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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1585–1600 of 9481 results
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Cissy
$19.95Cissy is a collection of three plays on gender and young LGBTQ+ folk by the acclaimed playwright Dave Deveau. In Nelly Boy, an unknown man sits in a nondescript room trying to discover how Nelly came to be running naked along the side of a six-lane highway. Nelly’s world slowly unfolds; following Nelly’s epic journey through suburbia, we discover the inner workings of a brilliant teenage mind trying to grapple with the greater picture. Caught in the middle of opposing gender ideals, Nelly is forced to confront hatred and his/her own perceptions of the world in order to survive.
My Funny Valentine examines the 2008 murder of 14-year-old Lawrence Laetitia King who asked Brandon McInerney to be his valentine. The next day, during first period, McInerney took out a gun and shot King twice in the head. On February 13, King was declared brain-dead, but was left on life support so organs could be removed for donation. King passed away on February 14, 2008 – Valentine’s Day. My Funny Valentine enters the minds of people on the fringes of a murder that will forever affect them. It tackles the fracturing of opinion in the face of a horrendous act within a community and invites the audience to search for its own humanity amid the confusing and chaotic implications King’s death brings to the surface. In searching through this thick haze, it enables us to find our hearts.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls is the story of 9-year-old Fiona who comes out as a boy and wants to be called Fin. Fin has always had this feeling – knowing something is different but not knowing what it was or how to say it. As Fin cuts his hair short and changes his name, his family works to understand and adjust to Fin’s gender identity. Dad is accepting of the change right away, but Mom doesn’t quite get it at first. We see Fin’s family struggle with this change and through the course of the play ultimately begin to accept and embrace Fin for who he is. Three powerful, intensely relevant plays by “one of Vancouver’s finest playwrights and one of our country’s finest gay writers” (Mark Robins, Vancouver Presents).
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Cities Matter
$24.95People ask themselves why cities exist? Can?t there be other ways of organizing life on earth? Given the climate crisis and environmental concerns, how can we justify living in cramped quarters?
Cities Matter answers those questions. There are really good reasons why cities exist. There are also really good reasons to believe that cities can help us solve the problems of our day and age.
Though Jane Jacobs is known mainly as an urbanist, Ramsay shows how important an economist she was, particularly with regards to cities and their economic relationships to nations and international trade. He has corralled much of Jane Jacobs? writings on economics, in a palatable and concise format. He also explains classical economic geography, such as central location theory, and Alfred Marshall?s economies of agglomeration.
Borrowing from Jane Jacobs? approach, he proposes real-life exercises for regular people wishing to compare suburban and urban living conditions, real estate investments, or transport-cost analysis for businesses.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, some have predicted that cities are doomed. Will everybody continue to work from home and abandon city centres? Will the bucolic periphery take over from bustling and messy cities? Ramsay responds with a resounding NO, and posits that Jane Jacobs would too.
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Cities Within Us
$20.00Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor’s poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child’s visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.
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Citizen Suárez
$17.95Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.
These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-state. These are stories about people travelling, wandering or lost between countries and languages—people caught between the impulse to flee and the desire to belong. Sex, geography and politics grip the protagonists of these pieces, demanding promises, compromises and resolutions. These are stories about power—personal, civic, sexual, filial, political—and how, lubricious, it slips between the fingers. Quiet, careful, witty, they document and celebrate survival—consolations, complicities and accommodations in the face of indifference, cruelty and fear. The characters of these stories are known to the reader, intimately known, because they are revealed to us in the way that only we know ourselves—in those darkest recesses of the desires and fears we imagine, we hide from others, and thus, also from those we love. Most astonishing of all for a writer venturing into a new genre for the first time is the elegant surety of his style—Verdecchia speaks in these stories with the fatalistic lyricism of Lorca, the philosophical ambiguity of Paz, and the emotional scalpel of Márquez.
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Citizens of Light
$22.00Winner of the 2023 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime First Novel
“Sam Shelstad has a funny, lively, engaging, peculiar mind—charming and surprising.” —Sheila Heti, bestselling author of Motherhood and Pure Colour
This debut novel set in southern Ontario captures call-centre life, faded tourist attractions, and suburbia with oddball wit and sharp realism.
