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Showing 177–192 of 9311 results
A Gut Reaction
$22.95Gut Reaction is an entertaining as well as informative true story about the author’s battle to save her son’s life – or at least his large intestine – from a very severe case of Crohn’s disease. With persistence, humour, much searching of the Internet and the help of two unusual doctors, one in Canada and the other in Australia, she and her son, who was in his early twenties, finally find a regime of fecal infusions that replaces the bacteria that had ulcerated his gut with a healthy flora donated by his mother. The manuscript details their adventures and then concludes with a helpful summary of how they did it. It includes a foreword by Dr. Thomas Borody, the Director of the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Australia, whose emails and phone conversations helped the author understand what, how, and why to do what was necessary. Sky Curtis’s sometimes desperate, often hilarious, and always determined international quest for a treatment for her son’s life-threatening Crohn’s disease resulted in a new protocol for the treatment of this disease.
A Hamburger in a Gallery
$19.95Stuart Ross’s eighth collection of poems delivers a gallery of emotionally charged poetry experiments along with a series of philosophical meditations on the aesthetically contrived and sometimes downright quirky poetic processes that were followed to generate the poems in this book. A Hamburger in a Gallery is deeply engaged in demonstrating how art happens, especially through a poet’s immediate aesthetic engagement with other works of art. Comprised of poems written ‘after’ the lines and language of other artists’ works, ‘during’ sessions of listening to other poets reading their poems, or constructed ‘from’ the parts and pieces of other artists’ words, A Hamburger in a Gallery provides a distinctive experience of the relationship between the finished poem and the process that informed its creation. Blurring the boundaries between creative writing and creative reading, Ross has once again created an utterly original, accessible, moving and avant-garde classic. ‘Now considered to be Canada’s foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry.’ George Murray, The Globe & Mail
A Handbook for Beautiful People
$22.95Winner, 2017 IPPY Bronze Medal for Popular Fiction
When twenty-two-year-old Marla finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she wishes for a family, but faces precariousness: an uncertain future with her talented, exacting boyfriend, Liam; constant danger from her roommate, Dani, a sometime prostitute and entrenched drug addict; and the unannounced but overwhelming needs of her younger brother, Gavin, whom she has brought home for the first time from deaf school. Forcing her hand is Marla’s fetal alcohol syndrome, which sets her apart but also carries her through. When Marla loses her job and breaks her arm in a car accident, Liam asks her to marry him. It’s what she’s been waiting for: a chance to leave Dani, but Dani doesn’t take no for an answer. Marla stays strong when her mother shows up drunk, creates her own terms when Dani publicly shames her, and then falls apart when Gavin attempts suicide. It rains, and then pours, and when the Bow River finally overflows, flooding Marla’s entire neighbourhood, she is ready to admit that she wants more for her child than she can possibly give right now. Marla’s courage to ask for help and keep her mind open transforms everyone around her, cementing her relationships and proving to those who had doubted her that having a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder does not make a person any less noble, wise or caring.
A Hard Old Love Amongst Scavengers
$19.95At 46, Miles Hann gives it all up for the little cottage he has built on the slopes of his native Ingonish, Cape Breton. Miles has five times circumnavigated the globe and in his years of wandering has grown weary of man’s work of mendacity and pursuit of pleasure. Mostly though, Miles is tired; even a trip around the harbour is a weighty prospect. He writes himself a letter to express better his commitment to stay away from all, to contemplate the animals of the slope and to try for even one day with no ill thought of others. He does not manage it. For, people climb the hill to his door. They know Miles is a quiet man, a polite man; that Miles has travelled everywhere there is to travel and that he alone must have the answers to the burning questions singeing their hearts. Also — who else is there free like this to drop in on any time you want? No one is who.
Miles listens to every word of how yet again the world has been maligning even these poor gentle folk. And, afterward, though he has told them nothing, each visitor agrees that: yes, Miles Hann is one wise man. On their way back down his hill they agree to it; they stop and turn to his lofty house and say aloud: “Yes! Wise if ever wise there was one. The man bothers with not a soul!” Miles waves his hand and he shakes his head too, turning for his trees: ‘Further proof of the pride,’ he says. ‘And that everyone is a wound.’ The next time that someone comes (and it is every day now), Miles runs for the cover of his trees, to crouch and hide from them. He spies at the same instant the little red fox that had been visiting him: ‘Charlie, the one who found my glasses! the one who now leads me haphazardly up the mountain proper and out onto the beautiful lonesome rockslide scree of a blackening evening. Here is one place I have not been up to in many, many years’, and as he remarks further at its utter forlornness, lurking in the black spruce fringe is a badly starved coyote pack, one grown desperate and bold, one that has killed.
