Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an 11-year-old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar. Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce — these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What

Nominated for an Alberta Book Award.Time you had a haircut. Look like a mop.Not that skinny.Skin and bloody bone, boy.Jacob breaks the point of his pencil but makes it look like an accident. And away Dad goes out the door and thump thump down the stairs.Jacob eyes the hole at the end of his pencil. Listens till he can’t hear the Torino anymore. Crawls under the covers. Hopes the rest of December comes and goes like a heartbeat.

A raw and riveting memoir of collapse, recovery, and reinventionFor most of his adult life, Adrian Michael Kelly specialized in failure — serial, sometimes comic, but also epic failure. Born to a gambling-addicted, compulsively spending mother who left when he was five, and raised by his dad, a haunted and often violent hard-drinking Scot, Kelly learned failure early and learned it remarkably well: how to be small, how to be safe, how to be self-defeating. By the a...

Strong focus on advances in understanding barley physiology which inform decisions about breeding and cultivationDetailed coverage of molecular breeding techniques such as genome wide association studies (GWAS) and targeted induced lesions in genomes (TILLING)Covers latest research on optimising barley for particular end uses such as malting, brewing and animal feed

Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how ...