “CrackBerry” users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, and chess geeks. The dangers and joys of struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of RIM’s BlackBerry and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website.

When Technocultures Collide provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users.

The author provides critical accounts of highly specialized attributes, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info-addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. Beyond resistance, however, the goal of this work is to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of small cultures, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of RIM’s BlackBerry and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website.

Gary Genosko is a professor in and director of the Communication Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He held a Canada Research Chair in Technoculture from 2002 to 2012. He is the author of Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW (2012), Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (2009), and co-author, with Scott Thompson, of Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO (2009).

The artistic impact of Jean-Luc Godard, whose career in cinema has spanned over fifty years and yielded a hundred or more discrete works in different media cannot be overestimated, not only on French and other world cinemas, but on fields as diverse as television, video art, gallery installation, philosophy, music, literature, and dance.

The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard marks an initial attempt to map the range and diversity of Godard’s impact across these different fields. It contains reassessments of key films like Vivre sa vie and Passion as well as considerations of Godard’s influence over directors like Christophe Honoré. Contributors look at Godard’s relation to philosophy and influence over film philosophy through reference to Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell, and show how Godard’s work in cinema interacts with other arts, such as painting, music, and dance. They suggest that Godard’s late work makes important contributions to debates in memory and Holocaust Studies.

The volume will appeal to a non-specialist audience with its discussions of canonical films and treatment of themes popular within film studies programs such as cinema and ethics. But it will also attract academic specialists on Godard with its chapters on recent works, including Dans le noir du temps (2002) and Voyage(s) en utopie (2006), interventions in long-running academic debates (Godard, the Holocaust, and anti- Semitism), and treatment of rarely discussed areas of Godard’s work (choreographed movement).

Douglas Morrey is an associate professor of French at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Jean-Luc Godard (2005) and the co-author of Jacques Rivette (2009). He is currently researching the legacy of the New Wave in French cinema.

Christina Stojanova is an associate professor in film and media studies at the University of Regina. She is the co-editor, with Bela Szabados, of Wittgenstein at the Movies (2011). She is currently working on her book on new Romanian cinema.

Nicole Côté is an associate professor at Université de Sherbrooke. She is a member of VERSUS, a group researching representations intersecting race/gender/ class in literature, video, and cinema. She has published several articles and book chapters, edited two shortstory anthologies, and co-edited three books, most recently, Expressions culturelles des francophonies (2008).

Two Bicycles examines all of the films, videos, and television works that Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, two of the most important postwar filmmakers, did together.

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville worked across forms, across media, and across countries. This book, the first to be devoted specifically to the work they did together, examines the way they expanded the possibilities of cinema by using cutting-edge video equipment in a constant search for a new kind of filmmaking.

Two Bicycles moves slowly across France and Switzerland, with detours in Quebec, Mozambique, and Palestine. Their amazingly varied body of work includes a twelve-hour television series, some experimental videos, an acclaimed feature film with Isabelle Huppert, a cigarette commercial, and much else. Overall the book shows the degree to which this work departs radically from the legacy of the French New Wave, and in many ways shows signs of having been formed by the distinct culture of Switzerland, to which Godard and Miéville returned in the 1970s to set up their “atelier,” Sonimage.

Two Bicycles offers a chance to explore a body of work that is as unique and demanding as it is rich and revelatory. Godard and Miéville have worked together for four decades but have never seemed more relevant.

Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds undergo change. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe.

This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries to westerns and road movies, and from sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage as well as YouTube’s expanding audiovisual universe.

Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers such as Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media.

The first serious book-length study of crime writing in Canada, Detecting Canada Canada’s most popular crime writers, including Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Gail Bowen, Thomas King, Michael Slade, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Bidulka.

Genres examined range from the well-loved police procedural and the amateur sleuth to those less well known, such as anti-detection and contemporary noir novels. The book looks critically at the esteemed sixties’ television show Wojeck, as well as the more recent series Da Vinci’s Inquest, Da Vinci’s City Hall, and Intelligence, and the controversial Durham County, a critically acclaimed but violent television series that ran successfully in both Canada and the United States.

The essays in Detecting Canada look at texts from a variety of perspectives, including postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race and class studies. Crime fiction, enjoyed by so many around the world, speaks to all of us about justice, citizenship, and important social issues in an uncertain world.

Jeannette Sloniowski is an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. She is a series editor for the TV Milestones series at Wayne State University Press, author of several journal articles and four edited books including Documenting the Documentary, Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (WLU Press, 2002), and Candid Eyes.

Marilyn Rose is a professor in the Department of English at Brock University. She specializes in modern and contemporary short fiction and poetry as well as detective fiction. She has published articles and book chapters in these areas and, with Jeannette Sloniowski, created and maintains CrimeFictionCanada, a scholarly database dedicated to the study of detective fiction in English around the world.

Mostly scholarly book but dealing with a popular topic: mystery writers of Canada. Examines well-known authors such as Peter Robinson, Gail Bowen, Thomas King, Margaret Atwood. Will appeal to select general readers.

• review copies sent to major publications and literary journals
• review copies sent to select bloggers
• authors available for interview
• excerpt available
• advance copy available approx 6 week pre-publication

The Memory Effect is a collection of essays on the status of memory—individual and collective, cultural and transcultural—in contemporary literature, film, and other visual media. Contributors look at memory’s representation, adaptation, translation, and appropriation, as well as its mediation and remediation. Memory’s irreducibly constructed nature is explored, even as its status is reaffirmed as the basis of both individual and collective identity.

The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume. Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from literature to autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history. Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History, examines specific films in an effort to account for cinema’s intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory, considers individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.

Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production in the United States? If so, what is causing it? Are memoirs all written by narcissistic hacks for an unthinking public, or do they indicate a growing need to understand world events through personal experiences? This study seeks to answer these questions by examining memoir as an industrial product like other products, something that publishers and booksellers help to create.

These popular texts become part of mass culture, where they are connected to public events. The genre of memoir, and even genre itself, ceases to be an empty classification category and becomes part of social action and consumer culture at the same time. From James Frey’s controversial A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, computer hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way American readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences. The memoir boom is one of the ways that citizenship as a category of belonging between private and public spheres is now articulated.

Georg Tintner is best known to music lovers for his stunning interpretations of Bruckner's symphonies recorded by Naxos in the 1990s. He was a man who lived and breathed music. Blessed with perfect pitch, at the age of nine he was the first Jew to join the Vienna Boys' Choir. Later, he became immersed in the concert life of the city, rubbing shoulders with Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern, and observing the great conductors of the age. But by the late 1930s Tintner had to flee and he eventually landed in Auckland, New Zealand. There could have been no greater contrast for this gifted young musician, yet he started a new life there before moving on to Australia and, much later, to Canada.

Tintner's third wife and widow, Tanya, has documented the life of this uncompromising man and the result is a revealing window on to the artistic temperament from the person closest to him. Out of Time is a must-read for everyone who believes in the discipline that excellence in the arts demands – and the pure joy it can bring.

Tanya Buchdahl Tintner, Georg’s third wife and widow, is a freelance classical music writer and editor. She has managed a professional development program for conductors for over twenty years and served as concerts officer at the Queensland Conservatorium. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.