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Showing 2321–2336 of 9492 results
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Elysium
$18.00Pamela Stewart is a self-described “literary proctologist,” and her writing often looks into places that people generally don’t want to look. The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life – the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome. They are about ordinary people, characters searching for meaning. People are rescued, but not always in the way they hoped for or expected. Stewart’s work is character-driven and empathetic.
Pamela Stewart spent twenty years as a private investigator, which gave her a special insight into human behaviour. “Because I spent so many years alone in a car watching people, my perspective on people is a bit different. I would watch someone for three or so days in a row, and in that time get a capsule version of their life; but it was skewed because I was part of their life, yet not part. They didn’t know I was in it,” she says. “Writing about people is kind of like that too.”
Praise for Elysium:
“… Stewart is clearly a versatile and imaginative writer who does not lose sight of the fact that strong plots, plausible characters, action and conflict drive successful short stories. “”… There is a sense in her fiction that Stewart has the patience and perspicacity to get it just right – to write meaningful, artful, stories that permit readers immediate access.” (Front & Centre)
“Elysium’s strongest stories offer more than shocking scenarios, and focus on believable characters. Le Pain’ is about Mildred, a lonely baker with a passion for bread (and a tattoo of bread popping out of a toaster); the gripping Snow Angels’ describes Emily, a new mother struggling with the guilt of witnessing an accidental death. Anything but angelic, Stewart’s protagonists make Elysium a bold debut.” (The Fashion Magazine)
“Stewart writes in a clear, spare style that motors along with little ornamentation but every so often delivers a metaphoric punch. … The stories are intense and compressed, often leaving out connective tissue to achieve ends and effects usually associated with poetry, and benefit from rereading. Yet the book on the whole is suffused with enough organic humour and wit to keep you smiling throughout, if not laughing out loud. With each story brief enough to be read at a sitting, consider Elysium like a box of narrative truffles, each one unique and satisfying on its own, though they go down nice in bunches as well… ” (TORO.com)
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Emanations
$18.00In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.
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Emanations: fluttertongue 6
$18.00Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 marks preeminent sound poet Steven Ross Smith’s return to verse form. In this sixth chapter of what’s become for Smith a life-poem (a long poem that encompasses a life), Smith bends, confuses, and disintegrates the fundamental premises of poetic and fictive form—working language, narrative, and meaning like sculptural material, and engaging with composition by sound and its visual placement on the page.
These poems emanate from specific works by other poets. Exalt in Smith’s highly torqued and playful language that riffs off of bpNichol, Sylvia Legris, Federico Garcia Lorca, Lisa Robertson, and other seminal poetic masters, in this charged, frenetic work that deals in nature’s precariousness and social conundrums.
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Embedded
$26.00When Catherine Lang’s niece and Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang was killed while embedded with Canadian troops near Kandahar City, Afghanistan, in 2009, her world shifted.
In the aftermath, Lang and her family experienced the rigour of military ceremony. As she pieced together fragments from Michelle’s last days, Lang connected with the loved ones of soldiers who died alongside Michelle. She met with those injured by the roadside bomb, including the lone civilian woman talking to Michelle at the time of the blast, discovering in her and others a steely resilience to carry on and a more intimate understanding of the meaning of sacrifice. Suddenly thrust close to this aspect of Canadian society, Lang began to question previously held black-and-white views about military engagement, and she turned to writing as a way to understand the impact on her and her family, and to ensure that Michelle lived on in memory.
Wrestling with the unfathomable consequence of war, she travels across Canada to learn about Michelle through the eyes of her colleagues and friends. This process brings Lang to Saskatchewan, where she had lived as a child—a homecoming that reveals much to Catherine about Michelle, and about herself. Brought together by a shared love of journalism, a career she left behind, and dedication to press freedom and to the rights of Afghan women and girls, Lang is led back to writing through her search for Michelle, and back to Michelle through the language of love and loss.
