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Showing 209–224 of 9312 results
A Line Below the Skin
$18.95Fran Muir’s mastery of language amplifies the emotion of this ethereal tale, a search for the line that connects us all.
A Line in the Sand
$16.95In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This tenuous friendship is severed by the torture and murder of the 16-year-old Palestinian inside the Canadian base—an act to which the Canadian soldier was at least a witness and perhaps a willing participant.
Weaving poetic drama with myriad documentary sources, A Line in the Sand rips the benevolent mask off recent western peacekeeping operations and challenges Canada’s long treasured national mythology that it is a nation of quiet diplomats. It asks us to imagine how horrors like these could be perpetrated with our money, in our name and by people much like us.
Cast of 3 to 5 men.
A Little More Free
$14.95“Like [Elmore] Leonard, McFetridge is able to convincingly portray flawed figures on both sides of the law.” — Publishers Weekly
A riveting police procedural
Montreal, Labor Day weekend, 1972. The city is getting ready to host the first game in the legendary Summit Series between Canada and the USSR. Three men set fire to a nightclub and 37 people die. The Museum of Fine Arts is robbed, and two million dollars’ worth of paintings are stolen.
Against the backdrop of these historic events, Constable Eddie Dougherty discovers the body of a murdered young man on Mount Royal. As he tries to prove he has the stuff to become a detective, he is drawn into the world of American draft dodgers and deserters, class politics, and organized crime.
A Little More Free is a portrait of a city and of an officer, both trying to discover where they stand in a divisive and rapidly changing world.
A Live Bird in its Jaws
$12.95Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Drama, A Live Bird in its Jaws is a play within a play. Hélène is writing a play which draws heavily on the past of her lover Xavier and his twin brother Adrien. The brothers reluctantly agree to perform the parts Hélène has written for them, but she refuses to reveal the ending until the actual staging of the piece. A storm prevents the rest of the cast from coming, but the brothers begin their lines, which lead inevitably to the tragic ending Hélène did not want to write.
A Live Bird in its Jaws, Yves Saint-Pierre’s translation of Jeanne-Mance Delisle’s Un oiseau vivant dans la gueule, is stunning in its clarity. Seduced by both the language and the images, we are drawn into the heavy beauty of this drama. Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille premiered the English production A Live Bird in its Jaws.
A Long Continual Argument
$22.00A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. It includes all the poems John Newlove chose for his previous Selected Poems with substantial additions from all his major collections: all of his later poetry, as well as previously excluded yet critically acclaimed works such as the long poem Notes From And Among the Wars and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove’s has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in the words of Phyllis Webb, doesn’t struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking.
“To call him “the voice of prairie poetry” misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton “the voice of Cromwell’s London.” …This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. …It will be seen again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place.”—Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove and His Works)
A Love Letter to Africville
$26.00A Love Letter to Africville is a dazzling compilation of personal stories and photos from former residents of Africville. Much has been written about the struggles of the Africville community, who have been hurt, discriminated against and dispossessed for so long — but Africville is so much more than just the pain. This book recasts the historical narrative to help former residents heal by emphasizing the beautiful and positive aspects of Africville. Amanda Carvery-Taylor organizes captivating stories and stunning photography that express the love and importance of Africville. This book is a warm hug from one of Canada’s most important storied communities.
A Magical Sturgeon
$15.95Written and illustrated in the tradition of the Kwantlen people, Joseph Dandurand’s second book is an endearing tale of two sisters and their connection with nature.In the water sat a sturgeon, born there, so they say, thousands of years ago, though the sturgeon themselves have been here for two hundred million years. It was at first a little egg, a big egg, born into the river. Now the sturgeon is back, but how did it get here? How did the first sturgeon come to be? Earth and the river, moons and suns and clouds. Time, thousands of years and the Skwó:wech has seen it all. But what gift does the sturgeon have for us?So begins this second charming story for children by Kwantlen storyteller Joseph Dandurand. The sturgeon, spirit of the great river, eludes human fishers until two young sisters neglect to follow their mother’s instructions. What follows provides a moving exploration of the importance of sharing and kinship with all other living things.The story is told with grace and simplicity by a master storyteller in the great tradition of the Kwantlen people. Accompanied by Elinor Atkins’s illustrations, A Magical Sturgeon is a touching follow-up to Dandurand’s bestselling children’s book The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets.
