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All Books in this Collection
Showing 2433–2448 of 9481 results
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Ex-Yu
$19.95Short story writer, novelist and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the prestigious 2013 Man Booker International prize. In Ex-Yu, he explores the major themes of war and exile, of religiosity and existentialism, that have defined his fiction and earned him a place among the pantheon of international writers addressing contemporary literature’s most pressing questions. Masterpieces such “Honey in the Carcase”, “White Mustache”, and “Acorns”, unflinching in their humanity and realism, take us into the brutal despair of the Bosnian War. At the other end of Novakovich’s wide-ranging talents, we find fiercely imaginative stories that present an altogether different angle into the author’s philosophy of alienation. In between, dry humour and world-weary wisdom infuse such exile preoccupations as soccer, terrorism, and cigarettes. Taken together, this latest collection comprises a bravely intelligent mosaic of what it means to be torn from one’s country and one’s self.
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Exact Fare Only
$16.00We’ve all had good, bad, and sometimes ugly experiences on public transit. Exact Fare Only is an anthology of real life stories about heading out, heading back, and everything that happened in between, whether the trip was across the country or just across town.
Praise for Exact Fare Only:
“This book should be sold in bus terminals and train stations from coast to coast to coast and required reading for commuters everywhere. Laced with humor and subtle social commentary, Exact Fare Only is a timely portraitof that cramped, public space, otherwise known as the bus, the train or the subway.” (Matthew Firth, Front & Centre)
“… the reader … glimpses rare truths and moments of clarity that we can all see if we look around in our travels. Reading Exact Fare, like in any good journey, I didn’t want to step off. Instead, I wanted to see what happened along that road.” (The Antigonish Review)
” … could serve as evidence in a sociologist’s study of human behaviour … ” (Quill & Quire)
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Exact Fare Only II
$18.00With an afterword by David Suzuki
Back with more, Exact Fare Only 2 is the follow-up collection of the weird, the wild and the wonderful of commuter literature. Whether by land, sea or air, public transit around the world says more about the human condition than many want to admit. These real-life tales, reflections, poems, and rants are required reading for commuters everywhere. Join Teresa McWhirter as she gets propositioned on a cross-country Greyhound, Matthew Firth accidentally witnessing a midnight exchange of essential services, Scott Gunning encountering compassion on a third-class bus in southern India, Catherine McNeil who misses her ride and discovers the cost of a stranger’s kindness, and follow ten years of Patricia Rutale’s life as a TTC rider negotiating urban legends, prejudice, come-ons and bright-eyed awe.
Praise for Exact Fare Only II:
“Exact Fare Only 2 is a wonderful idea for a book, and we get our money’s worth from every ride we take. Obviously a second collection of such tales, and with an afterword by David Suzuki, it is a collection chosen with discernment, and offers a worldwide opportunity to ‘people watch’.” (The Antigonish Review)
“… the writing maps landscapes and mindscapes while illustrating quotidian encounters with small joys, guilty pleasures, and unexpected deaths during travel.” (Canadian Literature)
“In Exact Fare Only, tragicomedy sits alongside subtle, and not so subtle, social commentary and wry, mordant humour as the writers navigate and negotiate the myriad unwritten rulesand unspoken protocols of public transit, seeking that most elusive destination: their stop.” (Books in Canada)
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Exactly Twelve Cents and Other Convictions
$11.95This is a book of observation and comment about comic books—in particular the Marvel hero comics of the early 1960s—and the influence those stories and drawings had on the lives of the young people that grew up with them. The topic is not brought under hard analysis: the comics were originally written for entertainment, and the author’s views on them in turn are offered through conversational letters, addressed to two of the founders of the art-form at Marvel.
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Excessive Love Prostheses
$16.95The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is ‘a public organ of private damage.’ The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.
Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker’s Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.
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Exclusive Memory
$29.95Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future is a compendium of descriptive, speculative prose and text-images by the Governor General’s Award-winning artist, Tom Sherman. Its contents sweep across five decades, describing radically different periods and environments — from Sherman’s early experiments in Toronto in the 1970s to his recent explorations of text and image in Nova Scotia’s South Shore.
At the core of this volume is “The Faraday Cage,” a text that delivers a vivid cascade of images of the art scene in Toronto at the onset of the video era in the early 1970s. This opening chapter expands into a series of essays in which Sherman pictures a vast horizon of contexts: urban, rural, social, political, economic, and in some cases, simply a beach along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. His ongoing and rigorous investigation into the intersections of art, technology, and life itself is grounded in the converging terrains of mediaspheres and landscapes.
