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Showing 1745–1760 of 9492 results
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Cora’s Kitchen
$22.95It is 1928 and Cora James, a 35-year-old Black librarian who works at the 135th Street library in Harlem, writes Langston Hughes a letter after identifying with one of his poems. She even reveals her secret desire to write. Langston responds, encouraging Cora to enter a writing contest sponsored by the National Urban League, and ignites her dream of being a writer. Cora is frustrated with the writing process, and her willingness to help her cousin Agnes keep her job after she is brutally beaten by her husband lands Cora in a white woman’s kitchen working as a cook.
In the Fitzgerald home, Cora discovers she has time to write and brings her notebook to work. When she comforts Mrs. Fitzgerald after an argument with Mr. Fitzgerald, a friendship forms. Mrs. Fitzgerald insists Cora call her Eleanor and gives her The Awakening by Kate Chopin to read. Cora is inspired by the conversation to write a story and sends it to Langston. Eventually she begins to question her life and marriage and starts to write another story about a woman’s sense of self. Through a series of letters, and startling developments in her dealings with the white family, Cora’s journey to becoming a writer takes her to the brink of losing everything, including her life.
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Core Samples
$16.95An understated collection of stories about innocence, experience and the road in between set in a fictional Canadian Shield town that serves as home to Grayson’s unusual characters.
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Corked
$16.95Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms.
we need
not gulf
doubtnor gist-pierce
our placewhatever grip
or drib
we might
or meanDear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.
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Corker
$16.95Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Opening with the extended family’s awkward attendance at the funeral of Serena, aging flower child of the sixties, the symbolic conflicts build quickly. Serena’s sister Merit, the hard-driving, social-program-budget-slashing female political aparatchik and her husband Leonard, a lion of free enterprise, are hell bent on dismantling their government’s social services by replacing them with a privatized human warehousing system whose track record to date has been the streamlining of the American prison system. But there’s a problem: Serena’s developmentally challenged friend Corker, the family’s faded and failed country gentleman brother Galahad, and their octogenarian mother Florence, all become victims of Merit and Leonard’s “success.”
It is Wendy Lill’s great skill as a playwright that actually makes this symbolism work by unravelling it into a devastating conclusion that is seen in two completely different ways by the characters and the audience. While everyone in the play is celebrating their “one big happy family” reunion (brought about by Merit and Leonard having seen the “error of their ways”), the audience, having realized the characters are all about to lose their comfortable designer house and are headed for the unheated trailer park, watches in horror as the social worker brings in huge green garbage bags of junk. This play is not what it seems at all. This is not agitprop. This is killer theatre.
Cast of two women and four men.
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Correspondent
$19.95Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award
An on-the-scene report of a childhood abroad. A child’s vision of real-world events made real (and unreal) by the presence of his father.Memories of snow falling on Quebec City’s copper roofs; scientists tracking the location of a sinking submarine near the Russian Coast. Children flipping bright kopeks at a dancing bear outside a flea market; a translator awaking from a suicide bombing with ears ringing, surrounded by destruction. A young boy watching his father report the news on TV as hostages hold wet handkerchiefs to their mouths, trying not to breathe too much.
Across the street, a red sun sets the windows of the Hotel Ukraina on fire. The tallest of Stalin’s seven sisters. We huddle on the couch in our pyjamas. My mother holding a remote in her lap. Static sky, bad reception. The TV clearing its throat. My father’s body, cut in half, moving up and down the screen.
This remarkably confident debut collection offers three long prose poems, each divided into 19 sections, fusing images of bucolic coastal summers, a father fixed by a television broadcast, and the colours of a Moscow winter with vividly depicted scenes of gunfire, media scrums, and live reporting. In this unusual hybrid of the personal and the historical, Dominque Bernier-Cormier tenders alternating perspectives on what is said, what is seen, and where the silence begins.
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Corridor Nine
$20.00Seven years ago Bernadette Macomber did everything she could to cut her ties to her father Fabian, his opiate addiction, gun collection, and increasingly bizarre behaviour. She moved with her husband and four children, leaving no return address. Now, following his suicide, her father paradoxically makes contact again, and Bernadette finds herself not liberated but tethered to him ever more tightly by the bonds of familial guilt. Desperate for absolution, Bernie returns to her father’s home to hunt for evidence of his insanity and to try and understand why suicide became his answer. While she remains driven in her quest to understand the power of the parent/child bond, her father, Fabian, locked into his after-life purgatory, pushes for freedom via any available loophole through the punishing bureaucracy of personal evolution. While exploring his options, he encounters his jailor, the demon/angel Bune in the afterlife space of Corridor Nine.