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Embouchure
$18.95Kevin McNeilly’s debut poetry collection, Embouchure, compiles the intertwined lineages of trumpet players who came to prominence in the States during the “pre-bop” era, loosely defined as the period between 1890 and 1939. This series of vignettes betrays a broad and detailed knowledge of the players’ lives and work, yet reads like a collection of conversational anecdotes shared between the musicians and those around them. Rather than focusing on the solid facts of their lives, McNeilly brings to life the characters they inhabited and stories that surrounded them, all in a vibrant, slangy dialect that adeptly reproduces the feel of the period.Within the course of Embouchure’s thirty-seven portraits, Buddy, Satch, Bix, Jabbo, Cootie, Cat and the rest are resurrected in their smoky, brassy, sepia-toned glory as figures deeply steeped in their own mythos. Despite embracing the fictional aspects of their lives, however, McNeilly styles these remarkable men and women with pure love and admiration, not only for their shared history and contribution to the evolution of jazz, but also for the pure, loud, messy beauty of the music itself. In this stunning and highly readable debut, McNeilly boasts finely honed poetic chops, proving that heart remains the first and finest ingredient in any truly virtuosic solo.
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Emergency Hallelujah
$16.95Emergency Hallelujah
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Emergent Publics
$10.95Recently much of the Left has shifted emphasis away from issues of class, toward “democracy.” Indeed, democracy is now emerging as an overarching label for the goals of anti-globalization activists. What is the relationship between such social movements and democracy? In Emergent Publics, Ian Angus wrests the concept of democracy away from the notion that the citizen’s only real activity is voting, and argues for a radical and participatory model. This short and accessible book looks back to the roots of democratic institutions, showing how they originated in social movements and the new forms of communication and interaction within those movements.
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Emergent Voices
$24.95Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, and Gail Anderson-Dargatz are among the winners of the CBC Literary Award who have gone on to become some of the biggest names in Canadian literature. They and other past winners are included in Emergent Voices. For over twenty years, Robert Weaver has coordinated one of Canada’s most important literary awards for emerging writers, the CBC Canadian Literary Awards. Weaver founded the awards and has been tireless in promoting them.
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Emily
$19.95Emily is a story written in verse and based on the life of the author’s maternal grandmother, Emily Nolan, who was born in rural Newfoundland in 1900. Denise Batten tells the story of Emily’s colourful life, which reflects the lives of so many courageous Newfoundland women of her time. The verses have been put to music, so the story of Emily can be sung – much like a traditional Irish ballad or story song. (An mp3 of the recording is available for download with each book.) Readers will also enjoy the photos of original hand-hooked rugs designed specifically for the project by Kaaren Batten, a gifted Ontario artist.
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Emily & Elspeth
$20.00Emily & Elspeth follows two women and their unique paths to love… and each other. Catherine McNeil’s latest collection is a delightful romp through Mexico, the imagined inner-workings of Frida Kahlo’s relationship(s), and Vancouver bedrooms. Through poems that flirt with the intersections of desire, art, and commitment, she pieces together Emily and Elspeth’s relationship as playfully as she takes it apart.
Along the way, Emily & Elspeth brings you to places both intimate and unexpected: a belly where a uterus used to be; a girl matador facing off against a bull; and “fat, honeyed days, swollen with desire” that risk being destroyed by the nefarious aims of a government spy.
Weird, wonderful, and slightly dangerous, this is a queer love story that’s anything but typical.
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Emily Patterson
$21.95When Emily Patterson arrives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children in 1862, she finds herself worlds away from Bath, Maine, the staunchly pious township of her birth. Up the remote reaches of Vancouver Island’s Alberni Canal, Emily learns much about self-reliance in a fledgling milltown where pioneer loggers and the native Tseshaht community share an often tempestuous co-existence. In search of their ideal homestead, the Pattersons next travel to Oregon’s fertile Willamette and Columbia River regions, confronting both joy and tragedy along the way. After many years, their quest finally leads them to Burrard Inlet, where the sawmilling communities of Hastings Mill and Moodyville duel for lumber supremacy. Emily gains wide recognition amidst the hard-living mill workers for her extraordinary nursing skills, self-taught from sheer necessity over the course of her nomadic life. In a time when the nearest doctor is several hours of travel away, Emily is called upon day or night to deal with any medical situation, be it removing a splinter, treating a cough or preparing a body for burial.
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Emily Regained
$24.95Suffering from chronic pain after a devastating car accident, Emily fights to rebuild her life by blowing the whistle on the health professionals who betrayed her trust.
