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Showing 1937–1952 of 9492 results
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Dazzle Ships
$18.95Poems that challenge the depths of perception
Dazzle camouflage, at the beginning of the 20th century, was an attempt to answer the question, How do we hide those things that are too big to hide? Ships, often containing thousands of soldiers, were done up in a confusing array of lines to perplex and distort the viewer’s perspective (in this case, German submarines). “Razzle dazzle” was art attempting to hide life.
Jamie Sharpe’s Dazzle Ships is also concerned with art’s relationship to life. It questions how we build poems from the material of mass culture. And in asking whether authentic modes of expression can be found in an increasingly automated world, Sharpe creates a poetry that is at once as disturbing as it is hilarious and as deeply profound as it is subtle.
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de book of Joseph
$20.95Finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize, Poetry, 2023
de book of Joseph, the third book in Mordecai’s epic trilogy about the lives of Jesus, his mother, Mary, and his foster father, the tekton of Nazareth, is a dazzling retelling in Jamaican Creole of the story of Joseph’s life–his first marriage, his magical meeting with Mary, and his role in the birth and raising of Jesus. Mordecai creates a cast of spirited characters who surround a down-to-earth Jesus, Mary and Joseph as they contend with the intrigue around Herod’s determination to assassinate the infant king of the Jews; the family’s escape to Egypt; and the trials they face on their return. At once humorous and tragic, playful and sober, this luminous tale of how Joseph and his families prevail over life’s vicissitudes will reward endless rereading.
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de book of Mary
$20.95de book of Mary is an epic poem in Jamaican Creole based on the Biblical story of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The first book of a trilogy, Pamela Mordecai’s de book of Mary covers Mary’s life from her early years, through the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel and the birth of Yeshua, to her death. A Chorus of male and female voices provides an accompanying commentary. This exciting Canadian Jamaican retelling, profound and tragic, yet told with humour and gusto, is a major event, continuing Mordecai’s project of hybridizing one of the most significant cultural-religious phenomena in world history. The last book of the trilogy, de Man, about the crucifixion of Jesus, was published by Sister Vision Press in 1995 and is now out of print.
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De Cosmos Enigma, The
$17.95First detailed exploration of the mysterious life of Amor de Cosmos; British Columbias second premier; discusses his role in B.C. joining Canada; Canada nation-building as a whole.
This biography of Amor De Cosmos explores the life and career of this most eccentric of Canadian politicians, a man who played a crucial role in the creation of present-day Canada from sea to sea, and yet who, by the end of his life, was little remembered. Hawkins reveals how De Cosmos began public life as one of the most feared journalists in British Columbia, and how, as an outsider, he had to force his way into politics, eventually becoming B.C.’s second premier, and then elected to the House of Commons. Of particular interest is the discussion of what caused De Cosmos to change his name in the goldfields of California from William Smith (who had been a quiet young man in Nova Scotia) to the most unusual “Amor De Cosmos” -
Deactivated West 100
$25.95Deactivated West 100 is Don McKay’s latest set of variations on a poetics of place. Armed with lunch and relevant reading material, McKay invites us to join him on Vancouver Island for a series of explorations that depend on first losing our way. In the spirit of Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001), McKay embarks on a project to locate a human understanding of place in the midst of wilderness and in the scheme of infinite time. In six movements of prose and poetry, questions are clarified and answers begun.
Home is a series of habits, McKay suggests, as he recounts a personal tradition that involves selecting a stone from a local beach, familiarizing himself with it over the years, and then returning it from his pocket to the same beach and selecting a new one. Picking up the discussion of place and wilderness that began in Vis à Vis, McKay launches it in a new direction, headlong into the geologic/geopoetic time scale where crystals, magma, terranes and Xenophanes affirm an understanding of how we inhabit space and time.
At the centre of the collection is a series of poems dedicated to the Shay locomotive, which powered Vancouver Island’s logging industry in the 1920s. Here the natural and the built coexist, mental and geographical locations intersect, and wilderness and creativity border. These poems are followed by a set of journeys made for the purpose of losing the way and a treatise on natural clearings. On the ground, McKay is both precise and imaginative, pursuing the specific interstices where abstractions leak into the forest, and walks follow creeks into wilder, less habitable areas of thought.
