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Showing 2065–2080 of 9481 results
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Dishonour in Camp 133
$16.95Sergeant Neumann and the inmates of Camp 133 are back!
Even thousands of miles from the front lines, locked into a Canadian prisoner-of-war camp at the base of the Canadian Rockies, death isn’t far away. For August Neumann, head of Camp Civil Security and decorated German war hero, this is the reality. Chef Schlipal has been found dead in Mess #3, a knife in his back.
Now it’s up to Neumann to find out what would drive the men of the camp, brothers-in-arms, to turn on each other. He’s learned, of course, that beneath the veneer of duty and honour, the camp is anything but civil.
When the trail of clues ends at the edge of the prison yard, Neumann must consider the crime bigger than the camp. Is someone getting out of the prison? If so, can he follow? If he can’t, he might have to live with the dishonour of Camp 133.
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Dishwasher, The
$22.95WINNER OF THE AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD • NOMINATED FOR CANADA READS • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A NOW MAGAZINE BEST BOOK TO READ FOR SUMMER 2019 • As heard on CBC’s The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright
It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam. Thrust on his first night into a roiling cast of characters all moving with the whirlwind speed of the evening rush, it’s not long before he finds himself in over his head once again. A vivid, magnificent debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden, The Dishwasher plunges us into a world in which everyone depends on each other—for better and for worse.
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Disintegration in Four Parts
$21.95Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity.
“All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal.” With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc Ah-Sen writes about love blooming between two writers belonging to feuding literary movements. Emily Anglin explores an architect’s search for her twin at a rural historic house. Devon Code documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman. And Lee Henderson imagines Dada artist Kurt Schwitters finding unlikely inspiration in a Second World War internment camp in northern Norway.
Wildly different in style and subject matter, these four virtuoso pieces give us a 360-degree view of a philosophical theme that has never felt so urgent.
“Despite the disparity of their subject matter – a Nazi-evading Dadaist detained in Norway, urban and familial estrangements, complicated love amid the avant-garde, the vicissitudes of old age – these brilliantly inventive, delightfully strange stories cling together like four unlikely soulmates, unified by art’s pursuit of coherence through life’s various disintegrations.” —Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall
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Dispatches from Ray’s Planet
$24.95As a child, Claire’s big brother Ray was always bright and inquisitive, but as the two became teenagers, Ray struggled to acquire the social skills that came more easily to others. Claire tried to help, pointing out (after Ray’s many “bloopers”) what he should or shouldn’t have said or done. Ray insisted that he wasn’t the problem–“On my planet…” he would explain, there were no social climbers, no subtle hints or subliminal messages to miss, and the telling of little white lies would be a capital offence. At sixteen, sitting with him in the high school cafeteria, Claire vowed to find Ray’s planet.
After graduation, Ray took a job as a letter carrier with Canada Post, but after thirty-three years on the job he was fired, blew his appeal, and spiralled into a suicidal depression. Claire didn’t know he was in trouble until he reached out to her by email. Thus began a remarkable written correspondence that pulled back the curtain on an inner life Claire couldn’t have imagined. Where in-person interactions plunged him into hot water, Ray’s writing revealed a compassionate, funny, sad man who showed extraordinary insight into his way of navigating the world. Ray was fifty when Claire realized he might have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but by then, having survived without a diagnosis his whole life, Ray was reluctant to have a label pinned on him and resisted Claire’s efforts to fix him by trying, in all sincerity, to make him more like her.
Dispatches from Ray’s Planet draws on Ray and Claire’s correspondence to tell the story of two siblings from two very different planets. There are thousands of Rays in our world. In this collective memoir, Claire and Ray share their journey with the hope that others can also learn that we all perceive the world in different ways, and that “different” does not necessarily mean “wrong.”
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Dispatches from the Occupation
$16.95Somewhere at the core of almost every intellectual discipline is an attempt to explain change – why and how things change, and how we negotiate these transformations. These are among the most ancient of philosophical questions. In this collection of essays, award-winning poet Stephen Collis investigates how the Occupy movement grapples with these questions as it once again takes up the cause of social, economic and political change.
Dispatches from the Occupation opens with a meditation on the Occupy movement and its place in the history of recent social movements. Strategies, tactics and the experiments with participatory democracy and direct action are carefully parsed and explained. How a movement for social, economic and political change emerges, and how it might be sustained, are at the heart of this exploration.
Comprising the second section of the book is a series of “dispatches” from the day-to-day unfolding of the occupation in Vancouver’s city centre as the author witnessed it – and participated in it – first hand: short manifestos, theoretical musings and utopian proposals. The global Occupy movement has only just begun, and as such this book presents an important first report from the frontlines.
Finally, Dispatches from the Occupation closes with a reflection on the city of Rome, written in the shadows of the Pantheon (the oldest continually-in-use building in the world). In something of a long prose-poem, Collis traces the trope of Rome as the “eternal (unchanging?) city,” from its imperial past (as one of the “cradles of civilization”) to the rebirth of Roman republicanism during the French Revolution and the era of modern social movements – right up to the explosive riots of October 2011. Woven throughout is the story of the idea of change as it moves through intellectual history.
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Disquieting
$20.00How do our bodies speak for us when words don?t suffice? How can we make ourselves understood when what we have to say is inarticulable?
In Disquieting, Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to ?turn away,? or reject the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and Neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.
Disquieting: Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.
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Dissonance Engine
$20.00Dissonance Engine is an exploration of time, cognition and loss; the intersection of dream and alternate reality amidst myriad systems of control. The collection probes these themes through a multitude of forms including prose poems, palindromes, fictional journal entries, a faux manifesto, and collage poems.
