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All Books in this Collection
Showing 2049–2064 of 9492 results
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Digsite
$18.95Digsite draws on Nicholson’s experience working in the Alberta oil sands and arboreal forest, taking an archaeological lens to its subject, and in this way, reimagines tens of thousands of years of human existence. These poems grow from a schism between the current place of living and the ones in which we are pulled back to, in particular, the places we no longer occupy.Nicholson’s language draws on his archaeological and fieldwork background as he burrows and grinds the places we have lost, consistently underpinned by the grief that must accompany such a fervent exploration. In these discoveries, Nicholson presents us with the material remains of our own abandonment, of loss and acceptance, and ultimately leaves us with more questions than when we began.
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Dilettantes, The
$21.95The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how—sloppily.
Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak‘s editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly indifferent student body. But trouble looms large when a big-money free daily comes to the west-coast campus, threatening to swallow what remains of their readership whole.
It’ll take the scoop of a lifetime to save their beloved campus rag. An exposé about the mysterious filmed-on-campus viral video? Some good old-fashioned libel? Or what about that fallen Hollywood star, the one who’s just announced he’s returning to Simon Fraser University to finish his degree?
With savage wit, intoxicating energy, and a fine-tuned ear for the absurd, Michael Hingston drags the campus novel, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
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Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone
$24.95?In the chronicles of television’s history, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone is considered by far the medium’s quintessential creation. The CBS series that debuted in 1959 and aired for 156 episodes offered black-and-white morality plays both terrifying and poignant. Each week the ominous voice and brilliant mind of writer Serling took audiences on a trip through his surrealist realm of fantasy and science fiction, beyond the boundaries of imagination.
Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone is a visually stunning backstage glimpse through time and space, into the history and making of the Twilight Zone. Author Stewart T. Stanyard, creator of The Twilight Zone Archives online, invites readers to explore a portion of the archives collection: over 300 original behind-the-scenes production stills taken during the filming of the show. Accompanied by insightful captions, the book includes rare documents and interviews with 40 producers, directors, writers, and actors who worked on the series, such as Dennis Weaver, Bill Murray, Shelly Berman, Earl Holliman, and Earl Hamner, Jr. The book also features candid interviews with Serling’s wife Carol, brother and writer Robert, and Serling’s influential teacher Helen Foley. Aside from five informative and analytical chapters by the author, it features tribute essays by several Hollywood personalities, including Rush drummer Neil Peart, Simpsons producer Dana Gould, and Star Trek: Next Generation writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe.
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Dinner on Mars
$24.95“This culinary cosmic outing is as creative as it is informative.” — STARRED review, Publishers WeeklyFrom Impossible Burgers to lab-made sushi, two witty, plugged-in food scientists explore leading-edge AgTech for the answer to feeding a settlement on Mars — and 9 billion Earthlings tooFeeding a Martian is one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture. Will a Red Planet menu involve cheese and ice cream made from vats of fermented yeast? Will medicine cabinets overflow with pharmaceuticals created from engineered barley grown using geothermal energy? Will the protein of choice feature a chicken breast grown in a lab? Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out “what’s for dinner on Mars” is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home.For futurists, sci-fi geeks, tech nuts, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of food, Dinner on Mars puts sustainability and adaptability on the menu in the face of our climate crisis.
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Diplomacy
$16.95Sharing a title with Henry Kissinger’s infamous book, Tim Carlson’s play Diplomacy is a graphic, conflict-fuelled drama with moments of heartbreak and dark humour—a reflection on the international themes that have come to define our contemporary world. Nominally about Canada and America’s active military involvement in the Middle East’s many theatres of war, it scrutinizes the part the media plays in manufacturing our private reactions to foreign policy—how the new phenomenon of “embedded journalism” has become complicit in making everything personal, political.
