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Showing 2145–2160 of 9481 results
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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
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Dragging Mason County
$24.99“A timely tale of friendship, self-acceptance, and the importance of proper contouring.”—Kevin Christopher Snipes, author of Milo and Marcos at the End of the World
A laugh-out-loud YA debut that examines the realities of small-town queer life and celebrates the transformative power of drag—perfect for fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pumpkin.
Peter Thompkin needs a public image overhaul. After a tense confrontation with one of the few other queer kids in his small-town high school, rumors about him are becoming more elaborate by the day. Meanwhile, his best friend Alan (aka teen drag queen Aggie Culture) is throwing Mason County’s debut Drag Extravaganza. Although Peter is a self-described “dragnostic,” he decides to help produce the show, hoping to prove that he isn’t a self-hating gay. In the process, he finds himself facing down angry guard dogs, angrier bigots, and a very high-strung church lady. As backlash grows, Peter begins to wonder whether he’s setting fire to his already damaged reputation and if his friendship with Alan will survive past curtain call.
At turns touching, sharply funny, and a little absurd, Dragging Mason County explores the pains and pleasures of queer community through one teen’s journey to self-acceptance.
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Dragging Mason County
$18.99“A timely tale of friendship, self-acceptance, and the importance of proper contouring.”—Kevin Christopher Snipes, author of Milo and Marcos at the End of the World
A laugh-out-loud YA debut that examines the realities of small-town queer life and celebrates the transformative power of drag—perfect for fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pumpkin.
Peter Thompkin needs a public image overhaul. After a tense confrontation with one of the few other queer kids in his small-town high school, rumors about him are becoming more elaborate by the day. Meanwhile, his best friend Alan (aka teen drag queen Aggie Culture) is throwing Mason County’s debut Drag Extravaganza. Although Peter is a self-described “dragnostic,” he decides to help produce the show, hoping to prove that he isn’t a self-hating gay. In the process, he finds himself facing down angry guard dogs, angrier bigots, and a very high-strung church lady. As backlash grows, Peter begins to wonder whether he’s setting fire to his already damaged reputation and if his friendship with Alan will survive past curtain call.
At turns touching, sharply funny, and a little absurd, Dragging Mason County explores the pains and pleasures of queer community through one teen’s journey to self-acceptance.
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Dragon and the Dry Goods Princess
$14.95New fairy tales for adults and children. David Arnason’s wit and comic grace transform 2000 years of classics into 20 tales for today of love, loss, and triumph.
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Dragonflies
$19.95Dragonflies
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Dragonfly
$15.95In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.