The colliding events trigger a complicated set of mysteries: there is the planet at the centre of Bune’s “master plan” diagram and the puzzle of its eventual connection to Bernadette’s painting; there is the addiction artifact that Bune pulls out of Fabian’s chest, and a host of other symbols and rites such as a blastoshere and embryo division all revealed while Fabien wanders the constant maze of Corridor Nine. On planet Earth Bernadette continues obsessively in her need to solve the mystery of her father’s death and his continued contact with one question guiding her: how can she achieve a father and daughter reunion that will bring them both peace and liberty?
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Corridor Talk
$24.95Corridor Talk contains contributions from feminist scholars from across Canada from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. When the anthropologist Paul Rainbow coined the term, ‘corridor talk,’ he used it to refer to information that was relegated to side chats with colleagues, information that was not to be included in field notes, manuscripts or journal articles. These were the unimportant details or ‘gossip’ concerning a person’s research, although he noted that a person’s reputation often hinged on such discussions. Most feminist scholars, like many working within the realm of qualitative methodology, have for many years, rejected this discourse of ‘unimportant details’ and have chosen instead to document experiences and struggles during the research process as a way of exploring such issues as: whose interests are served by the research, what is the purpose(s) of the research, what are the goals of the research? In this book, graduate students, sessionals, independent scholars, community members, as well as established scholars, have an opportunity to share their experiences with the reader about doing feminist research, including the pitfalls, the benefit of hindsight, the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘ah ha’ moments. By sharing stories about the emotional struggles and methodological dilemmas that occur in the process of doing feminist research, the authors provide researchers, both seasoned and new, an invaluable inside look at conducting feminist research.
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Corridor to Nightmare
$26.99When one life ends, another begins.
After forty years as the village school teacher in the idyllic valley of Greenbottom, Agatha is looking forward to a quiet retirement. Instead, an enigmatic stranger arrives to drag her through a long-closed portal to another world.
Confronted with a completely foreign culture steeped in magic and violence, Agatha finds herself a crucial pawn being played between rival factions. The only way forward through the rigid traditions and convoluted politics of the Archons of Otopia is to remain true to herself and her Greenbottom ideals.</p
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Cosmic Bowling
$20.00This book is a collaborative work of Ted Goodden?s ceramic sculptures and Cornelia Hoogland?s poems. Specifically, they are responding through image and text to the 64 hexagrams contained in the ancient book of wisdom, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Cosmic Bowling‘s calm weather lands in the midst of twitter storms in which everybody wants to start a conversation. Here’s a conversation — facilitated through visual art and poetry — that’s been going on for three millennia, one that asks the perennial question: How should we live now?
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Cosmic Wonder
$24.95Even if people sometimes argue over the pettiest things, we all have our curiosity in common. The universe is a stupendous place that has no obligation to make sense to us. Just think about it: we’re living on a tiny planet that’s hurtling around a star which is whirling through a galaxy that’s careening through the cosmos at absurd speeds. We humans only appeared 100,000 years ago in our universe’s 13.8-billion-year-long backstory. In the big picture, we’re newcomers to the cosmos—and our entire planet is nothing more than a microscopic speck. Disclaimer warning for an existential crisis!
From science writer Nathan Hellner-Mestelman comes Cosmic Wonder, a humorous and detailed guide to our universe as you’ve never seen it before.
While our cosmos sounds like a remote and abstract place, we’re connected to it in every way. Our atoms were smashed together in the cores of exploding stars. The universe dooms us to a riveting cascade of destruction, humbling us to look at one another with more compassion. Life sprouted on this planet thanks to a series of fantastic cosmic collisions—and we might not be alone in this universe after all.
Come along on a funny, deep, and insightful journey to the edge of the universe and back. From the tiny particles that make up life to the galaxies on the other end of the cosmos, and from the explosion of the Big Bang to the chilling death of the universe itself, Cosmic Wonder is sure to be a rollercoaster ride for your brain.
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Cosmo
$18.95Through ten incendiary and mercurial stories, Cosmo will take you on a wild ride over the churning waters of pop culture and the malaise of our solitary existence.
WINNER OF THE 2013 CBC OVERLOOKIE BOOKIE AWARD FOR MOST UNDERRATED CANADIAN BOOK
An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal, stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Such are the speakers and stars of a collection of stories that explode the conventions of short fiction.
