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All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 241–256 of 9311 results
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A Night for the Lady
$15.95A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, an exploration emerges of the roles of woman within local as well as historic literary and global situations. The poems draw together diverse figures from world literature, world religions and myths to lay open the experience of human beings within the “brown-feminine.” Identifying and synthesizing connections across a wide palette of human experience, this collection challenges the divisions of personal and global, indigenous and “everyone else,” all the while celebrating both the humanity and the divinity of the Lady. Playful, erotic and occasionally harrowing, this collection bundles together experimental and inspirational work from a longstanding voice of conscience in Canadian letters. Once again, Arnott carries us into the most intimate terrain, casts her net widely, catches us up.
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A Northern Woman
$16.95In her second volume of poetry, acclaimed writer Jacqueline Baldwin examines life in the North as a poet, feminist and environmentalist.
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A Number of Stunning Attacks
$18.95A raw and intimate testimony of the spatial and emotional difficulty of facing the self and the other
A Number of Stunning Attacks contributes to the ongoing association of fragmented forms and women’s writing, yet the insistent repetitions and crystallized imagery produce something more coherent than a fragment and more dynamic than a single whole. Drawing on a line of innovative women’s poetics in Canada, these poems recall the radical experiments of Lisa Robertson, Erìn Moure, and Gail Scott. Intoxicated by disorientation, the reader will ask: Which city is this? Which woman is this? Which reader am I?
“Fans of Lisa Roberston and Erín Moure will find lots to love in these pages.”—Open Book
“MacEachern’s poetry demands attention to the stunning beauty of her craft.”—Quill & Quire, starred review
“A smart and stellar debut.”—Winnipeg Free Press
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A One-Handed Novel
$24.00A hilarious and captivating novel that challenges expectations and assumptions about women’s sexuality and living with disability. Hilarious, captivating and sexy, this new novel by Kim Clark challenges expectations and assumptions about women’s sexuality and living with disability.
When Melanie Farrell visits the neurologist she is told her multiple sclerosis is progressing. She isn’t surprised by the diagnosis, but what does shock her is the related prognosis. It seems, based on a new study, that she only has six orgasms left. Six! Fortyish and single, Mel must decide how best to spend, save or at least not waste those precious orgasms. Mel’s plans to make the most of her sex life proves easier said than done when other realities of living with MS demand even more of her attention. Should she max out her credit card on an experimental procedure in Costa Rica? How can she work to financially support herself and get the care she needs when she can hardly leave the house? Where are her friends when she needs them? Her choices become even more confusing when one day she meets a man who loves butterflies and is good with his hands. But is romance what she’s really looking for right now? Or is she looking for something even more?
Funny, honest, heartbreaking and hopeful, A One-Handed Novel offers a fresh take on independence and disability, ambition and love, and the communities that help us cope when our bodies and our desires are ever-changing.
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A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
$19.00An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things.
A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature–constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past–through zoos, apiaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author’s grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where “arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades,” and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster’s best work.
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A Painted Elephant
$16.95A Painted Elephant tells a tale of love – unrequited, of course, like all the best stories. Our Juliet? A lonely Indian elephant, newly arrived at the Calgary Zoo from Holland, with a penchant for moonlight escapes. Her Romeo? The wooden Maytag Man statue on Calgary’s 9th Street, with his sad eyes, his oaken thighs, his aloofness. Punished for her romantic escapades, our heroine is made to suffer a thirty-day quarantine during which she meditates on the true meaning of elephantine love. And finally, when she emerges from her solitary confinement – well, the outcome is as tragic as it is inspiring.
This book, the first from Jill Hartman, is a tragi-comic narrative poem about pachyderm passion. Nina Simone, Pig Latin, German opera and a chorus of Canadian poets play in the background. Incense, speculaas cookies and cheap flowers scent the air. And goddesses, myrmidons and shipwrecks appear with some frequency.
With fractured, playful language, the smart and funny A Painted Elephant trumpets an important new voice in Canadian poetry.
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A Palace in Paradise
$22.95A Palace in Paradise is a novel about the complex Iranian refugee and immigrant community in Toronto and the way in which one woman’s death changes the lives of many others. The people in this community are connected by family ties, cultural ties, romance, and the fact that, as immigrants, they not only share a culture, but they also share a past of political violence. Several were at one time imprisoned in Evin, a notorious jail in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Some were unable to withstand the daily torture and constant physical pain they were subjected to in Evin, and thus began to cooperate with the jail’s authorities and participate in the torturing, even execution, of other prisoners. Many are incapable of having a normal life even after being released from the prison, and having immigrated to Canada to start a new life. Parvaneh, a social worker, accepts her friend, Ferdous, even though she may be a traitor. She is pitted against Nadereh, a refugee who learns that Ferdous was a traitor and feels duped. Guilt is a major theme in this book as characters deal with remorse from having caused the death of another by accident, or by not acting sooner, or by betrayal to the authorities. Life in exile is not easy and some succumb to their dark past with fatal consequences, while others struggle to forgive and find solace.
