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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1937–1952 of 9481 results
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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.
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Dead Salmon Dialectics
$16.95Drawing on scientific studies of salmon recycling in perhumid rainforests, Dead Salmon Dialectics follows the dark and often humorous trial of a young biologist at work in the wildest estuaries of the rainiest place on earth. Written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the historic Lyell Island logging blockades on Xaaydaa Gwaay, these poems form a musicolous bricolage out of a mesothermal wordstream, sampling ideas of unequal value toward a cohesion of ecological and ecoliterary integrity. Filled with thousands of rotting carcasses, rain, swirls of phosphorescent algae, rain, night-fishing bears, local sledneck debutantes, the marvel of raven song, rain and near misses by giant falling trees, Dead Salmon Dialectics is an interdisciplinary experiment for the senses and the synapses. While they challenge passive readers to activate and participate, the poems set the visceral beauty of coastal rainforest music to the unavoidable slippery realities of hard science, technology and philosophy.
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Dead White Men
$18.95A vital collection that interrogates the stories of the dead white men that litter our histories and landscapes.
Juxtaposing the seemingly benign names of Europeans that permeate our geographies with the details of their so-called discoveries and conquests, Dead White Men turns ideas of exploration, discovery, finding and keeping back upon themselves. Engaging with exploration and scientific texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries – texts wrapped up in the history and ongoing present of colonization – this collection builds a fascinating poetry of memory out of histories that are largely forgotten.
‘A provocative and galvanizing read … Riveting and dazzling invention is visible on almost every page: fonts shift size, language cascades and cleaves, and images disrupt order. Dead White Men should be widely read and taught.’
– Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
‘Dead White Men is not only a searing indictment of colonialism but also a painful reminder of the violence that underpins the logic of exploration. Each poem strikes at the heart of the issue: there are often unarticulated, unacknowledged Indigenous presences here that have been flattened over by the lies and mirages of empty landscapes. Dead White Men is a stinging and difficult journey, and one that continues to remind us that stolen land has always been the most pressing concern for Indigenous peoples and settlers. This is an absolutely essential book.’
– Jordan Abel, author of Injun
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Dead White Writer on the Floor
$17.95Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, six “savages”; noble, innocent, ignorant, fearless, wise and gay, respectively; find themselves in a locked room with the body of a white writer, which they stash in a closet. None of them can figure out how he died or which of them might have killed him. They realize as they point fingers at each other, however, that they are all profoundly unhappy with their lives as they’ve been constructed over the past four hundred years: Old Lodge Skins wants to know what it feels like to be a young man; Billy Jack wonders what spreading healing rather than pain would feel like; Injun Joe is desperate for an education; Kills Many Enemies is exhausted by his deadly seriousness and yearns for a sense of humour; Pocahontas seeks to feel respected as a woman rather than lusted after as a child sex object; and Tonto wants to “come out of the canyon” and be the one wearing the mask for a change. Gradually, they figure out that the latest iteration of Gutenberg’s invention buzzing like a beehive on the dead writer’s desk is actually a dream-catcher, which they can use to rewrite their lives in the image of their own inner beings.
Imagine their surprise when they reappear in the same locked room in Act Two as Mike, Jim, Bill, John, Sally and Fred—attending an A.A. meeting and bickering among themselves about reserve politics, unmanageable family relationships and whether Bingo has a place in their new air-conditioned casino—and realize the white writer must still be very much alive in their community; his body in the closet is still warm!
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Dead Writers
$23.95In this collaborative omnibus-style fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. The lives of a biographer surveying the career of a “haunted” literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor’s complicity in a colonial scandal, stand side to side within this macro-narrative of interlocking themes.
These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul. -
Deadly Frontiers
$18.95Disaster can strike without notice. In a split-second the forces of nature, human intervention, or a simple twist of fate can place lives in jeopardy. A ship sinks, a plane crashes, a child wanders deep into the forest. Death is imminent, except for the bravery and persistence of small groups of men and women who enter these dark frontiers as rescuers. Of course they fail sometimes — but often they return with the near dead, plucking them from the hungry jaws of disaster. Written by veteran newsman Dean Beeby, Deadly Frontiers: Disaster and Rescue on Canada’s Atlantic Seaboard tells the stories of real-life heroes, and of the bureaucracy and bungling that threaten their lives and those they have sworn to save.
In Deadly Frontiers, Dean Beeby deals with the chilling question of Canada’s preparedness for disaster, as he investigates the most significant events in the contemporary history of search and rescue. Canada occupies a unique position in the rarified world of search and rescue. The second-largest country on the planet, Canada has three jagged coastlines, an immense internal wilderness, and a vast Arctic to swallow hapless travellers. Since the Second World War, Canada’s East Coast has been the crucible for modern search-and-rescue techniques and equipment. This hard-won experience has been driven mostly by disaster, from the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig off Newfoundland to numerous cargo-vessel disappearances in the 1990s, including the Protektor, Gold Bond Conveyor, Marika, and Vanessa. Ground search and rescue, a special branch of this culture, was reborn in 1986 during the protracted search for a lost child in the forests north of Halifax. Swissair Flight 111 plunged into waters off Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia in 1998, triggering a massive search-and-recovery effort, as well as a fundamental rethinking of emergency response. The worst disaster within the search-and-rescue community itself was the 1998 crash in Quebec of a Labrador helicopter from Greenwood, Nova Scotia, leaving six rescue specialists dead among the charred wreckage.
In Deadly Frontiers, author Dean Beeby examines official documents, forensic evidence, and the personal histories of those involved in these cases and more. His book is a frank examination of how Canada’s tragedies and triumphs have helped forge a professional search-and-rescue culture that is second to none.