Jonathan Ball

Genetic manipulation has poisoned the ecosystem of the earth. Since the Unraveling, no newborn lives past puberty and earth is a warring, wild land. To create the cure, a reclusive madman and his animal army must kill their way west to save a girl that might unlock the door to the future. Bale, heir to the Gencore corporation fortune, has turned his back on both family and company after they caused the collapse of civilization. Now, he lives in a compound with a zoo’s worth of half-tame predator animals who are his only friends. When a mysterious woman offers Bale the chance to restore the world by aiding her quest to save the only teenager anyone has seen for a decade, Bale becomes a reluctant savior. He agrees to escort the women, leading a pack of wild beasts on a quest across a dangerous, dystopian America. Will they survive the journey? Is it already too late?

Seize your destiny. Slay the vampire. And become the hero you were always meant to be. Land of Vampires: Slipping into ShadowThe first, full-length one-on-one 5e campaign from D&D Duet and Grove Guardian Press Designed specifically for duet 5e play, where you get to be the hero and, together with your partner, you'll create a whole world, just for two. As part of the campaign, you'll find: over 170 pages of adventure, worldbuilding, and GM guidance-everything you need for an amazing duet 5e experience Land of Vampires: Slipping into Shadow consists of 15 chapters for levels 1-10 plus character backstory ideas, GMPCs, vibrant settings, unique NPCs, and more More DetailsLand of Vampires: Slipping into Shadow is a level 1-10 duet campaign from Beth and Jonathan of D&D Duet and Grove Guardian Press. This campaign takes you on a vampire hunt deep into the land of Steymhorod, where the PC and their companion(s) must navigate blood-thirsty enemies, suspicious fae, terrified townspeople, and a whole host of hidden monsters creeping through the haunted forests. And that doesn't even begin to cover the mysterious and powerful lord of the land, Draego. In addition to the 15 chapters of the adventure, the campaign includes scale and leveling tips for GMs to adapt sessions and combats for one-on-one play. Tabletop gaming with one player and one GM (what we refer to as a duet) works best when GMs game masters/storytellers] can individualize the story, challenges, encounters, and sessions to both their player and their player's PC player character]. We'll help you do that throughout the campaign text so you can weave an adventure specifically for your player.

Jonathan Ball’s fourth poetry book, the first in seven years, swirls chaos and confession together. At the book’s heart is a question: Why create art? A series of poetic sequences torment themselves over this question, offering few answers and taking fewer prisoners. Loose sonnets that consider the artistic creations of Leatherface, monster-killer from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sit alongside Rilkean elegies for an iPhone. Surreal meditations on the collage work of Guy Maddin are followed by all of the lines from Melville’s Moby-Dick that mention “salt.” Politicians and painters jostle while absurdist humour crashes into stark admissions of vulnerability in the wake of having children. A startling diversity of styles and subjects feed into the maelstrom of The National Gallery, and its dark currents will draw you in to drown.

An experimental novella sculpted entirely from passages from out-of-copyright novels transcribed by Project Gutenberg that were e-mailed to the author by spambots. The result is a fractured narrative in 35 chapters, with sources ranging from Stendhal to Virginia Woolf to D. H. Lawrence, including occasional interruptions by the copyright policies of Gutenberg itself.

Operation: Jericho takes the reader into the world of clandestine warfare, focusing on two Arab American brothers who face a formidable enemy in Afghanistan. Much like the story of Jericho in the book of Joshua, two spies are sent into a terrorist training camp to determine if there is any righteous people among the population. The brothers must escape only to return and destroy the village codenamed: Jericho in an attempt to strike a major blow against all enemies in the War on Terror.

John Paizs’s ‘Crime Wave’ examines the Winnipeg filmmaker’s 1985 cult film as an important example of early postmodern cinema and as a significant precursor to subsequent postmodern blockbusters, including the much later Hollywood film Adaptation. Crime Wave’s comic plot is simple: aspiring screenwriter Steven Penny, played by Paizs, finds himself able to write only the beginnings and endings of his scripts, but never (as he puts it) “the stuff in-between.” Penny is the classic writer suffering from writer’s block, but the viewer sees him as the (anti)hero in a film told through stylistic parody of 1940s and 50s B-movies, TV sitcoms, and educational films. In John Paizs’s ‘Crime Wave,’ writer and filmmaker Jonathan Ball offers the first book-length study of this curious Canadian film, which self-consciously establishes itself simultaneously as following, but standing apart from, American cinematic and television conventions. Paizs’s own story mirrors that of Steven Penny: both find themselves at once drawn to American culture and wanting to subvert its dominance. Exploring Paizs’s postmodern aesthetic and his use of pastiche as a cinematic technique, Ball establishes Crime Wave as an overlooked but important cult classic.

John Paizs’s ‘Crime Wave’ examines the Winnipeg filmmaker’s 1985 cult film as an important example of early postmodern cinema and as a significant precursor to subsequent postmodern blockbusters, including the much later Hollywood film Adaptation. Crime Wave’s comic plot is simple: aspiring screenwriter Steven Penny, played by Paizs, finds himself able to write only the beginnings and endings of his scripts, but never (as he puts it) “the stuff in-between.” Penny is the classic writer suffering from writer’s block, but the viewer sees him as the (anti)hero in a film told through stylistic parody of 1940s and 50s B-movies, TV sitcoms, and educational films. In John Paizs’s ‘Crime Wave,’ writer and filmmaker Jonathan Ball offers the first book-length study of this curious Canadian film, which self-consciously establishes itself simultaneously as following, but standing apart from, American cinematic and television conventions. Paizs’s own story mirrors that of Steven Penny: both find themselves at once drawn to American culture and wanting to subvert its dominance. Exploring Paizs’s postmodern aesthetic and his use of pastiche as a cinematic technique, Ball establishes Crime Wave as an overlooked but important cult classic.

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge the gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming. She made hyphens and made me use them. From her back she pulled brackets. Saying: "These in your throat and these around your neck." Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities.

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards in the category of Most Promising Writer Talented newcomer Jonathan Ball's Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce -- plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience, and the laws of physics are flagrantly violated. The poems in one sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and 'fire' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus 'happenings,' but they replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball's 'plays' break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magnificent horror.