New Releases by Phil Hall

The 3rd and possibly final part of Ice''s story is finally here! Isaan Girl is a gripping tale of human trafficking that will leave you wanting more even after the last page is turned. From the leafy suburbs of Oxford to the tropical forests of Myanmar. A real nailbiting thriller and worthy finale to the Pattaya Chronicles.

From the dapper and charismatic Charles Ponzi of the 1920s to the dapper and charismatic Elizabeth Holmes of the 2020s, America has been intrigued and outraged by a parade of audacious personalities who sought to line their pockets by breaking the law. Award-winning journalist Phil Hall recalls the outlandish schemes and scandals from larger-than-life characters including Marcus Garvey, Joseph P. Kennedy, Howard Hughes, Billie Sol Estes, Martha Stewart and Martin Shkreli in this entertaining history of the dark side of the financial services industry. "Phil Hall brings America''s most significant white-collar crimes to life through historical investigation and firsthand accounts. Each crime story reads effortlessly, and when taken as whole we better understand how greed and the desire for power have wreaked havoc on innocent bystanders. Phil''s ability to make us fully understand the past makes us stronger for the future." - Chris DiPentima, president and CEO, Connecticut Business and Industry Association "''100 Years of Wall Street Crooks'' by Phil Hall is a fascinating and important read about the history of white-collar crime. Written in a wonderful style, Phil Hall begins with the infamous Charles Ponzi. then covers other famous crooks like Marcus Garvey (of the Black Star Line ill-fame), Joseph P. Kennedy, Preston Tucker (of Tucker Automobile infamy), Billie Sol Estes and a host of others. He covers Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Mortgage fame and the 2008 financial crisis. The book is a fascinating read and well-worth your time and money." - Dr. Anthony B. Sanders, emeritus distinguished professor at George Mason University and chief economist at Artesia Economics "If you are into American greed, as I am, and want to know how the rich get richer, Phil Hall has put together a great book on how people scammed their way to the top. People such as Charles Ponzi, Howard Hughes, Michael Milken and Elizabeth Holmes all faked it until they made it. This is a well written and a fast read, ideal for learning more about the history of scammers." - Todd Rowe, president, BitX Funding

The history of Jesus on film.

"A new collection of poetry from Governor General''s Award winner Phil Hall"--

"To tell what happened to you is not a poem," writes Governor General Award-winning poet Phil Hall in this, his latest collection, Niagara & Government. What a poem is: roaring calamity, wedding deceptions, sobriety, Charlottesville mobs, estranged sisters, folk art, poverty, puffery, work, names on cenotaphs, white space, white space, white space. These long sequential poems want to be spoken. They invite the reader to check her ego and sit with "the good stories that un-tongued us."

Follow the Hall family from adventure to adventure and share their joy and tears along the way. This true story covers 18 months of emigration mishaps, attempted murder and coming to terms with the inevitable conclusion that you can''t run away from what was meant to be. A must read for those thinking of teaching in Thailand!

Film journalist Phil Hall traces the convoluted history of how Bigfoot was captured on film.

Follow the adventure''s of Wallingford''s Billy as he comes to terms with an ancient curse passed on by none other than William the Conqueror himself.The beautiful market town of Wallingford features heavily in the action/fantasy novel and is the backdrop to some incredible hijinks and skulduggery.

In this sequel to A Flight Delayed, by the same author, we take up Kari''s story. Mysterious activities in her lovely Scottish neighbourhood arouse Kari’s suspicions, yet she has nothing definite enough to convince anyone else they need looking into. When her home is broken into, yet nothing is stolen, Kari is certain she is not imagining things – but why will no-one believe her?Determined to uncover the mystery as well as meet the needs of her clients before she escapes to Zimbabwe to sort out her personal problems, including her struggle with an eating disorder, Kari sets herself a deadline of 30 days in which to do it all, and still make it onto her ''plane. But when she finally is taken seriously by Tate, one of the detectives in charge of hercase, it seems some of her problems may just be over before she even leaves ... at least, if God has anything to do with it!

Driver Jones and his family of trucks to the rescue. Big, shiny and green, Freddie Flatback can carry just about anything. Which is just as well when a digger and dumper truck need delivering to a local building site. But what starts off as a straightforward delivery turns into an adventure as the heavy rain causes all sorts of problems in this beautifully illustrated story.

Driver Jones and his family of trucks to the rescue. It''s supposed to be the trucks'' day off, but Tilley the bright pink transit van steps in to help out Farmer Fry when the local hotel runs out of milk. Readers of all ages will enjoy the colourful illustrations and cheeky characters.

It is one of the most astonishing facts of cinema history: an extraordinary number of important films are believed to be lost forever. Spanning from the early days of the silent movies to as late as the 1970s and touching all corners of the global film experience, groundbreaking works of significant historical and artistic importance are gone. Cinema icons including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Micheaux and Vincente Minnelli are among those impacted by this tragedy, and pioneering technological achievements in color cinematography, sound film technology, animation and widescreen projection are among the lost treasures. How could this happen? And is it possible to recover these missing gems? In this book, noted film critic and journalist Phil Hall details circumstances that resulted in these productions being erased from view. For anyone with a passion for the big screen, In Search of Lost Films provides an unforgettable consideration of a cultural tragedy.