“The background for Deactivated West 100 is a particular fault line on southern Vancouver Island known as the Loss Creek-Leech River fault,” says McKay. “It is very eloquent because it is marked on the surface by a deep canyonat least at its western end, in which Loss Creek, the Leech River and a couple of reservoirs lie. I decided, as part of my apprenticeship to west coast landscapes, to walk the fault line from end to end and take note of whatever it presented to me in terms of rocks, plants, animals, birds (of course) and human history. A lot of that walking was done on the old deactivated bush road which follows Loss Creek and gives the book its title. Since the area has been very aggressively logged, this also led me into the history and politics of forestry hereaboutsincluding technological advances like the Shay locomotive and the Stihl chainsaw, both of whom make appearances in the book.”
Deactivated West 100 proceeds with the same mix of humour, humility and determined authenticity that have characterized McKay’s previous works. At a pace that falls somewhere between stroll and clamber, McKay introduces a potent set of ideas with which to situate ourselves in the woods.
This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Electra and printed offset on laid paper.
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Dead Ends Dancing in the Wind
$14.95During the last century, one of the most exciting and dangerous occupations in Newfoundland was pulpwood driving. One of those river loggers was Newfoundland writer Stanley Sparkes, the author of a new lyrical collection of poetry entitled Deadends Dancing in the Wind. Sparkes is passionate about his profession. Whether it is a reflection about a man driving logs, or a snapshot in prose of black bears in the wild, the words convey powerful and lasting images. Sparkes has created a lasting tribute to the men who risked their lives to sustain the logging industry and help to build the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
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Dead Flowers
$19.95An anonymous writer stays up late into the night penning personal and inappropriate letters to a local public official. A new father and cook at a Montreal café chronicles the tyrannical rise of a new manager. An eccentric young student, in trying to carve out a space for herself, deals an existential blow to her roommate. Dead Flowers is a collection of stories featuring characters who have become estranged from the trajectory of their lives, yet must grapple with youth, love, isolation, drugs, friendship and the changing of seasons. These are stories of peripheral tragedies, moral ambivalence and compromise, chance and how we are shaped by what finds us.
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Dead Heat
$21.95“Let’s say it up front: reading Dead Heat, the Hungarian writer Benedek Totth’s first novel, is a shock … [like] the cry of love and desperation flung out by a generation that’s finished before it can begin, before it can even reach maturity.”—Yann Perreau, Les Inrockuptibles
Adrift in testosterone and booze, teenage members of a competitive swim team prowl the nighttime clubs and highways of Budapest. Their parents and coaches, demoralized and debased by decades of totalitarian rule, either pay them no attention or too much of the wrong kind. When the boys aren’t setting records in the pool, they’re treating old men, young women, and animals that happen into their path as objects at their disposal—but after their recklessness explodes into violence, one of them must find resources in both his heart and his disciplined swimmer’s body to confront his responsibility for a horrific crime. Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and a harrowing, indelible story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.
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Dead Man on a Bike
$21.95Wayne Tefs is the Dead Man on a Bike in his posthumous follow-up memoir to Roller Coaster: A Cancer Journey. Diagnosed with a rare cancer in 1994, Tefs spent the next 20 years raising a family, writing acclaimed works of fictions, battling cancer, and cycling. Always cycling.
Brutally visceral in his approach, Tefs explains: “This book is about the wound, about how cancer sticks a knife in your side and says, There, do what you can. What are the options? You can fall over dead; whinge out your days; leave the knife to fester; yank it out and splash blood around; pretend the knife is not there; anaesthetize it; use it to wound others; rage. Attempt to ride it away on a bicycle.”
And ride he does. Tefs cycles along the highways and byways of the Manitoba prairie; steep and arid Catalina Foothills; and lush, rolling French countryside. While he rides, he unflinchingly examines his sense of Self, uncovering bright flares of insight, earthy humour, deep-seated fears of mortality, and Zen-like moments when the Self falls away and all that remains is peace.
Dead Man on a Bike is a love letter to cycling, to family and friends, and to the natural world. For cancer patients, it offers a new approach to grappling with disease. –Winnipeg Free Press
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Dead Man, The
$22.95The Dead Man is a compelling novel about a woman who is obsessed. Eve, a composer of sacred music and a music therapist, is well aware of the saying, “Physician, heal thyself,” but she just can’t seem to do this. For some unknown reason, she– a sensible, intelligent professional– can’t recover from a brief relationship she had five years ago with a world-famous music critic named Jake. This obsession with Jake is a mystery to Eve’s friends, and also to her. In an attempt to solve this mystery, she “returns to the scene of the crime”: Israel, where Jake still lives, and where they first fell in love. There she revisits all their old haunts and struggles to complete the song cycle she started composing five years ago about Jake but hasn’t been able to finish. Gradually the dark mystery behind their complex relationship begins to unravel. Eve discovers the forgotten childhood memories, losses, and desires that are encapsulated in her connection to Jake. And then, inspired by all the music she hears around her (including the singing of birds, the crying of babies, and the honking of cars), she succeeds in finally completing her song cycle and setting her obsession to rest. This novel, filled with music, dealing with themes of love, grief, early loss, and the power of art, will resonate deeply with anyone who has ever loved and lost, and will continue to resound and echo for a long time afterward.