Though shifting wildly in tone, structure and perspective from one page to the next, each of these mercurial stories is drenched in pop culture, the distancing effects of modern communication and the malaise of solitary existence. At their core, these stories are a portrait of ordinary people (as well as celebrities – they’re just like us!) striving, thinking, and suffering alone.
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Cosmographia
$20.00Butt out, Dante. Move over, Milton. Piss off, Pound. Outta the way, Olson. Here comes Cosmographia—a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, the latest ground breaking incursion into the ever popular spectacle of the Epic Poem. Tracking the classic epic journey through the unfolding cosmos toward home, though occasionally disoriented by milling cows with similar intent, Cosmographia teems with nasty political invective, scurrilous spiritual slander, and endless exploitive sexual innuendo. Taking as its muses Cab Calloway and Charles Mingus, by the time it gets home, Cosmographia has subjected the epic to unspeakable acts in the name of linguistic rectumtude, dada terrorism, and sporadic ejaculations of self-expression. Oh yeah!—poetry will never be the same.
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Cosmophilia
$16.95What earthly use is the love of ornament? Slowing down to look closely at an inherited shawl made by hand, the title poem in Rahat Kurd’s Cosmophilia traces an object of luxury to the traditionally male art of Kashmiri shawl embroidery. The poet works with images from Kashmir, her maternal family’s place of origin, where the ability to make and appreciate beautiful things is both absolutely essential and taken for granted; where increasingly rare levels of artistic mastery are simultaneously prized and trivialized; where the struggle to carry on traditional art forms is strained by awareness of increasing obsolescence, severe political repression, and environmental degradation; a place both celebrated and dismissed as spectacle, as “paradise on earth.”
The question persists, throughout other poems in Cosmophilia, both as self-reflexive creative practice and existential dilemma. On the concrete streets of Vancouver, the anonymity and material ease of cities tug at the poet’s consciousness of frayed traditional ideals, both philosophical and aesthetic. Religious language and rituals considered in the aftermath of a marriage take on complex, subversive, and irreverent layers in a seven-poem sequence. Allusive, playful multilingual imagery inhabits long narrative meditations, free-form couplets, and the traditional ghazal, in elegiac or sharply satirical moods. Nastaliq, a centuries-old form of Persian and Urdu calligraphy, speaks to the author through the smoke-damaged voice of a fading celebrity confessional.
The emotionally powerful collection follows the elaborate, unexpected turns of the poet’s imagination, enlisting intricate details of memory and language and the occasional plain truth – “the hard solitude of the maker.” They intertwine political conflict and family history; they imagine Hamlet reluctantly confronting the partition of India and Pakistan. Cosmophilia translates multiple glittering facets of Muslim culture into, and reflects back from, the immediacy of embodied, urban Canadian experience.
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Cottagers and Indians
$16.95Cottagers and Indians explores the politics and issues surrounding a real-life event still occurring in the Kawartha Lakes region of Central Ontario. An Indigenous man, Arthur Copper, has taken it upon himself to repopulate the nearby lakes with wild rice, known amongst the Anishnawbe as Manoomin, much to the disapproval of the local non-Indigenous cottagers, Maureen Poole in particular. She feels the plant interferes with boating, fishing, swimming, and is generally an eyesore that brings down the property values of her cottage and those of her neighbours. Drew Hayden Taylor’s thirty-second play is a powerful dramatization of contemporary confrontations taking place between environmentalism and consumerism, Indigenous and non-Indigenous sensibilities.
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Could Be
$19.00Poems about the unexpected and often wry coincidences language lends to life.
In Could be, each poem is a moment of engaged and isolated attention, prodding language, relationships, the mundane aspects of daily life, friendships and art. It asks how we use words, how we shape them and are in turn shaped by them. In many ways, then, this book is about how we construct our world through language, and how language unexpectedly shifts the terms on us. It is wry, funny, moving and at times disturbing. It will quietly assert itself, as so often language itself does, and will challenge readers to reconsider how they engage with words and world.
Fly you, wildbird
half eaten by the smog.
All sheets to the wind. Oh oh
is it laundry day?
… We wake up
to the sounds of development.
Is that Mimico Creek
in the washing machine? If you roll over
you’re out of the dream and your anger
can really take shape. Sorry,
I meant passion.— from “Perpetual Cleanup”
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Count On Me
$22.95Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan’s meddling in their parents’ lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money.