Poetry. The term "conjugation" refers to more than the obvious grammatical movement of pronouns through time (I am / you are / they will be). For, in Biology, it also refers to the transfer of information between cells. And CONJUGATION--the new collection of poetry from award-winning poet Phil Hall--sees an open realm where individual letters inside a word are each rolling through their possibilities, from A to Z. Thereby, the language in this, Hall''s fourth collection of poetry to be published by BookThug, travels into and out of itself, as he says, "escaping my ego, while revealing, word by slightly different word, my deeper connections and disconnections to things--to what used to be called poetry''s ''subjects.''" As much care was taken with the writing of this collection as the shaping of the poems themselves. Replete with images of the natural world and in some cases, the mechanisms that transform it--horses, leaping fish, trees, canals and locks--CONJUGATION signals a return to the nature/nurture elements that have wound their way through his earlier collections, but also a versed ode to the discouragement that many Canadians have felt about the progression of their country and government over the past number of years. "These are poems of ferocity and humility, of vulnerability and wit, poems whose skilled complexities elucidate the lyric disturbance of melody, memory and self. Grasping his intimate line like a kind of loved and fortuitous hand-tool, what Hall constructs is a voice that attends to the familial and psychic histories submerged in landscape, in all their bitterness and gorgeousness. There is a rough amplitude in his compositional principle: that ''between the body & language/ a ravine of call and response.'' In this work, out of the uncertainty and lag of dailiness comes the knowledge that although precision isn''t always simple, by the precise ear we may arrive at the heart."--Judges'' citation, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2006 "Phil Hall has come, by strife with words and their embedded values, to a technique of compression that reminds of Paul Celan''s knotted poems: they beam straight through the skull... Poetry that recalls the organs of the body, that invents and compounds verbs, nouns and adjectives to reach toward what cannot be spoken, only named, if we use all the names, without censoring our hands'' flutter."--Er n Moure

Increasingly known as the “poet’s poet,” Governor General’s Award–winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Hall’s isn’t a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a “selected poems” as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Hall’s published work. Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure. The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well. It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Hall’s ars poetica. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Hall’s four-plus decades of bricolage.

These are the films that inspire wonder-you are left wondering how seemingly intelligent people could gather together and spend money to create such bizarre productions. From A-list atrocities to Grade-Z zaniness, 100 of the most wonderfully warped anti-classics have been gathered together for this celebration of cinematic kookiness. Relive the jaw-dropping spectacle of John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Halle Berry as Catwoman, Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, and Jerry Lewis as a Gore Vidal-inspired extra-terrestrial. Sing along with a naked Anthony Newley, tap your toes to a "Pennsylvania Polka" dance number in the middle of an unauthorized remake of A Streetcar Named Desire, watch a suicidal Elizabeth Taylor run amok in Rome and appreciate Coleridge''s poetry with topless women. Hook up with Edward D. Wood Jr., Phil Tucker, Tommy Wiseau and their peers in the so-bad-they''re-good genre, and marvel at how cinema royalty including Stanley Kubrick, George Cukor, Michelangelo Antonioni and Clint Eastwood could conceive celluloid debacles of an unprecedented scale. When it comes to shock and awe, nothing compares to The 100 Greatest Bad Movies of All Time.

They were the big screen royalty that left us too soon - the brilliantly talented icons whose premature deaths continue to fill the hearts of movie lovers with rue and pain. From Robert Harron and Rudolph Valentino of the silent era to Heath Ledger and Natasha Richardson of today''s cinema, the history of movies is filled with too many legends and rising stars who died before fulfilling their career destinies. But what would have happened if fate had been kinder? What could have been the careers of Jean Harlow, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge, Bruce Lee, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, and many other screen luminaries who died too soon? What if They Lived? offers a speculative trajectory for the careers that the late, great stars never had. Piecing together pending film projects, industry trends and wider shifts in popular culture, What if They Lived? considers what could have happened to the beloved movie actors who never had a chance to enjoy a long and fruitful professional output.

WINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL''S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGN SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE These are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue. Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones, among others. He writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the whole concept of home. His notorious 2004 chapbook essay The Bad Sequence is also included here, for a wider readership, at last. It has been revised. (It''s teeth have been sharpened.) In this book, the line is the unit of composition; the reading is wide; the perspective personal: each take a give, and logic a drawback. Language is not a smart-aleck; it''s a sacred tinkerer. Readers are invited to watch awe become a we. In Fred Wah''s phrase, what is offered here is "the music at the heart of thinking."

This new updated edition provides a wide range of interviews with filmmakers, distributors, festival programmers, marketing experts, and critics, taking the reader deep into the process of positioning a film for distribution.