Roy deserted the US Army during the Vietnam War to become a historian specializing in Canadian diplomacy. His Vietnamese-born wife, Thu Van, has flashbacks to the “shock and awe” she experienced as a girl, while the new armed conflicts heat up in the Middle East where their daughter, An, serves as a Canadian diplomat in Damascus. Roy’s best friend Sinclair is an ambitious, possibly unprincipled, newsman. His interest and obvious involvement in Thu Van’s public self-immolation makes him decidedly suspect. “We don’t need a lot of martyrs but we need a few,” argues Thu Van in Sinclair’s videotape of her suicide statement.
Following the suicide protest of Thu Van, Roy’s principles are shaken: once believing his desertion was an honourable reaction to a dishonourable war, he now believes he was misguided. His grief, fury, fear and despair keep this play on its razor’s edge.
Like diplomacy itself, perhaps none of Carlson’s characters are new. But his dramatization of how our personal lives are increasingly shaped by what used to be called “public affairs” is compelling—the usefulness (or uselessness) of martyrdom certainly remains an overwhelmingly contemporary question.
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Dipped in Shadow
$12.95Claire Harris is one of Canada’s most powerful poets. Dipped in Shadow shows her at her strongest: the book’s five poems making hard-hitting statements about women and their children.
“O what are you thinking my sisters,” the book’s foreword, draws women of all races together in the fundamental facts of female life: fear for themselves and fear for their children. In “Night Dances,” a frightening story of sexual and physical abuse, knife-sharp language and experimental form expand words far beyond their usual connotations. “Sister (Y)our Manchild” reminds women that the cruellest soldiers in the most vicious wars are their babies; they have nurtured evil in their beautiful children. “This Fierce Body” reviews the life of a young man dying of AIDS as friends watch at his bedside. Experimental form and language make “Woeman Womb Prisoned,” a harrowing evocation of a teenager in childbirth, both moving and provocative.
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Direct and Devious Ways
$10.95Direct and Devious Ways is Katharine Beeman’s first book of poetry. In this collection, we are introduced to a mature poet who is politically aware rather than politically correct. She is at ease with the body sensual and the body politic.
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Director’s Cut
$29.95From Weekend at Bernie’s to First Blood and Law & Order: SVU, the legendary director recounts his journey and wide-ranging career in this intimate memoir . . . with a foreword by Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning actress Mariska Hargitay
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“It is a fascinating, startling thing to look over the films Ted has made and realize that he never met a genre he couldn’t conquer.” — Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award-winning actor
“It is for such insights into the director’s craft that Ted Kotcheff’s digressive, sometimes salty Director’s Cut: My Life in Film is a book to be valued . . . a bounty of no-nonsense homiletics on the duty of the director and regular injections of salacious gossip.” — Film Comment
Born to immigrant parents and raised in the slums of Toronto during the Depression, Ted Kotcheff learned storytelling on the streets before taking a stagehand job at CBC Television. Kotcheff went on to direct some of the greatest films of the freewheeling 1970s, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Wake in Fright, and North Dallas Forty.
After directing the 1980s blockbusters First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s, Kotcheff helped produce the groundbreaking TV show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. During his career, he was declared a communist by the U.S. government, banned from the Royal Albert Hall in London, and coped with assassination threats on one of his lead actors.
With his seminal films enjoying a critical renaissance, including praise from Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave, Kotcheff now turns the lens on himself. Director’s Cut is not just a memoir, but a close-up on life and craft, with stories of his long friendship with Mordecai Richler and working with stars like Sylvester Stallone, James Mason, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Hackman, Jane Fonda, and Richard Dreyfuss, as well as advice on how to survive the slings and arrows of Hollywood.
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Dirt of Ages
$18.95Dirt of Ages is the highly anticipated second book of poetry by Gillian Wigmore, whose debut collection soft geography (2007) captured the ReLit Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize.
In Dirt of Ages, everything meets in “the perfect v” of the valley: where rivers meet in an “exchange between sky and water,” where rural runs into urban,”where art and work meet,””the rush and rattle,” where fog and smog converge as “foetid fall inversions,” and where “two chafe so close together.”
Wigmore expands both her curiosity and command as a poet from personal observations and relationships with wilderness to a universal, societal energy that flows through time, place and every one of us.”Notions of deeper rivers” do not reveal a romanticized “true north” but rather a meth dealer accidentally entreating a mother with child on the streets of a pulp-mill town, and “burnedout buildings that are a calling card of the heart’s.”