A Man A Fish
$17.95Prosper is a fisherman trying to get by in the face of everyday problems: there’s the spectre of the baby his wife desires, the ghost of his dead mistress, his wife’s secret admirer, and the overwhelming lure of the village bar. When a slippery eel salesman arrives in town peddling progress to the rural community, Prosper’s list of problems only increases. Faced with an invasive new species in his lake, his fortunes decline along with the fish population, and Prosper gets a lesson in gift horses and generosity.
A Man A Fish is a part of the 54ology, inspired by events in Burundi.
A Man of Letters
$29.95The late Urjo Kareda was renowned for his commitment to respond personally to the hundreds of mostly unsolicited scripts received by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, where he served as artistic director for almost two decades, from 1982 to 2001. His letters—the bulk of which were, by necessity, rejections—became infamous for their detailed dramaturgical content and characteristic critical candour; they became the stuff of legend among Canadian theatre practitioners and scholars. Comprised of a carefully selected range of Kareda’s dramaturgical correspondence, A Man of Letters makes public for the first time over three hundred responses, including rejection letters and ongoing communication with playwrights whose work Kareda developed for production at Tarragon. Recipients range from unknown playwrights to many of Canada’s most celebrated theatre artists.
A Man of Letters offers an unprecedented record of Kareda’s dramaturgical practice, including the values, preoccupations, and preferences that shaped his responses to new work—responses that, in turn, exerted considerable shaping influence on English-language Canadian theatre in the last decades of the twentieth century.
A Man Walks Into a Bar
$15.95A woman, with the help of a man, nervously sets out to tell us all a joke: A man walks into a bar and meets a waitress. As they begin to perform the joke for the audience, lines between the performers and characters blur and a tense and funny standoff about gender and power emerges. Is the customer justified in thinking something will happen? Is the waitress justified to lie? Why are some things funny to her and insulting to him? Ownership of the story becomes a competition as the man and woman unpack every word and movement, catching each other out on their assumptions and contradictions as they inch towards the dark punchline.
2015 Toronto Fringe Festival Patron’s Pick and Best of Fringe Selection
Named as an OUTSTANDING NEW PLAY, OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION, OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE, OUTSTANDING DIRECTION —Now Magazine
A Map in My Blood
$17.95Traditional poetry continues to hold its place in contemporary literature, in part, because of the emergence of women whose writing is informed by tradition but whose subject matter crystalizes in the personal search for meaning. This work represents a search through life, querying events and ideas. Thoughts are offered and ideas considered, but no real conclusion is reached as life’s constant flux shifts the perspective and importance of every event. Everyday moments and seemingly inconsequential acts are allowed their due while peace and strength show through the loss and effort.
In the backdrop to the poems, the boreal forest comes alive, poems begin there:
I spent the entire day walking poplar brush and spruce groves
stretched out for a bit in waist-high grass in the meadow beyond the birches
worked my slow way beneath the willows where beaver wore a path
through stones that rim the slough next to Little Winter Lake
And poems end there:
young throats yip
coyote pups on the ridge
beckon the moon as feet slap boards
stretched to the drowning sun
leap into rippled silver
The forest, the woman, and poem share the work for meaning in these poems and this is what creates their beauty as much as the carefully chosen words that convey it.
A Map of Rain Days
$20.00A Map of Rain Days invites us into the liminal between the nights and the
too-bright days.
