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Showing 2481–2496 of 9493 results
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Fado
$16.95Acclaimed Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila’s new play, Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, is a tale of love and ghosts set in the back alleys and brothels of old Lisbon. Part concert, part theatre, the story of a young woman confronting her country’s fascist past and her own identity is interwoven with the heartbreaking national music of Portugal known as fado, which means “fate.”
Playing sold-out crowds in Vancouver and Victoria in 2018 and 2019, Fado was honoured on the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Sure Fire List (the Top Twenty-Three Most Producible Plays in Canada by Women) and selected as one of the Top Unproduced Latinx Plays in the U.S. by Fifty Playwrights. Fado won the Award for Favourite Musical in Victoria with B.C.’s own beloved Sara Marreiros playing the ghost of Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado.
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Fail Better
$22.95Taking seriously the idea that baseball is a study in failure—a very successful batter manages a base hit in just three of every ten attempts—Mark Kingwell argues that there is no better tutor of human failure’s enduring significance than this strange, crooked game of base, where geometry becomes poetry.
Weaving elements of memoir, philosophical reflection, sports writing, and humour, Fail Better is an intellectual love letter to baseball by one of North America’s most engaging philosophers. Kingwell illustrates complex concepts like theoretically infinite game-space, “time out of time,” and the rules of civility with accessible examples drawn from the game, its history, and his own halting efforts to hit ‘em where they ain’t. Beyond a “Beckett meets baseball” study in failure, Kingwell crafts a thoughtful appreciation of why sports matter, and how they change our vision of the world.
Never pretentious, always entertaining, Fail Better is set to be the homerun non-fiction title of the season.
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Failure to Thrive
$18.95When Canadian reality TV producer Jonathan Farb finds out that he may be dying of a brain tumor on the same day that he catches his wife having an affair with her obstetrician, he makes a pledge: to raise his five month-old son Elliot to manhood before his time is up. Farb’s list of parenting goals range from instilling a religious identification (can a baby be Bar Mitzvahed?), to the importance of Education (The Birds & The Bees), and onto more pressing pursuits like amassing capital for his son’s inheritance. Can Farb succeed in getting his reality TV pitch “Canada’s Next Great Apologist” greenlit despite the opposition of his antagonistic boss, a pathological fear of public speaking, and his declining mental and physical health? An energetic and ultimately poignant literary debut, Failure To Thrive digs deep into the compromises of marriage, the intensity of parenthood and the love that propels a father in the face of his own mortality to raise his son.
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Fair
$19.95In this spare, poetic novel, a young homeless man finds solace in friendship, falls prey to the machinations of a malevolent gang of thugs, and ultimately is swallowed up by the inevitability of consequences on the dangerous and deceptively sunny streets of L.A.
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Fairfield
$18.95When G. Brandon Sisnett dies at his computer ‘a mild spring day in March,’ he leaves behind two unfinished works in his Montreal home. One, a political tract typical of the kind of rant the reclusive writer was famous for, the other an unexpected box of short fiction none of his publishers was aware existed. At first read a seemingly ‘random collection of . . . fragments and miscellanea,’ it soon becomes clear the stories contain a mystery surrounding the sad death of the Barbadian-born author’s four-year-old daughter, his retreat from society, and the recurring name of ‘Fairfield.’ An amazing book, Sandiford’s newest collection is an intimate, insightful look at how we all strive to live with the memory of love and loss.
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Fairy Ring
$24.95In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss, who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian pseudo-science and its ignorant fascinations with violence, spiritualism, the reanimation of corpses, the channelling of passions, and especially with the control of every aspect and function of the body, particularly the bodies of women, these characters are increasingly rendered impotent by the collision of their fantasies with their repressions—the sadism of their lust to penetrate others, and the masochism of their own constricted closures.
As Captain Ryder says of his crew as his claustrophobic ship continues to drift, trapped in the harsh white light of the polar ice: “How repelled I feel by this promiscuity with individuals for whom I truly feel nothing but aversion.”
Set in the year Freud published his ground-breaking essay on hysteria, this is a compulsively readable, beautiful and dark novel of personal relations so close they verge on the incestuous, and desires so vast they approach the cold crystalline purity of the archetype.
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Faithful and Other Stories
$20.00A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik’s Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.
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Faithfully Seeking Franz
$25.00The itinerary of Faithfully Seeking Franz comprises an irregular quest for dead mentor, modernist author Franz Kafka—in places he lived, worked, vacationed and convalesced, and in the body of work he left: fiction, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence. The search for the man inside the writer is both a personal journey and a joint venture of two in the field: E. and M. in pursuit of K. The story might even be said to unfold as a love note to triangulation.
