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Kafka’s writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor, and these two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer, which contains an elegy to Langer’s friend and mentor Franz Kafka. Langer and Kafka hailed from the same middle-class, assimilated, Jewish Prague background and shared a mutual interest in Hasidic culture, literature, and Hebrew. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff from the Hebrew brings the fascinating work of Langer — poems as well as an essay on Kafka — to the English-reading public for the first time and sheds light on a hitherto unexplored relationship.
A is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips stories into superscripts. With writing that is lyric, layered and deeply felt, the poems in A is for Acholi unfold maps of history, culture and identity, tracing a route to a present where the poet dreams of writing a world without empire.
A Journey of Spiritual Awakening: Harnessing Your Intuitive Gifts is both a biography and a teaching tool on how you can further your connection with the spirit world. Using her own life as an example, Judy Brown chronicles the difficult, violent journey she has faced. As a child, Judy could see, hear, and sense things that other people couldn’t. But she kept her silence about her gifts. After two disastrous marriages, and desperate to protect her daughters from harm, Judy finally embraced her gifts and moved forward to a new spiritual level. In this book, Judy demonstrates a typical “reading,” from the moment someone enters her space and through the various phases of therapy. Specific case studies help us to understand the depths of our own psychic talents, and we see many examples of people who have been helped by Judy to sort out their inner demons — by using their own “psychic” resources.
Much of what Judy Brown can foresee is based on what each of us conveys by the way we talk, the way we act, the way we live. But Judy’s talent is being able to “read” people, and to sense more deeply than others what the next steps might be.
Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year and is given the task of cleaning out her grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment. In the process of doing so, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can’t trust, a village in Hungary and an artist’s loft in Harlem. A coming-of-age story about hidden pasts and the legacy of trauma and displacement, A Joy To Be Hidden is told with humour and insight. We can never quite forget the title quote — “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found” D. W. Winnicott — and we discover, over the course of the novel, that it applies to everyone.
Jenna Hamilton is a dating coach and the co-owner of a bookstore, with Adam Owens, in the Net Loft on Granville Island in Vancouver. When her best friend, hairdresser Hillary, is a bystander in a car crash that kills her co-worker Bruno, Jenna is there to provide emotional support. But soon, Bruno’s condo is trashed, along with the salon where he used to work with Hillary.
As Jenna tries to make sense of what is happening, she makes some shocking discoveries about Bruno’s life, and realizes the facade he had presented to those around him was an almost complete fabrication. Who was Bruno, really? Did someone intentionally kill him? And what are they after?
In 1938, Tae Kwon Do began at the end of a wicked poker game in a tiny village in a remote corner of what is now North Korea. Today, the martial art is likely the most popular on the planet, an Olympic sport practised by an estimated 50 million students and known for its spectacular kicks. Few people, however, know about its secret and violent past; there are good reasons for the screams…
The Art of Killing: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do is a nonfiction novel that takes readers into the lurid dynasties of two men and their disciples: Choi Hong-Hi, who began the martial art, and his nemesis, Kim Un-Yong, who developed the Olympic style and became one of the most powerful, controversial men in sports. The story follows Choi from the 1938 poker game (where he fights for his life), through high-class geisha houses (where the art is named) and into the Vietnam War (where the martial art evolves into a killing art). Tae Kwon Do became a martial art for the twenty-first century, an art of merciless techniques, indomitable men and justice pumped on steroids.
This book is part biography, part thriller and part memoir; the author, a martial artist and investigative journalist, made the mistake of entering the high-stakes world of Choi and Kim. The work is based on obscure documents, Korean-language books and in-depth interviews with Tae Kwon Do’s pioneers. It is steeped in Confucian values and confused men, high ideals entwined with tragedy — with tips, along the way, on how to kill with your bare hands. The Art of Killing is a wild ride to enlightenment.
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In 1938, Tae Kwon Do began at the end of a wicked poker game in a tiny village in a remote corner of what is now North Korea. Today, the martial art is likely the most popular on the planet, an Olympic sport practised by an estimated 50 million students, and known for its spectacular kicks. Few people, however, know about its secret and violent past; there are good reasons for the screams . . .
