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Showing 2145–2160 of 9492 results
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Down Dangerous Passes Road
$15.95Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be married later in the day and it is this occasion that has brought the three of them together. Ambrose is losing his lover to AIDS. Victor, the eldest, has just left his second failed marriage.
They have never really spoken with each other because they all have their own individual secrets to hide and because they share an ambivalence about the death of their father. Could they have prevented it? Would they have wanted to save the town drunk, dreamer, poet, fisherman, the man who embarrassed them in front of their friends and locked them in the sentimental prison of his poems? Are they ready, finally, to reveal themselves to each other and move on with their lives? Can they survive this unsparing encounter with their own manhood?
In voices that interweave, alternate and play off one another with the exquisite lyricism of chamber music, the brothers reveal themselves as trapped by their father’s inability to let his boys grow up and their own inability to accept him as an adult.
Cast of three men.
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down from heaven
$16.95A virus has plagued the city and residents are quarantined. Curfews have been imposed and rumours of government corruption abound. Bureaucratic red tape is creating a food crisis. Laurel and her parents are imprisoned in the basement of their stately home, relying on the generosity of their former gardener, Cheater, for information and supplies. While Laurel and her family struggle just to survive, Cheater becomes intoxicated with his new-found power as a member of the Security and Surveillance police. Laurel must act as go-between if she is to liberate her family from their basement cell, and enters the dark and convoluted world of Cheater, discovering in the process startling revelations about herself, politics, art, violence, and the man they have become dependent upon.
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Down in the Ground
$20.00Dying is not merely the domain of the dead; it is a shared experience. What remains after someone has passed are the memories, that reflections of the past and those who have passed, and the challenges everyone faces in the wake of loss. Down in the Ground is a collection of short, flash fiction stories that examine the ways in which individuals deal with grief and loss, not as morbid reactions but as attempts to understand what they are experiencing. From the cradle to the grave, Down in the Ground is a study in the complex creativity we use to address grief and to challenge death so that life can triumph.
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Down Inside
$24.95A compelling personal memoir and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic indifference and agenda-driven government policies.
In his thirty years in the Canadian prison system, Robert Clark rose from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada’s most dangerous and notorious prisoners, including Paul Bernardo and Tyrone Conn. He dealt with escapes, lockdowns, prisoner murders, prisoner suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes. He has managed cellblocks, been a parole officer, and investigated staff corruption.
Clark takes readers down inside a range of prisons, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for mentally ill prisoners and the notorious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. In Down Inside, he challenges head-on the popular belief that a “tough-on-crime” approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation. Wading into the controversy about long-term solitary confinement, Clark draws from his own experience managing solitary-confinement units to continue the discussion begun by the headline-making Ashley Smith case and to join the chorus of voices calling for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.
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Down Sterling Road
$21.95Nominated for an Alberta Book Award.
Time you had a haircut. Look like a mop.
Not that skinny.
Skin and bloody bone, boy.
Jacob breaks the point of his pencil but makes it look like an accident. And away Dad goes out the door and thump thump down the stairs.
Jacob eyes the hole at the end of his pencil. Listens till he can’t hear the Torino anymore. Crawls under the covers. Hopes the rest of December comes and goes like a heartbeat.Eleven-year-old Jacob McKnight doesn’t like running. He doesn’t like the hills, the cold wind, the slushy electrolyte drinks, the interval training. He doesn’t like the way his dad is always pushing him: harder, faster, what’s wrong with you, boy? But mostly he doesn’t like the way it gives him time to think about the accident that shattered his brother’s body and his parents’ marriage.
Jacob would rather be drawing than running. He likes the Anatomy Colouring Book his dad gave him, and he likes how it helps him to better draw superheroes, with their unbreakable bodies. He likes, too, how drawing makes him forget about how much he misses his mum, about how hard his dad works to pay for their tiny apartment and secondhand clothes, about the pitying whispers that follow them around Glanisberg.
Down Sterling Road parses the anatomy of childhood with wisdom, wit and wonder; it’s one of the most charismatic books you’ll read all year.
‘Down Sterling Road lopes into the periscope of Canadian literature, strides through the barking back alleys of small-town childhood, drifts like a leaf over the skin of memory. Adrian Michael Kelly has captured the bittersweet ache of growing pains and growing up, of adolescent loss and daydream and rage. This dazzling bildungsroman fractures paternity and anatomy and necromancy to become an exquisite marathon of filial love and acceptance.’