A Harsh and Private Beauty
$22.95A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby’s grandparent’s immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny’s life in 1920s Chicago–the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition–and Ruby’s subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto. Headstrong and talented, Ruby struggled with the conventions of the times, was trapped in a marriage that forced her to give up her singing career, and in love with another man who shares her passion for music. Now, on the train headed back to a city she cannot remember, to a daughter she hardly knows, Ruby tries to look honestly at herself and the choices she has made, choices that affected not only her children, but her grandchildren. Ruby has a stroke on route, leaving the disconnected story of her life and love in the hands of her granddaughter, Lisa, who must reveal a secret to her father, Ruby’s son, that her grandmother guarded all her life.
A Heart In Port
$16.95The fictional worlds that Emily Givner was intent on evoking are subtle, yet lucid, her characters often wrought with inherent contradictions, her narrators keen-eyed and pithy. In the title story of the collection, “A Heart In Port”, a seemingly light hearted send up of heartbreak, a Canadian woman waits in vain for the return of her European lover, amid the comedic shards of those close to her. The narrator’s caustic eye shifts between lives touched by illness and disappointment and the backdrop of life’s sharp ironies. Irony is apparent as well in “In-Sook” when a visiting music professor adored by his Korean students finds himself in conversation with the glass eye of one. When the glass eye starts speaking to Professor Andresj, the voice leads him to certain infidelity with the one student who is capable of the encounter. This mode of the surreal also enlightens the Kafkaesque “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Cockroach”, a story which (quite apart from its quiet forewarning of Emily Givner’s own death) is a juggling act of improbability, breakdown, sly rhetoric, fairytale and literary allusion, all sustained by the perceptions of a young girl, Clarissa. These stories are never quite what they present themselves as being.
In some – “Canadian Mint and Private Eye” – a small apparent flaw in the story’s internal logic creates a puzzle and a hint and, to solve that puzzle, the reader is led back to the story again to read it with new eyes. There is often something otherworldly afoot – too organic to be merely surreal, too witty to strain credulity.
Always pealing the layers of intense relationships, Givner never lets questions of culture, race and politics escape her. In “Polonaise” the relationship between an older Polish musician and young Canadian Jewish woman is consummated under the cloud that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Poland.
A Helluva Life in Hockey
$24.95A captivating memoir from Canada’s foremost hockey historian and a beloved NHL commentator
It’s been 85 years since Brian McFarlane first laced a pair of skates and tested the black ice on a tiny pond. And then he discovered the joy of hockey. Ultimately, there would be grade school hockey, high school hockey, junior hockey, college hockey, and, miraculously, two decades with the NHL Oldtimers anchoring his life. He was the rank amateur playing on a line with the Big M and Norm Ullman, facing off against icons like Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay at Maple Leaf Gardens — even scoring a goal. He suited up at the Montreal Forum, elbow-to-elbow against John Ferguson, before thousands of fans. (There was even a stint with the Flying Fathers who ordained him a “Bishop” after a hat trick.) Off the ice, in 1960, McFarlane was the first Canadian to be a commentator on CBS’s coverage of the NHL. He also survived 25 years of Hockey Night in Canada — despite confrontations with Punch Imlach, Harold Ballard, Bobby Hull, and Eddie Shack. Now, in this revealing autobiography, he remembers it all. For Brian McFarlane, it has been a helluva life in hockey.
A Hero
$22.95The state war raging outside the home of the Al-Fakhoury extended family, who live in a border town buffeted by the turmoil of the Arab Spring, entwines with the familial conflict raging within. The patriarch of the family, Mohammed, is an aggressive, dominant man who bullies his wife and four children and wages paranoiac diatribes against his sister and her family. It is only when Mohammed leaves for work every morning that the house relaxes into the rich interconnectivity of familial relationships: between Mohammed’s gentle wife Fatima and his sister Rana, who yearns desperately to contribute to their country’s historic fight for freedom; between the twelve-year-old twins and Rana’s gentle son Mazin, whose effeminacy is a source of great anxiety to her. This formidable woman tends her chickens and her garden in the courtyard, sharing the produce with the neighbours and improving the lives of everybody around her, even though she cannot raise a placard with the men. Ahmed, Mohammed’s brother, is an active and passionate participant in the protests, demanding their country’s dictator step down and make way for democracy. When Ahmed is involved in a terrible incident during a demonstration, he wakes up in an underground cavern, surrounded by groaning, dying men stretched out on blankets on the floor, and is stunned by what he discovers there.
A Hinge of Spring
$7.95A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley’s first published collection of poetry. Wheatley’s writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence; she weaves together literary associations and responses to more immediate experience with an attractive assurance of tone.
A History of Breathing
$16.95Two boats float aimlessly on an ocean that conceals the remains of civilization and history. One boat carries a father and daughter, the last survivors of an unspeakable catastrophe; the other carries the only hope for a new beginning. Daniel Macdonald crafts a stunning tale of myth and reality at the end of the world and at its creation.