A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do takes readers into the lurid dynasties of two men and their disciples: Choi Hong-Hi, who began the martial art, and his nemesis, Kim Un-Yong, who developed the Olympic style and became one of the most powerful, controversial men in sports. The story follows Choi from the 1938 poker game (where he fights for his life), through high-class geisha houses (where the art is named) and into the Vietnam War (where the martial art evolves into a killing art). Tae Kwon Do became a martial art for the 21st century, an art of merciless techniques, indomitable men, and justice pumped on steroids.
This book is part biography, part thriller, and part memoir; the author, a martial artist and investigative journalist, made the mistake of entering the high-stakes world of Choi and Kim and based this narrative on obscure documents, Korean-language books, and in-depth interviews with Tae Kwon Do’s pioneers. It is steeped in Confucian values and confused men, high ideals entwined with tragedy — with tips, along the way, on how to kill with your bare hands. A Killing Art is a wild ride to enlightenment.
The eagerly anticipated updated return of a bestselling martial arts classic
The leaders of Tae Kwon Do, an Olympic sport and one of the world’s most popular martial arts, are fond of saying that their art is ancient and filled with old dynasties and superhuman feats. In fact, Tae Kwon Do is as full of lies as it is powerful techniques. Since its rough beginnings in the Korean military 60 years ago, the art empowered individuals and nations, but its leaders too often hid the painful truths that led to that empowerment — the gangsters, secret-service agents, and dictators who encouraged cheating, corruption, and murder. A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do takes you into the cults, geisha houses, and crime syndicates that made Tae Kwon Do. It shows how, in the end, a few key leaders kept the art clean and turned it into an empowering art for tens of millions of people in more than 150 countries. A Killing Art is part history and part biography — and a wild ride to enlightenment.
This new and revised edition of the bestselling book contains previously unnamed sources and updated chapters.
A Knife in the Sky is Haitian-Québécoise writer Marie-Célie Agnant’s most recent novel. Like most of the author’s oeuvre, the book is preoccupied with colonial imposition and its weight specifically on women. In A Knife in the Sky, Agnant locates the power of resistance in women, and in the pen: the novel’s first narratrix, Mika, is a journalist dangerously engaged in the pursuit of truth during the repressive Duvalier regime, supported by a cast largely made up of other strong women; the second is her granddaughter, a student from Grenada named Junon. Based on the lived history of those who survived the Duvalierists, A Knife in the Sky is brutal, terrifying, and hopeful.
A radiant collection that employs the lyric poem as a tool for scientific and emotional exploration.
Erin Noteboom’s A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen takes exact and exquisite measurement of what carries a voice through illness, grief, loss, and through the failures and triumphs of work and love. Various theories and hypotheses are tested in these poems: sadness is knowledge and science “is only half a turn from love.” Whether Noteboom is examining the life and work of physicist Marie Curie or compressing imagistic gems from plaintive, important questions like “What lasts?”, there is everywhere in these poems a shadow-scratching curiosity, vital research, and an acknowledgement of the long waits in a life between discoveries. An essential marriage between the arts and science, A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen is full of poems that readers will savour long after closing their eyes and raising the vial.
Muriel Duckworth passed away August 22, 2009 in her one hundred and first year. In the weeks that followed memorial services were held in Austin Quebec, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. People from across Canada recognized that her passing marked the end of an era and they wanted to not only remember her but to come together to be a part of her ongoing legacy of love. This book brings together stories from Muriel’s family and close friends from the past dozen years of her life. It is a collection of incredible tales of Muriel’s ability to reach out to people, her humour, her deep affection for her family, her ongoing activism and enduring political feistiness, her views on education, religion, death, war and love. The book is richly illustrated with photographs from Muriel’s later years.
With fresh, understated wisdom, A Life in Pieces explores a woman’s entire life, without ever forgetting the shadow of mortality trailing every one of us.
