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All Books in this Collection
Showing 2433–2448 of 9493 results
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Evocations
$49.95The photographs in this volume are evocations made visible through reflection, observation, exploration, and expression … the embodiment of memory, renderings of personal emotional truth … recollections of the photographer’s life during the 1970s, spanning the decade he underwent basic art training and developed as a professional image-maker. Few frames from this collection were printed at the time, and the negatives resided untouched for decades in an old cardboard box that inhabited the basements and attics of his transitory world. In 2017, 40 years later, he opened that box, and discovered history anew, awakening long dormant feelings and perceptions. Through the prism of time, reminiscence sometimes brings clarity, but just as often, the residue of the past can be complex and blurry. The metaphors in these contemporaneous visual musings are both non-verbal and evocative, as well as testament to the veracity and longevity of ocular fragments, the reverberations of a long process.
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Ex Machina
$18.00A long poem at the fringes of the Canadian tradition, Ex Machina is a latticework of poetic and philosophical statements concerning the symbiosis of humans, books, and machines. In a series of three intertwining sequences, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth from statement to statement, seeking development but meeting frustration. The reader thus becomes a larval stage in the poem’s development, forging connections between its disparate parts during the course of this mental processing, as the text evolves over multiple readings.
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EX MACHINA: Creating for the Stage
$29.95In 1993 when Robert Lepage suggested to his colleagues that a specific identity and image be found for his next working group, he imposed one condition. The word “theatre” was not to be part of the name of the new company. This gorgeous full-colour book documents the results of that landmark decision: the dynamic creative arts company Ex Machina, constantly on the move in search of new forms of storytelling—from Lepage’s own Dragon’s Trilogy, through Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Metropolitan Opera of New York, to Peter Gabriel’s world tours, or Cirque du Soleil’s Kà in Las Vegas. Its frenetic dynamism means the company must constantly move simultaneously between story draft and stagecraft as it invites audiences the world over to their theatrical experiments where technology is part of the human adventure. Onstage, hierarchies, methodologies and narrative codes are turned inside out to create a rich stage vocabulary, free of the conventional constraints of theatre.
“The artists of Ex Machina believe that theatre craves new sources of inspiration,” notes Michel Bernatchez, the company’s producer. “What is needed is a commingling of the performing arts such as dance, opera and music with the recording arts such as cinema, video and multimedia. It calls for encounters between scientists and playwrights, between scenic artists and architects.”
Robert Lepage has said, “Theatre, like the world itself, evolves very rapidly, as do its practitioners and its audience. The influence of film and television and the new dramaturgical possibilities offered by multimedia have opened the way to new forms of expression and new languages of staging that have only barely been explored. It is thus not simply the content and form of theatre that we are questioning, but also the role theatre will play in the new exchange of ideas in the 21st century.”
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Ex Nihilo
$22.95A bilingual collection of renga poetry by two of Canada’s most celebrated poets in English and in French, each writing in his respective language in response to the other. A project of discourse itself, shared in dialogue between two poets, as they explore Novalis’ definition of poetry as “the truly absolute real.” The poetic act is world-changing, the agglomeration of atoms as they fall through space – a sort of “elective affinity”, or state of grace – to constitute Being. If Lao Tzu reminds us that the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, this renga, suffused with elements of the natural world, also recognizes that, in the words of Angelus Silesius, ‘‘the unnameable, which we usually call God, is expressed and revealed through the Word.’’ Léveillé and Bloggett share an unprecedented dialogue that possesses both paradox and complete clarity of word in Canada’s two official languages.
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Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, The
$15.95Haley McGee was on the phone with Visa, promising to pay off her bill by having a yard sale, when she realized that the only things she could sell were gifts from her exes. Inspired by this call, The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale: a play about love is a hilarious and daring play about the cost of love…or what love costs us. So: can we translate sentimental value into cold hard cash? Why does Haley want to — and why now? The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale smashes together personal divulgences, mathematics, interviews with Haley’s ex-boyfriends, economics, and the politics of commerce in a quest to determine what our romantic relationships are actually worth. This autobiographical work offers eight items “for sale” — all gifts from Haley’s real ex-boyfriends — and introduces a brand new formula, developed with math expert Melanie Frances, to calculate the cost of love.
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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.