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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1985–2000 of 9492 results
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Death, Drugs, & Muscle
$18.95Death, Drugs, & Muscle is the story of a man who lived decades on the right side of the law before making the dangerous choice to enter the dark and dangerous world of drug dealing. After reaching the top and living a lavish lifestyle where sex, drugs, and money were in plentiful supply at all hours of the day, it all came crashing down in one harrowing instant. This is the story of Gregg Valentino, a man who had everything, lost it all, and fought his way back to the top.
The book describes Valentino’s involvement with bodybuilding and its association with steroids and underground behaviour, including the sex and muscle worship trade. Valentino eventually begins dealing drugs himself, and details the dangers and the fallout — including the murder of his girlfriend, his arrest, and his rise as an unlikely celebrity.
The story is uncensored, no-nonsense, and spares no expense to give the reader a true account of a life marred with murder, tragedy, sex, drugs, and sports.
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Death’s Last Run
$14.95A young snowboarder is found dead on the Blackcomb Glacier, and Whistler police want to close the case as suicide. The victim’s mother, a U.S. senator, says her daughter would not, and did not, kill herself. At her request, the FBI sends in an undercover agent — Clare Vengel — to find out who might have killed Sacha and why. Dropped into a world of partying with ski bums and snow bunnies, Clare soon discovers that Sacha was involved in an LSD smuggling ring. Worse: the top cop in Whistler is in cahoots with the smugglers, and Clare’s cover is too precarious for comfort. As suspicion snowballs, can Clare solve the case before she’s buried alive?
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Debris
$19.95Winner of the 2016 Trillium Book Award
Finalist for the 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Nominated for the 2015 Danuta Gleed Literary Award
One of Quill & Quire?s Books of the Year, 2015
One of 49th Shelf?s Books of the Year, 2015
The eleven remarkable stories in Kevin Hardcastle’s debut Debris introduce an authentic new voice. Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those—MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals—who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.
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Decadence
$24.95A collection of essays, ranging from the personal to the humorously mundane, Decadence spans a decade in the life of writer Richard Kelly Kemick.
The subjects of these essays are far-ranging, including Christmas villages, volleyball, municipal landfills, high-school plays, and dog fur. They feature the same rotating cast of characters: friends, family, Litia—Kemick’s partner of ten years—and their newborn son.
Throughout the course of Decadence, a narrative is gradually revealed. The collection begins with the early days of Kemick’s relationship with his long-time partner; the collection closes with the surprising, unconventional end to their romance. In the pages between, Kemick creates a repository of humour and epiphany that make up the odds and ends of living.
These essays are for fans of David Sedaris and David Rakoff. However, unlike the books published by these authors, Decadence puts on display the writer’s evolution. The contents, in chronological order, span the ten years it took Kemick to write this collection, revealing a gradual shift in his voice and priorities.
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Decalogue
$19.95Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets is a poetry anthology edited by rob mclennan.
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Decalogue 2
$20.00With the response to Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (2006), we decided to follow up with Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers. Because we are the capital city, Ottawa as a whole is often accused of having no identity of its own; instead, some of our strength comes from our transient nature, interacting with ideas larger and more multiple than a single base. Edited by rob mclennan, this collection features the work by Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriela Goliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis, rob mclennan and Ian Roy.
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Deceptions
$21.95A savvy art world thriller with a strong, independent heroine and the follow-up to The Appraisal, finalist for the 2018 Staunch Prize.
Former Budapest cop Attila Feher would really like to see art expert Helena Marsh again, so he arranges a contract for her to determine whether a painting is a copy of a famous Artemisia Gentileschi canvas or the real thing. A simple appraisal becomes a dangerous assignment when usual eastern European gangsters show up and people start dying and the seething corruption that underlies the lost promise of post-Soviet Hungary swirls to the surface. In a race to get to the truth and to outwit her adversaries, Helena and Attila must solve the mystery of the painting’s origins.
Richly atmospheric, set in Strasbourg, Budapest, and Paris, this witty, sophisticated novel will satisfy readers of political thrillers by Alan Furst and Philip Kerr. Deceptions is a thinking-person’s thriller, a romp to the last satisfying page.