Among so many other interstices, human interaction with our natural environment is expressed as “rotten lumber stacked and waiting in the woodlot floodplain” and “our wallets open, hoping wealth / will rain down after winter,” while the “the earthen hum of bugs at work” goes on: the dirt of ages.
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Dirtbags
$20.00Longlisted for the ReLit Award
Editor’s Pick, Vancouver Sun
Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning – with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience.
We witness a shifting morality as Spider moves through chaos and anarchy, often of her own choosing, with no certainty of truth besides what is found in brief encounters. She soaks up the world around her, getting swept up in an accelerated scene of punk music, partying, booze and drugs, but she is forever dogged by a nagging question from her past: “When everything in your life is fleeting, what do you hold onto?”
Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition.
This is Teresa McWhirter’s follow-up novel to Some Girls Do.
Praise for Dirtbags:
“Some of our most treasured stories are rooted in the present, and the last novel in hand for this review is relentlessly contemporary. Teresa McWhirter’s very impressive second novel, Dirtbags, is a coming-of-age novel set in 21st-century Vancouver. McWhirter is a mistress of momentum. Her energetic account of her female protagonist’s love life and adventures with drugs and drunkenness in Vancouver’s Eastside punk scene is a wonderful sequel to her first book, Some Girls Do. Her descriptions are deft, her prose clear and energetic. We will hear great things from this promising West Coast writer, and Dirtbags will take its place in any sensibly constructed future Canadian canon. This is a great book and a funny, moving and entertaining read.”
The Globe and Mail
“McWhirter does a good job of accurately reflecting some larger social problems in Vancouver. The first line of the book, Vancouver is a place that can kill people with loneliness. Cold, grey rocks break up beaches. It is a city full of powders. A city filled with rain,’ encapsulates this city for me. Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and is also one of the darkest, dampest and coldest. … The subject matter may make some people uncomfortable, but it’s a good story with well developed characters. … if you are looking for a good read I recommend Dirtbags. It’s gripping, real, and is very hard to put down once you start reading it.”
Grab News: Muse News from Vancouver
“This affecting and affectionate story of a soft-spoken punk’s struggle to find something to believe in follows Spider Rose McKenzie as she navigates through the treacherous waters of her early 20s. McWhirter sketches vivid portraits of people on the periphery, from punk-rock burnouts on Vancouver’s East End to broken mill workers in Spider’s B.C. Interior hometown. Her clear, emotionally detached voice serves the story superbly, refusing to pass judgment even as the character’s actions lead them to ruin. This search for beauty amid chaos and anarchy resonates long after the last page is turned.”
Fast Forward Weekly
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Dirty Birds
$22.95***IPPY: INDEPENDENT VOICE AWARD – WINNER***
***LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2021***
***APMA BEST ATLANTIC PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD: WINNER***
***STEPHEN LEACOCK MEADAL FOR HUMOUR: SHORTLIST***
***THOMAS RADDALL ATLANTIC FICTION AWARD: SHORTLIST***
***MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION: SHORTLIST***
***FOREWORD INDIES HUMOUR AWARD: SILVER***
***THE GLOBE AND MAIL SUMMER’S HOTTEST READS***
***2021 RELIT AWARD: LONG SHORTLIST***
In late 2008, as the world’s economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario – not to be confused with Milton, Ontario – leaves his parents’ basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless twenty-something Millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah – Leonard Cohen. Hilariously ironic and irreverent, in Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray generates a quest novel for the twenty-first century—a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller—where a hero’s greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime, and sleeping in all day.
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Dirty Sweet
$28.95In the middle of the afternoon on a busy downtown Toronto street a man is shot in the head behind the wheel of his SUV. The killer drives away before the light changes. It could be road rage, or it could be a random act of violence.
It could be, but it isn’t. What it is, is opportunity. For everyone involved.