And then, in a quick shift of perspective enter Peggy Gale and Caroline Seck Langill, who charge the book with wide-sweeping conversations about Sherman’s practice: his use of written language and dynamic, critically engaged “pictures,” the expansive reach of his text-based visual works, and the distinctive character of his voice.
The result is a provocative retrospective in book form that both demonstrates and expands upon Tom Sherman’s clear, forward-looking vision.
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Execution Poems
$14.95After nine years and nine trade printings, Gaspereau Press is issuing a revised and redesigned second edition of its most popular title. Originally released in 2000 in a limited edition of 66 books handset and printed letterpress in a folio format, Execution Poems has gone on to sell over 6000 copies. It was the winner of the 2001 Governor General’s award for poetry and took first place in the poetry category of the 2001 Alcuin Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design.
Execution Poems is a suite of poems about Clarke’s cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged in July 1949 for the murder of a Fredericton, New Brunswick, taxi driver. In this startling work, Clarke reminds us of racism and poverty and of their brutal, tragic results, blurring the line between the perpetrator and the victima line we’d prefer to be simple and clear. As all true poetry should, Clarke’s embodies both damnation and redemption, offering convoluted triumphs alongside tragedy.
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Executor
$16.95When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the politics so dear to Eleanor, but a life-threatening plot.
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Exhilarating Prose
$19.95This smartly illustrated literary miscellanea is intended to stimulate readers and writers of English prose. From “dead language ? the speaks” (i.e., ad-speak, media-speak, corporate-speak) through “re-writing ? Again?” to rules (to obey or not to obey), authors Barry Healey and Cordelia Strube examine what makes good and bad writing. With tongue often in cheek, they scrutinize various forms of prose and the seven major prose elements, and reflect on how to approach the writing process most effectively. Exhilarating Prose also abounds with examples of startling writing, wide-ranging quotes from celebrated authors, and their own ruminations on the oddities of writing and the infinite eccentricity of the human mind. To those interested in English words “in their best order” (Coleridge), this book will inform, engage, and amuse.
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Exile on a Grid Road
$12.95Exile on a Grid Road is a celebration and exploration of the human experience, from youth to adulthood and illness to joy. Sadness, healing, humour, forgiveness, and joyfulness mingle as Shelley Banks creates detailed narratives of office life, failing health, and complex relationships and confronts the rootlessness and disconnection common to a contemporary experience marked by globalization and increasing mobility. In many of her poems, Banks presents the conundrum of belonging, identity, and culture. She displays an intimate knowledge of the many environments in which she has lived but also possesses an underlying disconnect due to the temporary nature of her stay in each place. Though poems such as “Moon Offering” and “Grasshopper Summer” are rich with natural imagery of the Canadian prairies, Banks’ writes, “I have no farm./I am three generations past my mother’s flight/from saddles, curry combs and dill./I am afraid of horses./I’m city-deep.” She expresses a similar separation from her youth in the Caribbean, recalling the vivid details of storms, beaches, and “curry, chutney, tangerines” yet reasserting her alienation and feelings of loss. Encounters with mortality are brought into sharp relief in later sections when Banks introduces an elderly grandmother, aging family pets, and the sudden death of a parent on his way to McDonald’s for a morning coffee. In “Kiss of Knives”, a sequence of nine poems which follows a woman battling breast cancer, Banks reveals her insight into the complexity of emotion present while dealing with illness. This complexity is especially evident in the poem “2: Wings Spread Under Glass” when a woman “so tired she can’t walk/across a grocery store” agonizes that she has become a neglectful parent even as she fights to stay alive.
Banks’ quiet wit keeps her serious subject matter from overwhelming by presenting mundane details of working life with fresh observational humour, including describing tea that “is cold and tastes like chewing gum” and expressing envy towards an irresponsible coworker who “wears Black Cashmere,/come-fuck-me shoes.” She uses rich imagery to evoke nostalgia and to remind readers of the details we often miss during the process of daily life. By combining sharp observation, humour, and accessible verse, Exile on a Grid Road reveals the wonders to be found among the seemingly mundane details of the day to day.
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Existence in All Its Uncoverable Beauty
$19.95Existence In All Its Uncoverable Beauty reveals the rich textures and layered complexities of both the natural world and the human spirit. These poems explore our folly and brilliance, our deepest yearnings, while remaining rooted in the enduring magic and wonder of being alive. Each moment of consciousness becomes a gateway-an invitation to dive deeper into ourselves and the world around us. In this ever-unfolding interface, the book reminds us, lies our truest sense of security and connection.