This often lyrical and always thought-provoking memoir asks questions that confront many of us: What do we know, for sure, about our childhoods? Does a lively imagination enrich a life or blind us to opportunities? What choices shaped the path our lives have followed? In thirty short chapters, Jo-Ann Wallace take us on a journey from girlhood to elderhood, from one conundrum to another, with the crackle of synaptic energy flashing in the gaps — in what isn’t revealed, isn’t told.
The book parachutes us into working-class English Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, into young womanhood in Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then into professional life in Edmonton from the 1980s through the 2000s. “White Swan, Black Swan” delves into childhood games, and how the subconscious power dynamic between a younger and an older sister lets their imaginations fly free of their small shared bedroom. “Melmac” starts with that quintessentially mid-century dinnerware rattling around in an old motorhome as the author ponders the obsessive collecting of objects as a quirky coping strategy, an outlet for the stresses of contemporary working life. “Whimsy” takes us from the classic Jimmy Stewart movie “Harvey,” with its 6 foot 3 1/2 inch rabbit to her own imaginary childhood friend, a Scottie dog, and to a present friend who will not watch any movie based in “whimsy.” What dangers arise, the author wonders, when imaginations go unexamined, and unexercised.
The many disparate pieces of the author’s life are like an intricately worked mosaic, while the title, A Life in Pieces, foreshadows the final chapters that unfold with tenderness and awe in the wake of a cancer diagnosis.
A Life Out of Whack has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos: aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures.
***2023 ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARD – HONOURABLE MENTION***
A unique and engaging perspective of humanity – a journey to wisdom shared through stories of self-awareness, acceptance, and discovery, by acclaimed psychotherapist Dr. Hassan Khalili.
In A Life Spent Listening, Dr. Hassan Khalili reflects on four decades of being a frontline community psychotherapist and shares the wisdom he has learned over the years. By inviting the reader into his own life and the lives of his patients, Dr. Khalili explores the human condition and explains his concept of the grid as a guiding principle in his psychological practice. The book takes us from his experience as a young Iranian immigrant in Newfoundland and Labrador to his role as one of the top psychologists in the province, by way of his adventures hiking Machu Picchu and Mount Kilimanjaro. Dr. Khalili illuminates what it means to seek contentment and how we hold the key to our own happiness.
Winner, Canadian Museums Association’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Award and IPPY Awards Silver Medal (Fine Art)
A Toronto Star Holiday Gift Guide Selection
A Like Vision is a lavish celebration of the legacy of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Canada’s canonical landscape painters. The Group’s depiction of the rugged beauty of the Canadian landscape — from the coastal mountains of British Columbia to the north shore of Lake Superior, the villages of rural Quebec, and the rocky, windswept coves of Newfoundland — charged Canadians to experience their country in a bold new light and changed the face of Canadian art forever. Through their vigorous and expressive painterly style and vibrant colours, the Group of Seven significantly contributed to Canada’s sense of autonomy and identity as a modern state in the aftermath of the First World War.
Featuring three hundred full-colour images, A Like Vision includes a lead essay by Ian A.C. Dejardin, Executive Director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and contributions by a host of artists, curators, and writers. Among them are Indigenous art historian and curator Gerald McMaster, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, novelists David Macfarlane and Jane Urquhart, painters John Hartman and Robert Houle, and Inuk writer Tarralik Duffy.
One hundred years on from the Group’s first exhibition in 1920, A Like Vision is both a chance to review the Group’s legacy and a tribute to these giants of Canadian art and culture.
As if Joe Barley doesn’t have enough on his mind. His job as a part-time instructor at Hambleton College is likely to be eliminated, and his partner, Carole, is expecting their first child. He’s also been assigned to find the identity of a mole in the English Department who is part of a nasty and embarrassing letterwriting exchange in a student newspaper. But the stresses of his job and personal life are compounded by the disappearance of a member of the Hambleton faculty, and Joe begins to hear rumours that the teacher was involved with a drug ring run by the Russian mob.
The long-awaited third instalment in the Joe Barley Mysteries series, A Likely Story showcases the biting humour, engrossing storytelling, and keen eye for the ordinary that have made Eric Wright one of the most beloved crime writers in Canada.