Colleen Weagle works in a call centre and lives in a bungalow with her mother in a quiet Toronto suburb. In her spare time she writes spec scripts for a CBC riding-school drama (her mother’s favourite) and plays an online game set in a resort populated by reindeer. It’s a typical life. Except three months ago Colleen’s husband Leonard—who led a similarly monotonous life—was found in a bog in the middle of the night, a two hours’ drive from home. Dead.
With a flatly optimistic belief in the power of routine, Colleen has been soldiering on, trying not to think too hard about all the unknowns surrounding the death. But when a local news photo twigs Colleen’s memory of a mystery attendee at Leonard’s funeral she snaps into action.
In the maddening company of her ornery co-worker Patti, she heads to Niagara Falls on a quest to find the truth behind the death. Amid the slot machines and grubby hotels, the pair stumble into the darker underworld of a faded tourist trap. What they find will lead straight to an episode from Colleen’s adolescence she thought she’d put firmly behind her.
Bleakly madcap, with deadpan dialogue, Shelstad’s debut novel is a noir anti-thriller reminiscent of Twin Peaks and the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and early Kate Atkinson. He captures call-centre life, ramshackle tourist attractions, and suburbia with wit and sharp realism, and reveals the undercurrents of melancholy and the truly bizarre that can run beneath even the most seemingly mild-mannered lives.
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City of Sensors
$19.95In a city where everything is recorded by data–from the coffee you drink to your most intimate secrets–Data Detective Frank Southwood, down on his luck and saddled with a gambling addiction, faces jail time if he can’t pay his debts. Working for an elite body of detectives who use big data for police work, Frank gets the case that might make his career when he begins investigating a high-profile money laundering ring. Meanwhile, he meets and falls for Jenny, a political activist with ties to the criminal underworld. Desperate to pay his debts, Frank makes a dirty bribery deal with Jenny’s fellow criminals, but soon his investigation leads him back to the criminals he himself works for. Forced to choose between putting Jenny in jail or else an innocent man in her place, Frank pushes the limits of morality in a world in which justice can seem preordained. Thoughtful and eerily prophetic, City of Sensors shines a light on a digital future rapidly becoming our reality.
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City Rising
$24.95The first book in the Shanghai Quartet – City Rising – starts on the Hua Shan (the Holy Mountain) 250 years before Christ where the FIRST EMPEROR the most powerful man the world to that time had ever known bequeaths a talisman to his three trusted followers: the BodyGuard, his favorite Courtesan and his Head Confucian – a narwhal tusk with carvings depicting the growth for the next 2500 years of a city at the Bend in the River – Shanghai. The warning from the First Emperor before he commits suicide is to watch for the White Ships on Water – and so the progeny of the three who are entrusted with the Tusk do – and then – in 1841 – they arrive. British Men of War ships – and Opium.
City Rising tells the story of two destitute Baghdadi boys who become opium lords – and the battles against the powerful British Opium companies – and the boys’ eventual love of the City at the Bend in the River – Shanghai.
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City Rising
$24.95City Rising
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City Rising
$24.95City Rising
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City Treaty
$12.95city treaty is a tough and gritty long poem from a fresh new voice on the Canadian literary scene.
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Cityscapes in Mating Season
$17.95Cityscapes in Mating Season combines a lyric sensibility with a distrust of any such singular vision, a loneliness coupled with desire to feel into the thrumming ground of a place, and a willingness to register beauty even at its most apocalyptic. Whether playful, sensual, or unsettling, the poems in this collection are always tightly crafted, attuned to languages possibilities as well as its limitations, its pitch and roll. From protest-filled Montreal to Vancouver’s property disputes, the works in Cityscapes reach out to the textures of urban space, but also interrogate the human and industrial facets of supposed wilderness, from graffitied ruins in the Irish countryside to baited crab traps along BC’s Gulf Islands.
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Civil and Civic
$18.95?