The author navigates a life felt full on, inhabiting all its beauty and shadows theslap-tumble
of sex,the mean streets of the suburbs,
the swill and gore
of youth. Interwoven into this life are the realities of racism, addiction, suicide, rape, and death. And then clarity ensues.
A Matter of Gravity
$18.95A Matter of Gravity is about the forces that draw two men together. Hermann, an embalmer and doctor’s son, devotes himself to the dead to mask his disappointment that, unlike his father, he cannot cure the living. Hu is an ailing pianist who dwells in memories of past glory. Hermann displaces his drive for perfection and order onto his elderly neighbours. Hu, ashamed of his lame, knobbed hands, rarely leaves his airless room. Hermann contends he is eternally separated from the world by a “permanent cushion of air” that keeps him wavering between two women and hovering above humanity. Hu is bound to a nightmarish reality, shuffling between emphysema, rheumatoid arthritis, and Parkinson’s disease.
When a mysterious manuscript, possibly written by one of Hermann’s centenarian neighbours, connects one man’s routine with the other’s, an extended afternoon at the park eventually leads back to Hu’s piano. This marks the beginning of the men’s tenuous relationship, which, while healing in nature, is made more fragile by the pianist’s heightened mortality.
A Matter of Gravity is a sensitive, delicate, and humorous novel that unfolds in liminal spaces: between life and death, youth and age, earth and sky. By the end of the final, transformative meeting between Hermann and Hu, Vachon gently broaches the question that paralyzes each man and the people whom they love: When faced with terminal illness, how do we embrace the unsatisfactory life we leave behind?
A Matter of Taste
$14.95How farmer’s markets and organic produce became synonymous with “good food” and why they shouldn’t be.
How did farmer’s markets, nose-to-tail, locavorism, organic eating, CSAs, whole foods, and Whole Foods become synonymous with “good food”? And are these practices really producing food that is morally, environmentally, or economically sustainable? Rebecca Tucker’s compelling, reported argument shows that we must work to undo the moral coding that we use to interpret how we come by what we put on our plates. She investigates not only the danger of the accepted rhetoric, but the innovative work happening on farms and university campuses to create a future where nutritious food is climate-change resilient, hardy enough to grow season after season, and, most importantly, available to all—not just those willing or able to fork over the small fortune required for a perfect heirloom tomato.
Tucker argues that arriving at that future will require a broad cognitive shift away from the idea that farmer’s markets, community gardens, and organic food production is the only sustainable way forward; more than that, it will require the commitment of research firms, governments, corporations, and post-secondary institutions to develop and implement agriscience innovations that do more than improve the bottom line. A Matter of Taste asks us to rethink what good food really is.
A Matter of Will
$20.00Will Crosswell’s decision to pursue acting shattered his father’s dream of him being a useful adult. When we first meet the young Will he is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. But in the ensuing years, from relationships to the theatre, his life has become one shipwreck after another. Dumped by his fiancée and desperate to pay the rent, he finds himself taking a job on the bottom rung of the Great Chain of Being – a telemarketer. The satire becomes serious when Will hits rock bottom. After a life-altering AA encounter with an unconventional minister, Will enrolls in divinity school and has to survive his most challenging escapade yet – a forty day fast in a Newfoundland outport in the middle of the frozen winter. As he struggles to keep from freezing and starving to death, he is confronted by a series of strange events, not the least of which is an encounter with Billy Blight, a bigger-than-life Newfoundlander headed for perdition. Funny, surprising, outrageous, and moving, A Matter of Will is the tale of a middle-age maybe minister and his journey to find a mighty purpose.
A Migrant Heart
$16.95A Migrant Heart is about departures and arrivals, uprooting and attachment, resettling and returning. Denis Sampson left Ireland as a student, leaving behind the farming countryside of his childhood, the city of Dublin where he was educated, and the history and culture of his native country. He arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and discovered he was not the only one in search of a new life; and then that search became his life. He also discovered many different ways to return to Ireland, until slowly, what was painfully forced apart was rejoined in a life lived in two places and cultures.