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Declarations
$18.95This is a paper cut. This is Greta Garbo. This is the smell of Windex. Declarations, by acclaimed playwright Jordan Tannahill, is an ode to mortality — that of the playwright’s mother, his own, humankind’s — a joyful and moving attempt to capture the objects, sensations, and experiences that make up a life. Through a lyrical and iterative text, five performers chronicle a life pulled through time, encountering meteorological phenomena, mythology, political calamity, pop culture, and everyday happenstance along the way. What accumulates is a staggering archive of images, sense memories, and voices asserting that here lived, for a time, a woman.
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Decline of the Animal Kingdom
$18.95A debut collection with a fresh approach
Decline of the Animal Kingdom investigates modern constructs of domesticity, freedom, wilderness, and artificiality to paint a portrait of what it means to be human, animal, or both in a society saturated with dog boutiques, trophy hunting, retro taxidermy, and eco-tourism. With brief forays into Algonquin Park and the heart of the 1980s jungle, the book largely draws its energy from the urban landscape, where the animals that interact with the environment have permanent effects on the land and human psyche. A wild deer wanders into the downtown core; the Galapagos and the ethics of conservation invade our Xbox; a mule grows weary of his unrewarding office job and unfulfilling relationships. Exploring the victories and defeats of an urban existence complete with 9-to-5 office angst, the claustrophobia of domestic partnerships in bachelor apartments, and party-and-pick-up culture, Decline of the Animal Kingdom is Laura Clarke’s love letter to the city of Toronto, and to extinct animals and office misfits alike.
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Decolonizing Equity
$28.00Institutions everywhere seem to be increasingly aware of their roles in settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. As such, many racialized workers find themselves tasked with developing equity plans for their departments, associations or faculties. This collection acknowledges this work as both survival and burden for Black, Indigenous and racialized peoples. It highlights what we already know and are already doing in our respective areas and offers a vision of what equity can look like through a decolonial lens. What helps us to make this work possible? How do we take care with ourselves and each other in this work? What does solidarity, collaboration or “allyship” look like in decolonial equity work? What are the implicit and explicit barriers we face in shifting equity discourse, policy and practice, and what strategies, skills and practices can help us in creating environments and lived realities of decolonial equity?
This edited collection centres the voices of Indigenous, Black and other racialized peoples in articulating a vision for decolonial equity work. Specifically, the focus on decolonizing equity is an invitation to re-articulate what equity work can look like when we refuse to separate ideas of equity from the historical and contemporary realities of colonialism in the settler colonial nation states known as Canada and the United States and when we insist on linking an equity agenda to the work of decolonizing our shared realities.
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Decolonizing Public Places
$19.95Through acts of resistance and resurgence, Indigenous people are reclaiming public places in Winnipeg.
In Decolonizing Public Places, Sadie Lavoie explores the history of Indigenous resistance within Winnipeg since Idle No More in 2012, and how that protest played a pivotal role in the Indigenous cultural resurgence of reclaiming space within the city. Lavoie uses their experience to uncover how Indigenous people used places and spaces to revive their decolonial narratives from Indigenous ways of living, knowing and being. As public space in Winnipeg is reclaimed, Lavoie discovers how this newfound inclusion is shaping relationships within Indigenous communities, as well as how this movement connects Indigenous nations with their co-existing treaty partners.
Decolonizing Public Places
is part of The City Project, a series edited by Emma and Michel Durand-Wood. -
Decompositions
$16.95If language is an index of belonging, then Decompositions is the writing of an exile, a tribe of one.
For much of his life, Ken Belford has lived in the north, in the pristine region of the headwaters of the Nass River. His careful (de)compositions disclose the land as a complex living organism, articulate the names of it, see the whole of it. Yet the landscape of these poems is not a matter of latitude and longitude, but that unroaded place which begins at the edge of the rancher’s ?eld, wherever that boundary is, and looks back at “civilization” with a vision and a voice that is unique and new. These poems catch their readers up in a surprising social engagement that is at once larger and other than the consumer discourse of trade and ownership.