— Aritha van Herk
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Down the Road to Eternity
$19.95Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Compiled of selected fiction from Sick Pigeon (1991), Raw Material (1993), Altered Statements (1995), Word of Mouth (1996), What’s True, Darling (1997), Darwin Alone in the Universe (2003) and The Breakdown So Far (2007), it includes her complete new suite of 18 stories, The North Pole, where our individual existence is bludgeoned by the threat of “end times”—climate change, species extinction, pandemics and really bad politics. Each of these stories is an ongoing instance of the author’s attempt at understanding language ironically, a search for the strikingly sublime in the awesomely absurd.
Objective reality in our culture has become a corporate performance of make-believe, and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our private lives often triggers uncontrollable tragi-comic effects in Farrant’s characters—a vacuous lethargy and/or a destructive violence they act out in a context of the most excruciatingly bright banalities imaginable.
Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humour, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold the popular media now has on the public’s imagination. Yet as in all such relentlessly absurdist dystopian social parodies, there resides behind each of these brief entertainments a stifled scream for help, a trapped yearning for the awe and wonder of what we have become estranged from, an arrested lust for meaning.
Unsparing in her critique of the branded New Age syncretism our global culture has substituted for authentic human emotion and particular belief, these hilariously off-side stories navigate Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving construction of reality in our media and information age.
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Down The Tube
$13.95A couch potato’s downward spiral. Imagine yourself at home on your couch, contractually obligated to remain in front of your satellite-rigged television for a period of seven days, at the end of which you will produce a funny but penetrating account of your journey — a virtual one — through the strange and culturally revealing landscape of the 200-channel universe. Bill Brownstein did just that and Down the Tube is his hilarious survival guide, complete with the expert testimony of a psychologist who kept tabs on the couch potato’s mental state. The author of the riotous Sex Carnival charts his week on the couch in this latest odyssey with a cynical eye and relentless wit. Brownstein meditates on such important questions as: Should Pamela Anderson sue the doctor who botched her breast reduction? Are those people on Springer for real? Hey, do they still play reruns of The Waltons? Nobody is immune to Brownstein’s wry wit, not even big-name celebrities like Oprah, Regis, and Jerry Seinfeld.
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Down Time
$16.95Down Time proposes a social self that is able to recognize the ironies and restrictions we live in without returning to a garrison mentality.
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Down to Bowring’s
$19.95Arriving in St. John’s in the middle of the Great Depression, Derrick Bowring discovered an island whose vistas and people would capture his heart. Sent to Newfoundland to join Bowring Brothers Ltd. and learn the retail end of the family business, his work with the company would take him into logging communities, outports and up to the ice fields. His memoir offers a mercantile history of St. John’s in the mid-twentieth century providing stories of life on Water Street during economic depression, a world war, Confederation and the business management shifts of the 1960s. His memoir is punctuated with colourful stories of the people he encountered such as Sealing Captain Al Blackwood, Premier Joey Smallwood and King George VI. He even reveals a little-known fact about Confederation and the Princes of Water Street.
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Downed Hearts
$18.95Ten days after an air-sea disaster, an island fisherman struggles to recover from the aftermath of his participation in the rescue-turned-recovery operation of a downed jetliner. Aaron’s mental fragility is compounded by his wife’s recent decision to take their twelve-year-old special needs son to live off-island so that he will get better schooling. Aaron, determined to regain his equilibrium, boards his small boat and heads out to where he feels most at peace, on the ocean. When he returns to shore hours later with a young mute woman, the question foremost in everyone’s mind is, “Who is she?” But more concerning to Aaron’s mother is whether Aaron might really believe he has found a lone survivor. Downed Hearts is a play that delves into the possibility that healing sometimes comes to us in mysterious ways.
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DOWNVERSE
$16.95In this quick-witted collection of poems, Nikki Reimer mines the language of new media – hashtags, YouTube comments, Twitter updates – to defamiliarize the very substance of modern life: the Ingram CoreSource of media-enforced ideals that barrage our newsfeeds, daily commutes to #work, and (mostly online) excursions to the (Apple) store. #nuffsaid
DOWNVERSE soothes the oversaturated reader. A natural translator, Reimer writes for anyone who has felt overwhelmed by the phrase “never read the comments.” Reimer has read all of the comments; paying close attention to musicality and her own poetic process, she guides found text into whiplike stanzas with original typos intact.