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Dead Men of the Fifties
$16.95From the ‘endlessly inventive’ mind of one of Canada’s greatest poets, comes Dead Men of the Fifties, a rollicking tour through a hopeful, headlong decade filled with jive talkin’ jazzmen, the tallest dancer in burlesque, regular folks, movie stars, and TV dogs. Following the success of last year’s Trillium Award nominated The Dark Time of Angels, Di Cicco proves once again that his mercurial talent can quickly shift directions and stop on a dime.
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Dead Metaphor
$19.95Canada’s top playwright sears the page with three new darkly comic plays that denounce political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity. The title play, Dead Metaphor, examines the collision of a politician’s personal and professional lives, complicated by a son’s return from Afghanistan. In The Ravine, a mayoral candidate learns that his ex-wife is living in a gully nearby and wants to put a hit on him. The Burden of Self-Awareness has money at the centre of a dramatic conflict of values. Each of the three plays is populated by characters trying to navigate the increasingly blurred lines of what’s right and wrong – trying to always stay informed, alert, and ready to act for the common good. Or just to get even.
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Dead of Midnight, The
$14.95Members of the bookclub at the Mystery Au Lait Cafe in Winnipeg are getting nervous, as events from their favourite murder mysteries start to come true-right in their own quiet neighbourhood of Wolseley. But Sarah Petursson and her neighbours can’t stop themselves from reading the popular Midnight Mystery series published by Alfred, a prominent member of the club. /
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Dead Peasant
$24.95Drawing on her decades of navigating the art world, Lisa Baldissera weaves writing conventions from the visual arts with the imaginative possibilities of magic realism and autofiction in this groundbreaking collection of short fiction.
The stories in Dead Peasant reveal the fraught circumstances and neglected emotions of an underclass who toil below the glossy economies of the international high-art world, including artists and art workers. Here, characters from across centuries are haunted by war, floods, and their parental histories. An auction-house worker vomits blueberries on an art-collecting oligarch. An aspiring curator converses with Lindsay Lohan about an exhibition of horse paintings before tragedy strikes. An archivist studies planet Earth from space, reflecting on tax havens and the embattled ecology.
Through these startling, affective, incisive, and fun stories, Baldissera chronicles the unique challenges of the art world and the damage it inflicts on those struggling to get by. Like the eviscerative work of Rachel Cusk and the dark humour of Miranda July, she satirizes the neoliberal double-speak of the ‘creative economy’ and its punifiying forces, to ask, what is it, truly, that art can do now?
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Dead Politician Society
$14.95?
The mayor falls down dead in the middle of a speech, and a university secret society promptly claims credit for the murder.
Clare Vengel is given her first undercover assignment: to pose as a student and penetrate the society. She’s a mechanic in her spare time, and thinks book smarts are for people who can’t handle the real world. Instead of infiltrating the club, she alienates a popular professor, and quickly loses the respect of police superiors.
Another politician is killed, and Clare is horrified that student idealism could be ramped up to the point of murder. She gets into gear, forging friendships with students, and a romantic involvement with a key suspect.
When two more politicians die, Clare knows that the murderer she has to unmask is someone she has come to consider a friend. She only hopes that the friend doesn’t unmask her first.
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Dead Reckoning
$19.95Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction
A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year
Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)
When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father, a respected doctor, was brutally murdered in his own home by an intruder. Twenty years later, and despite the reservations of her family and friends, she decides to contact his murderer in prison, and the two correspond for a period of two years. She learns of his horrific childhood, and the reasons he lied about the murder; in turn, he learns about the man he killed. She mines his letters for clues about the past before agreeing to meet him in person, when she learns startling new information about the crime.
With gripping suspense and raw honesty, Dead Reckoning follows one woman’s determination to confront the man who murdered her father, revealing her need for understanding and the murderer’s reluctance to tell–an uneasy negotiation between two people from different worlds both undone by tragedy. This is a powerful and emotional memoir about how reconciling with the past doesn’t necessarily provide comfort, but it can reveal the truth.