The construction of the lyric in contemporary poetry is most often grounded in a gaze from shelter, out onto a common ?eld that is captured, and thus appropriated—an “aboutism” or constructed estrangement of the other that is challenged by these decompositions of that sheltered and privileged “I.” For Belford, poetry is a social process that explores linguistic and political particulars from a gaze that is opposite to the shelters of convention, the academy, the city, or the south. It is a writing that rules out the anticipation and doubt of traditional narrative. These are not safe poems, they resist more than they assure.
While Belford’s self-taught language of subsistence isn’t aligned with the well-worn ancestral narratives of our forefathers, its sub-text remains rooted in questions of both origin and evolution, foregrounding a consciousness informed by the latest recognitions of science and technology. Uncolonized spaces are represented here not as a return to a golden age, but as bright openings to our undisclosed future
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Decoys
$17.95William Robertson writes with a quiet, unpretentious gait. He leads us through the beauty he finds within the simplicity of an honest life. His poems explore how his roles as father and grandfather allow him to share his love of the natural world, and his passions ignite especially when he writes about his love of birds. He asks if it would be possible for us all to be lovers of birds with the ardour of St. Frances of Assisi. “In the creek, birds I’ll probably never name explain their desire.” He writes as if quiet devotion just might release their thoughts.
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Deeds/Abstracts
$16.95Before his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer. Brick Books is proud to offer this exemplary work-in-progress (a 500-year diary can never be complete) assembled by a much-loved and keenly-lamented Canadian artist of the first importance. Greg Curnoe was born in London in 1936. He was a founder of the Nihilist Spasm Band, the Forest City Gallery, and Region magazine.
Front and back covers are after paintings by Greg Curnoe. The text includes 12 colour plates of photographs and Curnoe paintings.
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Deep Breaths of the Inanimate
$22.95In this captivating collection, readers embark on a journey through the extraordinary yet everyday lives of characters who traverse unexpected and uncharted paths, each story a vivid exploration of the human experience, driven by the emotion and desire that resonate deeply within us all. A newborn, fragile and innocent, is dramatically entrusted to the merciless waves of the sea. Three women find themselves ensnared by relics from their pasts—objects gifted by former lovers—that bind them in ways they cannot escape, challenging their identities and futures. The struggles of an imprisoned refugee unfold in a gripping tale of resilience in the face of despair, where hope flickers like a distant star. A lottery winner, basked in the glow of fortune, faces the harsh reality of loss as her life crumbles in ways she never anticipated. And a grieving son delves into the hidden truths of his mother’s tumultuous past, uncovering secrets that reshape his understanding of family and legacy. These are just a few of the eclectic and offbeat tales woven together in Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, each revealing the intricacies of love, loss, and the unpredictable nature of existence, leaving readers to reflect on the profound impact of choices and the paths we walk in search of meaning and connection.
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Deep Girls
$15.95Deep Girls tells stories that defy the conventions of young adult literature. The clichés of fictional relationships are tossed aside, and instead we read about girls whose relationships with their families are like the real relationships readers see in the world around them.
There are stories showing family members at their worst: a girl must stand up against expectations put on her by her parents and boyfriend; a sibling’s assault on a parent drives a young woman to dark thoughts, and admiration for a rule-bending classmate; an ill grandmother is cruel to her daughter.
There are stories about the search for strength: a father and daughter try to survive as a family after a tragedy; a family friend who was victimized by violence returns from a mental hospital; a mother shows her daughter the heart that lies beneath a passive exterior.
And there are stories about young women adjusting to their emerging sexuality (while reluctantly caring for a neighbour’s children, a teen turns her eyes to the kids’ father), and that of their parents (a father and daughter take a trip to a bar, and each turns their attention elsewhere).
Deep Girls is an astonishing collection of stories that are rich in tone and emotional complexity.
Deep Girls tells stories that defy the conventions of YA, sweeping aside the clich?s of life, love and family, giving us stories of girls whose lives mirror the world that young readers see around them.The young women in these stories, on the verge of adulthood, start seeing their parents and families in a new light of vulnerability. We see family members at their worst, we witness the search for strength, and we see girls becoming women as their worlds change around them.