A History of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
$45.00How does a venerable institution adapt quickly to sometimes volatile global markets and shifting domestic demands of the late twentieth century?
In A History of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Volume 5 1973–1999, the story of CIBC unfolds amidst a backdrop of world-changing events, economic booms and busts, and memorable moments in Canadian history. This era of the bank saw challenges such as the OPEC crisis and recession-driven collapses of iconic companies like Massey Ferguson, Dome Petroleum, and Olympia & York. CIBC weathered such storms, while also pursuing opportunities in international banking and corporate acquisitions, and embracing technology and education. The lessons of the past shine through in this long-view of how to remain competitive and continue to evolve to meet the needs of millions of clients. All the while, the bank’s commitment to its communities is clearly evident in the passionate and generous spirit of CIBC’s team members, and its corporate support as one of the leading donors in the nation.
At the heart of all the historical highs and lows are the people of CIBC, here profiled from the executives responsible for the bottom line to those working on the front lines, serving bank clients day in and day out. A History of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce brings to life the strategic changes that have propelled CIBC forward as it creates enduring value for its stakeholders.
A History of Forgetting
$19.95History of Forgetting, A
A History of Touch
$20.00Bearing witness to women in history.
A History of Touching is a poetry collection about women in folklore and history who were ill, disabled, or otherwise labelled ‘hysteric.’ The work bears witness to the lives of women with varying experiences, such as a woman whose epilepsy was mistaken for demonic possession, Sarah Winchester’s grief, Mary Roff and her love of leeches, and the “witch”, Biddy Early. There is a poem about Bridget Cleary, who upon displaying her independence was burned to death by her husband, believing her to be a changeling. The collection includes pieces on anchoresses, Rosemary Kennedy, and accused witches. A History of Touching tells the stories of ‘difficult women.’ Each poem discusses an aspect of or a moment in a woman’s life, connecting these moments to different aspects of embodiment and the natural world. A History of Touching is an examination of women vilified or left behind for their strength or their weakness. This book uses strong poetic imagery and metaphor to elevate details drawn from real life to that of poetry. The book comprises of three sections, each drifting between biographical poetry (Scrying, about Biddy Early), experimental poetry (Projections of a Glass Womb, which manipulates the text of a midwifery textbook), fairy tale sequences (What a Pretty Sight), folklore, (Macha, Flickers) and pieces that incorporate elements of confessional poetry (Bloodletting, Whiskers).
A Hostage
$22.95When Charlotte is kidnapped by Middle Eastern dictator Kassem, panic is only held at bay by a sardonic Inner Voice, which alternately consoles and condemns. While Kassem appears determined to explain every warlike action, Charlotte attempts to instill humanity in the dictator. Inner Voice’s incredulity at such hubris provides much-needed comic relief in an increasingly tense situation, as unbearable loneliness unleashes a storm of unexpected sexual fantasies and complex feelings.
When the promised release date comes and goes, Charlotte embarks on a hunger strike, which ultimately brings about a joyful reunion with her family. However, home life quickly disintegrates into another form of confinement, as Charlotte discovers that Kassem had used her for his propaganda, live streaming their interactions online. Media interest drives the introverted writer even further inward; as her ability to function normally deteriorates, Charlotte becomes convinced that her existence is a liability for her children.
Ultimately a post-modern fable, the novel cleverly plays with perceptions of truth while exploring the concept of imprisonment, the wider impacts of social media, and challenging widely held assumptions about fame. A Hostage probes Western political naiveté along with novelistic hubris as it, often hilariously, explores the relationship of the individual to society.
A House Without Spirits
$21.95When Paul is hired to write a monograph of the Montreal photographer John Marchuk, he assumes he’ll be able to turn over the eccentric project in a matter of weeks. Little does he know that over the next few months his visits with Marchuk, in a house stuffed with boxes stacked floor to ceiling with his life’s archive, will expose an emptiness in his own home. In this ninth novel, David Homel delivers some of his most memorable characters to date – reclusive artists, disaffected life partners, wandering ghosts, cult-affiliated nuns – in a contemporary Montreal noir that reveals how much we learn about ourselves when we begin to ask questions of others.
A Hummingbird Dance
$11.95Detectives Lane and Harper are back for the third installment of the Detective Lane Mystery Series in this gripping twister of a novel that baffles with its ever increasing body count and suspect list.
When Ryan Dudley ventures out on horseback and his horse returns without him, Lane and Harper are summoned to unravel the mystery. Dudley’s disappearance marks the first anniversary of a young boy’s murder in the same neighbourhood, and evidence indicates the two incidents are connected. When Dudley’s roommate also goes missing and mysterious shootings start happening in the area, Harper and Lane are swept into a feud between neighbours, races, and land owners, all in search of a murderer on the loose for much too long.