The witness, Roxanne Keyes, a real estate agent trying desperately to lease out space in unwanted office space, recognizes the killer — a man who had once looked to rent with her. She figures with this kind of leverage he’ll be a lot more interested now. Except he’s Boris Suliemanov, a Russian mobster in the strip club business, who’s now busy taking out competitors and expanding into drugs and grand theft auto. Then there’s Vince Fournier, a cool guy with a mysterious past who might be able to help Roxanne deal with Boris if he gets what he wants. He rents space in her building for his internet porn company, but he’s looking for a little more from her. And finally, the homicide squad cops can see their own opportunities in the brazen, daytime murder. In the tradition of Elmore Leonard and Christopher Brookmyre, Dirty Sweet is a fast-paced crime story following each character to a surprising end.
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Dirty Sweet
$14.95In the middle of the afternoon on a busy downtown Toronto street a man is shot in the head behind the wheel of his SUV. The killer drives away before the light changes. It could be road rage, or it could be a random act of violence.
It could be, but it isn’t. What it is, is opportunity. For everyone involved.
In the tradition of Elmore Leonard and Christopher Brookmyre, Dirty Sweet is a fast-paced crime story following each character to a surprising end.
“McFetridge is an author to watch. He has a great eye for detail, and Toronto has never looked seedier.” — Globe and Mail
“Dirty Sweet is an amusingly sordid tale that features amusingly sordid people . . . If more people wrote the kind of clean-as-a-whistle, no-fat prose McFetridge does, this reviewer would finish a lot more of their books.” — National Post
“The dubious fun is in the dialogue and details of a very entertaining and libidinous local debut.” — Toronto Star
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Dirty White Collar
$19.95A fast-paced, shocking legal thriller. The world of international crime, drugs, and money laundering forms the backdrop to Dirty White Collar, a thriller that begins in a medium-security prison near Toronto and ends in Providenciales, the exotic Caribbean hideaway as famous for its secretive offshore financial institutions as its spectacular beaches. Jerome Wyndham, a prominent criminal lawyer, has traded his profession, reputation, marriage, and friends for a relentless refusal to believe that his only daughter was a drug addict who died of a self-administered overdose. His obsession lands him in prison, where he meets Dirk Mueller, a Colombian drug lord whose lengthy sentence has separated him from his family. In their isolation, the two men, so disparate in background and outlook, forge a relationship rooted in the love of their children. With the unwitting assistance of Adam Portland, the police officer who arrested Wyndham, and Buddy Ladner, a reporter who has been following Jerome’s story, Jerome finds himself back on the street with Dirk. As their well laid plans to resolve their personal mysteries unravel in death, deceit, denial, and desecration, Jerome begins to question the obsessions that have driven his life — until the thrilling climax gives them renewed meaning.
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Disappointment Island
$18.95In several long sequences of precise lyrics, small songs and “narrowed prayers,” Reid casts a paleontologist’s eye on the accumulations of everyday life, the remains of the near and distant past. Objects, those accretions of memory, are taken down from the shelving and dusted off by a mind hungry for meaning and transcendence. This is a poetry that asks the big questions: What survives, and what may be revealed by listening to the “erotic murmur of material things?” In so many of these moving poems, time is telescoped and small human figures are set against a stark backdrop of barrens, desert places, stones and “an excess of bones.” There are meditations on the arrogance of seeking such emptiness, and also on the various places and provisional dwellings we come to call home: a cabin fastened into place “by sticking the chimney into the mist,” a crumbling Cuban love hotel and “the faintly luminous tents that have gathered like so many eyes / around the fire in the desert…” Here be wonders.
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Disarmament
$18.95John Terpstra’s Disarmament is a new collection of poems from one of Canada’s great literary craftsmen. Ranging over difficult terrain, from Port-au-Prince to the Iroquois Bar, Terpstra is always ablethrough keen observation and playful, thoughtful use of languageto locate the moral centre. Terpstra’s poems open and close distancesbetween the present and the past, parent and child, one country and another, the old world and the new, teacher and student, presence and absence, the human and the divine.
Finalist for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.