Books published by Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

This novel traces the life experiences of a once highly successful woman who falls prey to electroshock and subsequently struggles to piece back together her life. Naomi suffers enormous memory loss; additionally, an estrangement from her family of origin that she has no way to wrap her mind around. The novel begins with her wandering the corridor of St. Patricks-St Andrews Mental Health Centre (St. Pukes) faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of coming to terms with the damage done her, as well uncovering the hidden details of her life. It moves back and forth between a relatively happy childhood in the legendary north-end Winnipeg of the mid-1900s and post-ECT adulthood in Toronto. An exceptionally kind man named Ger who befriends Naomi comes to suspect that important pieces of the puzzle of what befell her lurk beneath the surface of writing in a binder of hers, which comes to be known as Black Binder Number Three. What Naomi progressively comes to do, often with Ger's help and just as often with the help of a very different and eerily similar sister named Rose, is find ways to do justice to her life and to the various people in it. Filled with a vast array of colourful and insightful characters from a variety of communities--Toronto¹s Kensington Market of the 1970s, the 1970's trans community, north-end Winnipeg Jewry, and the ingenious and frequently hilarious mad community--this novel sensitizes us to the horror of electroshock, takes us to new levels in our understanding of what it means to be human, and, in the process, leads us to question the very concept of normalcy.

Theodor Adorno once remarked that, "...every work of art is an uncommitted crime." This book is a tribute to political artists who deviate from the mainstream and create art that engages with questions of societal oppression, survival, and resistance. It draws on interviews with transnational artists whose work is representative of emerging trends in art, visual culture, and political aesthetics. Uncommitted Crimes reflects on a new generation of artists whose creative praxis, sensibilities, influences, and frames of reference derive from multiple national, religious, and cultural genealogies, and an ambivalent relationship to Western and European nationalisms. Courageously, these racialized, Indigenous, and migrant artists straddle the divides of many categories of identity in regards to gender, sexuality, and 'race.' Their art challenges the silently imbibed worship of whiteness, heteronormative patriarchies, and colonial settler ideologies of "home." These exceptional cultural producers enter into uncomfortable dialogues, creatively. Inspired by their visionary praxis, this book is an uncommitted crime, attempting to smuggle arresting artistic ideas into a site of intellectual imagi/nation. Artists whose works are explored in this book include: Andil Gosine, Syrus Marcus Ware, Elisha Lim; Amita Zamaan and Helen Lee; Shirin Fathi; Kara Springer; Rajni Perera; Joshua Vettivelu; Brendan Fernandes; Kerry Potts and Rebecca Belmore; The Mass Arrival Collective (Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores Mendez, Tings Chak, Vino Shanmuganathan, and Nadia Saad). The book contains 65 pages of artwork.

Finalist for the 2018 Arthur Eliis Award for Best First Crime NovelRobin MacFarland is a somewhat eccentric and highly intelligent journalist for the Home and Garden section of a Toronto paper, who at age fifty-five looks aghast in the mirror and pronounces herself, "Old. Fat. Alcoholic. Alone. Failure." She resolves to lose weight, quit drinking, and try online dating, although not, perhaps in quite that order. The intrigue begins when Robin chooses to cover a water cooling system conference where she thinks there will be a lot of men. By coincidence, her first online date is with the owner of the water company who is found dead after they have coffee. Dauntless, Robin wades into what is now a murder investigation, under the supervision of her new editor, and with the help of her best friend, Cindy, a crime reporter. The novel is framed around a plot to steal Canada's fresh water, but it hinges on Robin's hilarious journey through the middle portion of her life, a serious social issue, and a highly ironic murder weapon.

Ever since anthropology PhD student Clara Lemont started researching the African-Brazilian religion of Odùn, her days and nights became filled with dreams of swirling figures of white, drum beats and yellow eyes haunting her in the darkness. When Clara travels to Brazil to do fieldwork, she quickly finds herself immersed in a world of dark intrigue, political corruption, black magic and desire. Travelling across time and space to be reunited with her eternal lover, history, politics and sex all collide as the female energy of the goddesses and the transformative power of love combat the dark forces of evil. An evocative and sweeping tale of myth and magic, from a seventeenth-century escaped slave community in northern Brazil to 1930s Rio de Janeiro, Clara Awake will take you on a sensual journey of intense passion, intrigue and love.

Seventeen-year-old Camden splits her time between her father, a minor rock star, and her mom, a scruffy "hardware geek" who designs and implements temporary and sustainable power systems and satellite linkups for off-grid music and art festivals, tree-sits, and attends gatherings of alternative healers. Lark, Camden's father, provides her with brand-name jeans, running shoes, and makeup, while her mother's world is populated by anarchists, freaks, geeks, and hippies. Naturally, Camden prefers staying with her dad and going to the mall with his credit card and her best friend, but one summer, when Lark is recording a new album, Camden accompanies her mother, Laureen, to a healing camp on a mountain in Northern California. After their arrival, Laureen heads to San Francisco, ostensibly to find her lover, but she never comes back. Alone, penniless, and without much in the way of camping skills, Camden withdraws. Things begin to look up when she is befriended by Skinny, a young man in charge of the security detail at the camp who knew her mother as a child. The summer ends and Camden heads back to Toronto to find her dad, and it's only there that she learns Laureen's disappearance is tied, unexpectedly, to the secrets Skinny tried to keep from her for months, until, finally, he couldn't.

A Romani Women's Anthology: Spectrum of the Blue Water is grounded upon Romani women's lived experiences, and confers epistemic privilege on critical insights that derive from their authentic and personal knowledge. Romani women are impressively diverse in their attachments, status, beliefs, and identities. The chapters in this book illustrate this multiplicity by traversing writing motifs. The book is a dynamic blend of life writing, creative work, research essays about identity, childhood, immigration, work, art, memory, love, spirituality, activism, advocacy, leadership, and other themes affecting the lives of Romani women. Visual art, as well as black and white portraits of Romani women complement the written text. Through incisive creativity, pragmatic action, and affective networks, this book consolidates these diverse expressions of agency and collectivity by activists, writers, artists, academics, community leaders, educators, professionals, and cultural and community workers.