“As accomplished as Jonathan Bennett is at using language, he’s never fussy or precious about it. With his exacting, contemporary voice, part colourful reporter, part reluctant witness, his lines gain their effect by serving experience in the most necessary way possible, via clear-eyed attention and vivid diction. The result is an immediacy often lacking in other poetry. Civil and Civic’s nimble narratives will crackle in your ear.” — David O’Meara, author of Noble Gas, Penny Black
The poems of Jonathan Bennett’s second collection, Civil and Civic, probe for present meanings of civility and civic mindedness, search for boundaries between private and public realms, and question the sprawling and often unintended effects of transparency and obligation. Medicine, the military, science, public relations, social justice, media, business, and the environmental movement are just some of the worlds these poems inhabit.
Not without a spirit of play, in Civil and Civic Bennett emerges as a disquieting curator, giving the reader poetry that is relevant, humane, political, investigative, and outward looking. Yet, within which, he supplies voice to private moments, isolated or suppressed incidents, and to the happy accidents that can occur within language when irreconcilable spheres of influence meet and open up new meanings, ideas, hope even.
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Claiming the Land
$24.95This trailblazing history of early British Columbia focuses on the 1858 Fraser River gold rush. Marshall’s detailed account becomes an adventure, prospecting the rich pay streaks of B.C.’s “founding” event and the gold fever that gripped populations all along the Pacific Slope. In doing so, Marshall unsettles many of our romanticized assumptions about the Fraser rush. He shows how foreign miner-militias crossed the 49th parallel, taking the law into their own hands and conducting extermination campaigns against Indigenous peoples. Drawing on new evidence, Marshall explores the three principal cultures of the goldfields: those of the fur trade (both Indigenous and the Hudson’s Bay Company); the Californian; and the British. The year 1858 was a year of chaos unlike any other in Pacific Northwest history. It produced not only violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Native reserves, and, ultimately, the expansion of Canada to the Pacific
Slope – leaving Indigenous sovereignty waiting for a full resolution. -
Claire Danes
$15.95The first biography of the beautiful young star of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Brokedown Palace and My So-Called Life, Claire Danes.
Her remarkable early career lead her to become one of the most respected and sought-after stars in Hollywood. She was heralded as the best actress of her generation by Steven Spielberg, and counts her mentor Jodie Foster among her most ardent supporters. Claire Danes traces the first twenty years of this New York native’s enviable life and career — from her childhood growing up in New York City’s trendy Soho district with hippie-artist parents to her successful first year studying at Yale University. All this, and Claire Danes seems to have had a great romantic life as well — including long-term relationship with Australian rocker Ben Lee.
Offering much more than just a biography, Jennifer Ambrose pays special tribute to the show that gave Claire her big break: the critically acclaimed but short-lived television drama My So-Called Life. She includes commentaries on the characters, episodes, and critical and popular reactions to the show, as well as an account of the fans’ ongoing efforts to keep it on the air. Since that career-launching television role Claire Danes spent the rest of her twenties giving exceptional performances in several major Hollywood movies: Little Women, How to Make an American Quilt, Home for the Holidays, To Gillian on her 37th Birthday, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, U-Turn, The Rainmaker, Polish Wedding, Les Misérables, The Mod Squad, and Brokedown Palace. One critic has described her strength as the ability to offer “luminous characterizations of complex young women” (Entertainment Weekly) and she has developed this strength throughout her wildly successful career.
This biography will appeal not only to the millions of Claire Danes fans and movie buffs worldwide, but also to television memorabilia collectors and the scores of people who still adore My So-Called Life.
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Clara Awake
$22.95Ever 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.
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Claremont
$21.95How to survive the unthinkable? This is the question nine-year-old Tom has to face after witnessing his parent’s murder-suicide. After the horrific event, Tom refuses to speak. At first, he moves in with his childless Aunt Sonya, but she is ill equipped to deal with the traumatized boy. Before long, Tom is forced to move again, this time to Claremont Street in downtown Toronto, where he shares a run-down house with his mercurial Aunt Rose and his reckless yet endearing Uncle Will. As the seasons change, Tom’s silence becomes a powerful presence, allowing this fractured family to hear one another for the first time– and for Tom to finally find a home. Claremont is a gripping story of one family’s journey through grief and toward healing.