Conscious of its birthplace, DOWNVERSE crafts both an ode to and an elegy for Vancouver’s middle-class, Gen-Y, millennial angst, and even Vancouver itself – not the physical place, but rather the idea of #Vancouver, presented through images plastered over billboards and stamped into Special Edition footwear. In its shifty way, Reimer’s text alternates between the voices of Vancouver’s youth- and consumer-driven populace, asking the question, “What happens when The Market is the Way, the Truth, and the Life?” -
Downward This Dog
$22.95These sardonic, wry, and sometimes playful stories, set in Toronto and the Indian subcontinent, describe the lives of people caught in diverse situations characterized by their recent unsettled, alien status. A disgruntled yoga teacher; an ardent epistolarian; a school custodian who has lost a winning lottery ticket; a young woman whose dentist may be touching her inappropriately; a disillusioned retiree obsessed by food; a chef dreaming of a chain of restaurants; a man who has turned away from religious fundamentalism–these and others find sustenance and exploitation, love and disillusion, and sheer luck as they attempt to locate meaning and weave historical order within their larger universe.
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Dowry of Education, The
$16.95In The Dowry of Education, Corrado Paina offers readers a rich representation of the many elements that comprise an adult education: from the perceptions of the world as a three year old to the drug induced visions of a junkie, to the lessons of love learned from a difficult, but successful marriage. In the poem, ‘Tonight I am the State,’ Paina deftly mixes the personal with the political in a moving exploration of the psychological distortions of life in Cuba under the embargo.
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Dr. Bethune’s Children
$18.95Xue Yiwei’s life has been marked by that of the legendary Montreal surgeon Norman Bethune, who died in China in the cause of Communism. Like other Chinese of his generation ? the generation that has turned China into the world power it is today ? Xue Yiwei was inspired by Dr. Bethune’s example during the Cultural Revolution. But unlike his peers, he went to the lengths of moving to Montreal, where he has lived for sixteen years as a writer acclaimed in China and ? until now ? unknown in Canada. This subversive novel is the story that only he could write.
Dr. Bethune’s Children, which is banned in China (it is available only in a Chinese language version published in Taiwan), focuses on individual lives marked by some of the traumatic events of recent decades that have been veiled by official secrecy. In showing us the effects of the distress and repression that have marked his whole generation, Xue Yiwei unveils the human heart. -
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall
$18.95Dr. Edith Vane, scholar of English literature, is contentedly ensconced at the University of Inivea. Her dissertation on pioneer housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers is about to be published, and her job’s finally safe, if she only can fill out her AAO properly. She’s a little anxious, but a new floral blouse and her therapist’s repeated assurance that she is the architect of her own life should fix that. All should be well, really. Except for her broken washing machine, her fickle new girlfriend, her missing friend Coral, her backstabbing fellow professors, a cutthroat new dean – and the fact that the sentient and malevolent Crawley Hall has decided it wants them all out, and the hall and its hellish hares will stop at nothing to get rid of them.
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Dr. Joe and What You Didn’t Know
$22.95The mythbuster and bestselling popular science author of A Grain of Salt tackles questions that show the scientific underpinnings of our culture
“A book with an incredibly high ‘Did you know that. . . ?’ quotient . . . Completely captivating.” — New Brunswick Reader
Dr. Joe & What You Didn’t Know acts as both the source and satiation of scientific curiosity through a series of 177 chemistry-related questions and answers designed to both inform and entertain. From the esoteric to the everyday, the topics Dr. Joe Schwarcz tackles range from Beethoven’s connection to plumbing to why rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs.
How did a sheep, a duck, and a rooster usher in the age of air travel? What does Miss Piggy have to do with the World Cup? And is there really any danger in eating green potatoes? The answers to these whimsical questions and more are revealed in this collection in an accessible scientific fashion.
“Only Dr. Joe can turn the world’s most fascinating questions into a compelling journey through the great scientific mysteries of everyday life.” — Paul Lewis, former president and general manager, Discovery Channel