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A Passion to Succeed
$19.95David Singh tells the inspiring story of his rise from abject poverty in the Third World to become the leader of Fortune Financial, once Canada’s largest financial planning company. It all came crashing down, but Singh’s drive and passion are now at the helm of his own bank, Destiny Investment Bank, and several new, dynamic businesses. Singh shares the highs and lows of his own powerful experiences, and offers original insights into the meaning of Family, Education, Career, Health, and the Emotional, Spiritual, and Financial aspects of all of our lives.
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A Peeled Wand
$14.95A Peeled Wand: Selected Poems of Anne Szumigalski,/I> offers a succinct, authoritative overview of the work of one of Canada’s most remarkable and original poets., bringing some of her finest poems back into print.
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A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: paratexts
$18.00A collection of engaging essays on writing and material culture that addresses our ability to know or understand ?things?. In A Peepshow with Views of the Interior, acclaimed fiction writer and poet. Aislinn Hunter writes lyrical paratexts on topics ranging from Charlotte Brontë?s dogs, bird displays in museums, peep shows, and clocks and convalescence.
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A People’s Citizenship Guide
$14.95In 2009, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government changed the contents of the official citizenship guide that is given to all recent immigrants. The new version contained a lot more military history and plenty of information about the monarchy, but little about public programs such as medicare or education, or our rich history of social justice movements. Ignoring the work and democratic struggles of generations of newcomers, it presumes that new immigrants need to be taught how to “take responsibility” for their families. In short, the official guide outlines an exceptionally narrow, conservative view of Canadian politics and society. In People’s Citizenship Guide, a group of progressive scholars offer an alternative citizenship guide: a lively, political, humane–and more honest–alternative to Stephen Harper’s version of the story.
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A People’s History of Quebec
$19.95Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and “embrothered the peoples” they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.Connecting everyday life to the events that emerged as historical turning points in the life of a people, this book sheds new light on Quebec’s 450-year history––and on the historical forces that lie behind its two recent efforts to gain independence. -
A Perfect Bowl of Pho
$18.95Nam, a procrastination-prone Vietnamese Canadian university student, sets out with the vague ambition to write a musical about his diaspora as embodied by food, particularly the world-famous noodle soup pho. What follows is pure meta musical, genre-bending through thousands of years of history, featuring rapping ancient kings, communist spies, dancing sharks and refugees, and awkward first dates in suburbia. However, Nam eventually finds himself caught between his different characters as each argues what pho (the food and the show) truly represents, and he struggles to find an answer that will satisfy everyone—in the end, isn’t this just a bunch of silly soup songs?
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A Perfect Day to Die
$20.00A widower meets a man who can change the weather. A middle-aged woman attempts to freeze to death; A young man attempts to starve to death. A young woman navigates in a foreign city, constructing a new identity. A dancer is forced to accept a ride home from a bar comedian. A divorcee meets an elderly Japanese woman… From the sombre offices of Tokyo to the ESL classrooms of Toronto, see how they find their own therapeutic ways to reconcile with their loss, agony, and despair.
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A Personal Calligraphy
$35.00Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Writers’ Association Prize for Non-Fiction
Mary Pratt is famous throughout Canada for her luminous paintings and prints. Her 1995 exhibition, The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light, drew record-breaking crowds on its tour of Canada. It also resulted in an unprecedented amount of press coverage on the biographical content of her work. The accompanying book by Tom Smart sold more than 6,000 copies and made almost every “best book of the year” list in Canada.
Mary Pratt: A Personal Calligraphy features Mary’s own writings, drawn and adapted from her personal journals, the essays that she has written for numerous publications ranging from The Globe and Mail to The Glass Gazette, and the lectures that she has given at many public events. For the first time, Mary has written her own book in her own words, rather than rely on others to write about her. Treating both public and private issues, she writes of her childhood in Fredericton — her connection to her family, life in Salmonier as a young mother, her decision to pursue her own career as an artist, and her complicated relationship with her husband, Christopher. She writes about public issues — the death of Joey Smallwood, the 50th anniversary of Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation, and the cod fishery. She writes about the images that interest her and influence her art, and the process of painting. Like her paintings, Pratt’s writing packs a sucker punch. At first it appears to be a paean to the pleasures of house and home, until the more disturbing aspects subtly reveal themselves. Ironing shirts become an erotic act; a memory of visiting the local market with her grandmother conjures images of violence; dead chickens, meticulously plucked, and carcasses of cattle, meticulously flayed, suggest rituals of sacrifice.
In Spring of 2001, Mary Pratt was awarded the Newfoundland and Labrador Writers’ Association prize for Non-fiction for A Personal Calligraphy.
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A Picnic at the Lighthouse
$12.95A Picnic at the Lighthouse is the heartwarming story of a young boy and his father who spend a fun-filled day together at a lighthouse. The book is about the special moments they share and the depth of a parent’s love.