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Exit
$20.00Somewhere in Montreal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions, she tells her story, taking the reader into the Kafkaesque world of the company and its bewildering cast of characters. ‘Exit’ is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan’s last novel is a hymn to life.
“[The protagonist’s] voice is thoroughly belligerent, as she mercilessly explains why she is bent on pursuing hopelessness, ugliness, all that is antithetical to life, and what it means to exist without that strength of will to desire, to discover, to love,to believe’… Ultimately, though, ‘Exit’ is a strangely hopeful novel…” – Canadian Literature
“This book plucked the brain from my skull and punted it through the uprights of remembering what writing can be like when a true artist unleashes her talent, passion and fearlessness in a book. No false compromises here. No half-steps. Just a rigorous exercise in ethics and contemporary morals wrapped in humour, helplessness and the absurd. For a book about suicide the writing is tight, energetic, rigorous … This book will be on my best of the year list.” – Sean Cranbury, Books on the Radio
“A powerful argument for suicide as a human right, ‘Exit’ is also strangely life-affirming. Ordinarily, these contradictory positions could suffice as the motor of a plot. Arcan’s protagonist is the irascible, narcissistic Antoinette Beauchamp, who seeks strength and reason to live from within the depths of her own twisted psychology. Knowing that the young woman who wrote this outrageously beautiful, thoroughly original novel did not is, well, heartbreaking. Cruel, even. So ‘Exit’ and the late Nelly Arcan’s life are a package. In the end, though, I only thought of Nelly Arcan. How could she have had this book inside her, let it out, and still leave us? Great beauty can be found in very dark places.” -The Rover
Govenor General’s Award Finalist
The Globe 100: The very best of 2011
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Exit Strategies: Stories
$22.95A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.
Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the eighteen stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate’s fiancée and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder. The characters in Exit Strategies are all in need of a way out, a way forward, a way through.
In Exit Strategies, it is less about the destination and more about the initial decision to leave. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always utterly captivating.
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Exit Wounds
$20.00What does it mean to feel at home? In his groundbreaking debut collection Exit Wounds, Indo-Canadian poet Tariq Malik weaves together history and myth with his own family’s experiences of immigration to uncover what it truly means to belong. Whether he is recalling his childhood memories of the death of his father, imaging himself as a dead soldier lost in the sands of the Kuwaiti desert, or drawing upon his family’s experience of ‘three wars and migrations,’ Malik’s moving search for home will resonate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with a dominant monoculture.
Malik’s poetry combines traditional Punjabi mythology and First Nations’ symbolism with contemporary events that have shaped the lives of immigrants: 9/11, RCMP violence, war. The result is a defiant triumph of the plurality of minority experiences—a poetic chorus of immigrants and their descendants coming home to the truth and power of their many worlds.
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Exovede in the Darkroom
$24.00The first collection celebrating the work of celebrated experimental filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, Exovede in the Darkroom is a series of responses, critical and poetic, to Vermette?s visually explosive, materially distinct, and conceptually singular practice. Exploring Vermette?s shorts that engage a number of 16mm collage practices, as well as her feature film Ste. Anne, a film that mesmerized festival circuit critics and audiences alike with a metered and visually resplendent story of a return to a Métis community, in which sequences of images dominate the narrative. Contributors include Jennifer Smith, Gwynne Fulton, Lawrene Bird, Mónica Savirón, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Sky Hopinka, Stephen Broomer, Claudia Sicondolfo, Inney Prakash, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Irene Bindi, and Janet Blatter.
Rhayne Vermette was born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba. It was while studying architecture at the University of Manitoba, that she fell into the practices of image making and storytelling. Primarily self taught, Rhayne?s films are opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, reenactments and divine interruption. Her work has screened internationally and highlights screenings at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar Del Plata IFF, Viennale, Jeonju IFF, Valdivia International FIlm Festival and DocumentaMadrid. Her first feature narrative, Ste. Anne, exploded into the world and was awarded TIFF?s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film in 2021.
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Exploded View
$19.99From ocean floors to the darkest parts of space, science fiction has been built on creative and challenging short stories. Cloudscape Comics adds to this tradition by presenting the next generation of scifi storytelling in its anthology, Exploded View. This collection includes unique stories by 25 individual artists, tales of android companions, future worlds without engineers and intercultural alien exchanges. It’s enough to blow your mind along with the mind of your time-travelling, parallel dimension self, too!