Emily used to be a genetics researcher. She used to play competitive chess and captain a soccer team. Then a distracted driver shattered her world. She can no longer work, the opioid she has been prescribed is not only highly addictive, it causes hallucinations and her insurance company’s psychologist has labelled her paranoid. Life as she knew it and loved it, is over. Suicide begins to look attractive.
When Emily learns that the health professionals she trusted have betrayed her, she struggles to throw off self-pity and take what’s left of her life and her good name to launch a counterplay.
Told from Emily’s point of view, we get her inner most thoughts – her humour, frustration and fear – and we cheer her on as she takes on those who have deceived her. Emily Regained includes elements of mystery and a bit of romance but, just like the real life it’s based on, it is multilayered and a little messy, all captured in entertaining and engaging prose. -
Emily via the Greyhound Bus
$9.95We meet Emily travelling on a bus, suffering from morning sickness, and reflecting on her past life – on jobs she has worked, relationships she has had, and her years of growing up as a First Nations girl. Years of making the wrong choices, especially with men, have left her confidence shaken and with a legacy of unexpected children. Without much money and not even a suitcase, Emily becomes a tragic figure but somehow through her independence and determination she rises above this stereotype. As the bus rolls west from Toronto across the prairies various passengers engage Emily in conversations, some with evil intentions of taking advantage of her. Throughout these incidents we discover Emily’s hard-edged attitude for survival and her instinctual savvy.
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Emperor’s Orphans, The
$21.00During the Second World War, approximately 4,000 Japanese-Canadians were “repatriated” to Japan. Among those Canadians sent back to were members of author and poet, Sally Ito’s family. As a Japanese Canadian child growing up in the suburbs of Edmonton, Alberta, Ito’s early life was a lone island of steamed tofu and vegetables amidst a sea of pot roast and mashed potatoes. Through the Redress movement of the late 80s, the eventual Parliamentary acknowledgment of wartime injustices, and the restoration of citizenship to those exiled to Japan she considers her work as an author of poetry and prose, meditating on themes of culture and identity.
Later as a wife and mother of two, Sally returns to Japan and re-lives the displacement of her family through interviews, letters, and shared memories. Throughout her journey Ito weaves a compelling narrative of her family’s journey through the darkest days of the Pacific War, its devastating aftermath, and the repercussions on cultural identity for all the Emperor’s Orphans.
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Emphysema (A Love Story)
$14.95Silent-film performer Louise Brookes was living in obscurity when bad-boy theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who was infatuated with her film persona Lulu, tracked her down for a New Yorker profile. In a script crackling with wit, Janet Munsil recreates their encounter.
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Empire of Desire
$29.95Empire of Desire, the second volume of Thierry Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition, completes the work he began in the first: Truth or Death. It traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuries—from Molière to Proust, by way of Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, Melville and Joyce—ending in 1922, coincidentally the year Ulysses was published and Marcel Proust breathed his last.
Truth or Death had revealed how the Biblical imperative of salvation gradually and systematically transferred the quest for immortality from the religious to the profane, as technoscience came to supplant God in the “age of reason.”
Now, in Empire of Desire, Thierry Hentsch presents “modern man”—freed from the imperative of transcendence—as a creature who “desires to desire, moving without cease from one object to another, in a state of self-imposed oblivion,” the Western narrative tradition reaching its apotheosis with the work of Marcel Proust, in whose exquisitely crafted prose, desire has become the artist’s instrument of choice—the vivisectionist’s scalpel.
Thierry Hentsch’s untimely death in 2005 has left us, as his generous bequest, a vivid, multi-faceted literary testament. Proust, foreshadowing the title of the mortal bargain, Raconter et Mourir —to tell the tale, and to die—brings Hentsch’s reading of the Western literary tradition full circle. Proust, “in whose company despair can find no finger-hold, in whose company I learn with every passing day that literature is nothing more than life reflected upon, recaptured; that it is the expression—an expression that takes one’s breath away—of those simple instants that poets have sought after since time out of mind, and whose fleeting yet powerful pleasure give us, for a spark of eternity, the feeling that we ourselves partake of the abolition of time.”