A literary Necker cube, the structure of this multilayered work reflects its subjects; anamorphic transformation on paper. Amidst poems about loss, melancholy, love, connection, longing and the natural world, Dowker scours the dissonance engine of the media spectacle, to stare into gnostic estrangement and question the “time-sensitive material” of language.
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Distantly Related to Freud
$21.00It’s Montreal, 1953, and eight-year-old Ellen, an only child prone to daydreaming, and her mother, a woman who believes in the promise of fresh starts, have moved into a large house on the flanks of Mt. Royal. To make ends meet, Ellen’s mother takes in a group of refugees from Central Europe, whose erratic behaviour and dark view of human nature captivate the young girl’s imagination. Ellen sees the refugees as a potential source of valuable information about her own background, of which she has heard little, except for a few stories about a lost golden civilization and the family’s distant connection to Sigmund Freud. The refugees soon leave to be replaced by Aunt Celia, a woman whose anxiety meter is permanently stuck at danger, and Ellen’s new stepfather, Dr. Henryk Steiner, whose years in the Soviet Union have earned him the title of “Playboy of the Communist World”.
While the adults wrangle with each other and the fallout from their past lives, Ellen sets her sights on exploring the brave new world of “America,” and on becoming a teenage femme fatale. Her quest takes her to Crescent Bay, Long Island, and into the placid lives of her American cousins and their friends. Supporting her along the way is her best friend Lydia, a fellow rebel whose mother, Magda, sets off a series of events that will alter the course of the two girls’ lives.
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Distillo
$19.95In her debut collection, Basma Kavanagh engages the natural world and seeks to explore our relationship to it. Hers is a poetics of description which subverts scientific observation and the authoritative language of nomenclature for mythopoetic ends. In the opening section (“Moisture”), precipitation is dissected and categorized, but ultimately the deluge of “rain making rain, /making rain” overwhelms controlled interrogation and undulating imagery saturates everything. Nomenclature reappears elsewhere in the book, attempting to anchor object poems about west-coast flora and faunasalmon, elk, bear, bigleaf maple, bog myrtlewhich otherwise drift toward the mythworld and gesture in the direction of the ethereal and the totemic. Understanding that language can be most precise when it harbours ambiguity and surprise, Kavanagh experiments with pattern poems and the layering of multiple voices in her attempt to express “a fullness /an absence /of self.” This is a book which turns over rocks and looks under them in search of truth in its soft, damp hiding places, poems which instruct us to “[d]escend. Blend /your knowing with the breath of earth”.
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Distinct Alien Race
$29.95In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England’s burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette’s groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday’s news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.
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Disturbances of Progress
$16.95If the expression ‘Two steps forward, one step back’ describes the conventional attitude toward hesitation and uncertainty, Disturbances of Progress takes those steps and turns them into a dance.
In an intimate and intensely personal manner, Lise Downe’s third major collection of poetry documents the sorts of interruptions that plague the lives of artists and writers. Yet the poems themselves emerge as testament to the triumphof the artistic process over circumstance.
As the poet mulls over the uncertainty of her own life’s trajectory, she deftly weaves together the imagery of searching and the vagaries of language into a whole cloth. Downe’s writing uses the qualities of colloquial speech – hesitation, interjection, digression and repetition – to convey the experience of writing as an unforseen progression. Favouring intuitive progress over linear intention, these vivid, painterly poems reflectthe dynamic between the known and the unknown.
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Disturbing the Buddha
$20.00A beloved poet explores why life is so rich, even at the worst of times.
Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster’s fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck–the “three-leaf clovers” so much more plentiful than the four.
Dempster’s wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece’s order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.
Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles’ heel and trusting us to do likewise.
…Heaven
is a still life in a Motel Six
non-smoker. … Tonight
you’ll sleep in a clearing
that won’t be there come dawn. (from “Lao-Tzu”)“Few if any poets encompass the range, the dynamism, and the spectrum of emotional colours Barry Dempster does…” –Canadian Authors Association Chalmers Award Jury Citation
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Diversion
$18.95New poems from one of Canada’s best-known poets
Where most poetry seeks contemplative quiet, as in Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Diversion asks: What happens to poetry if one stops trying to block the incoming cacophony and instead embraces the multiple streams of data that bombard the contemporary thought process? What poetry comes from the multitude of channels — ambient office radio, TVs at the gym, rampant social media alerts, eavesdropped conversations within crowds, 24-hour-news cycles, texts, telephone and voicemail, email pings — that constantly interrupt the brain from cogent thought? The result is alternately dark and hilarious, straddling the line between aphorism and poetry and creating an atmospheric narrative through connections that form between seemingly unassociated lines. For better or worse, what used to be stream-of-consciousness is now stream-of-collective-unconsciousness.
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Divide and Rule
$17.95In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in partially explaining, but, in the end, communication and subterfuge are inseparable – must, so to speak, co-exist.
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Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias
$19.95The one thing everyone knows is that we’re all going to die. Which means our loved ones are going to die. So how can we prepare for, experience, and honour their deaths? And does that look different if we have to make the decision to end their lives for them if they’re suffering? Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias is one woman’s story that offers a space for communal grieving through a celebration of life.
Traced by the historic world events that coincide with her memories of independence and immigration, Beatriz reflects on how she spent over a decade caring for her mother—the one person she promised she’d be there for all the way until the end—as she lost her more and more to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately had to make the tough call to end her mother’s pain.
A meditation full of light that doesn’t shy away from fear of the unknown, Beatriz’s narrative comes from a vulnerable and recognizable place of love that will invite our memories and choices in to heal.
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Divine Realms
$17.95Divine Realms is an anthology that looks at spiritual questions through the medium of science fiction and fantasy. This is an eclectic lot, and the main theme is faith– or lack thereof. The stories are written by some of Canada’s best and up-and-coming writers.