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Fake Math
$10.00
“Moments are the elements of profit.” – Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1
Composed primarily through the co-optation and recombination of internet search results, FAKE MATH is a poetic intervention into the ways the motive for profit structures our lives. Each poem exposes the fallacies, fake logics, and sheer idiocies that constrict our decision-making processes in terms of our art, industry, educational system, and our day-to-day lives, while questioning our tendency to resort to institutionalized social violence. FAKE MATH draws its inspiration from diverse sources from Marx to Freud, from Archimedes to Oprah, sending them all downstream on rapidly pulsating waves of schizophrenic glee and political gravity, often creating startling juxtapositions when mismatched ideas and images are torn from their original contexts. The effects are at once humorous and stomach-churning. Ultimately, these are poems about how we live, work, and play within larger structures of capitalism and how our attempts to move past these structures are largely failed attempts at rebellion, not real attempts at revolution or, better yet, escape. -
Fake Paul
$15.95On February 9th, 1964 the Beatles made their first phenomenal American appearance on The Ed Sulllivan Show in New York. At the same time, thousands of miles away, one of their biggest fans was being conceived.As the unnamed narrator of fake Paul scours every trace of the most boyish Beatle’s history in Liverpool and New York, Beach uncovers the poetic in dingy, sweating, underground bars, out-of-body concert experiences, and stolen wax museum heads. When Paul is found in the guise of a tribute band bassist, Beach explores those moments where obsession crosses over into possession, and love becomes an exercise in blind self-destruction.For anyone who has ever thought that if they could just get close enough, they would prove that their love is the truest.
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Faking It
$24.95A critical scrapbook collected from fifteen years of writing. Contains essays, reviews, interviews, journals, notes, and poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity.
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Falcon’s Egg
$19.95Falcon’s Egg, the sequel to Right to Know, is a fast-paced action-adventure. Discovering a plot to reassert Imperial control over the recently rediscovered Peregrine, Lorn Kymbal tracks the conspirators into the deepest and most dangerous reaches of the planet and beyond. Kymbal, a veteran of the war of liberation that almost cost his life, fights killer robots and his own inner demons as he tries to win freedom for himself and his planet.
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Fall in One Day
$19.99In the summer of 1973, a time of subversive drug culture and changing social roles, fifteen-year-old Joe Beck lives in a small Canadian city near the U.S. border where he watches dark-suited politicians lie on TV during something called Watergate. So when his best friend Brian goes missing, Joe has a hard time believing that adults ever tell the truth. Joe knows that if Brian is going to be found, it’s up to him. Eventually, he launches his own investigation, using a tape recorder–just like the American president–to help sift through the clues with the help of his older brother and their DJ stoner friend. With the unflinching honesty of a teenager’s-eye view, Joe embarks on a perilous and enlightening journey to decipher a mental institution diary full of secrets about a drug called LSD, uncover the truth about Brian’s father, and save his best friend./
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Fall On Your Knees
$20.95In an adaptation of the classic Canadian novel, this epic play follows three generations of a Cape Breton Island family in a tale of forbidden love, inescapable bonds, and devastating betrayals, all while harbouring secrets that threaten to shatter the family entirely.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young piano tuner named James Piper and thirteen-year-old Materia Mahmoud fall into a whirlwind romance. As their family grows, the couple is strained by dark revelations that lead to dangerous consequences. Their headstrong daughters Kathleen, Frances, Mercedes, and Lily grow up haunted but fiercely connected in ways they must learn to fully understand. A richly layered story by turns both heartbreaking and joyous, Fall On Your Knees is a vivid portrayal of love, desire, and the quest for truth and redemption.
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Faller
$19.95Faller mixes Roshoman style storytelling with traditional stories to describe the meeting, or juxtapositions, of a few characters on a Reservation. All of these characters are damaged in one way or the other. Faller is not narrative so much as bursts and flashes. It is not about what happens as much as moments in time. The stories fall together rather than follow each other. Faller is dark and funny in places, less sane and rational than yearning. Haunted. Not like every other book, Faller is the first work by an old young Indigenous writer, not trying to make sense of life on the Reservation, but giving a glimpse into the world he grew up in.
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Falling Backwards Into Mirrors
$18.95Falling Backwards Into Mirrors is a book that merges poetry and memoir. At the same time, it is a collection grounded in the body, naked and spare, wounded and wonderful. Through vivid, sensual images that evoke feeling, the speaker embraces the naked architecture of her own flesh and bones. In moments of give and take, this healing journey echoes the kind of deep explorations once undertaken by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. After a fall from a boat, water, distortions of light, and the blur of close reflection inspire the speaker to question the consistency of her own surface. She is hamstrung, literally and figuratively. She can’t stand unsupported. She can’t walk. She can’t sit. While supine for long stretches of time, her mirror becomes a vehicle for metaphor, for seeing, for reflecting, and refracting. Falling Backwards into Mirrors begins with a sudden trauma and moves forward as the surface of the speaker’s skin becomes like vellum, and landscape and love, family and community are grafted to hope.