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All Books in this Collection
Showing 257–272 of 9481 results
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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.
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A Place Called Sorry
$22.95Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie-as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her- believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on his cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush miles away, a place called Sorry. After tragedy strikes her family, Addie holds her sorrows close to her heart. Only later will she learn that her grandfather too has lived with his own secret torment for more than seventy years. It will take his slipping into blindness and dementia before the dark spectre from his past emerges, leaving her the one responsible for its consequences. And when that day arrives, when Chauncey Beale’s past intersects with Addie’s present, it will change her future in ways that she, and those she loves, could never have imagined.
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A Place for People Like Us
$25.00When Hannah meets Jillian, their connection is instant and addictive. Both unique and talented, but equally adrift in trying to determine and then pursue their goals, they become each other’s anchor until Jillian’s lies threaten to unravel the lives they’ve built.
In this insightful exploration of friendship and identity, Judaism and cults, and hypocrisy and family Danila Botha brings her signature empathy and nuance into worlds few are intimately familiar with, with riveting results. Poignant and moving, A Place for People Like Us is a story that will stay with you for a long time.
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A Place in Mind
$19.95A Place in Mind: Designing Cities for the 21st Century is the result of Avi Friedman’s worldwide quest for successful environments where people congregate and feel comfortable. Whether he writes of the conviviality of a teahouse in Istanbul; the serenity of Assisi; the squatter settlements of Tijuana, or the architectural harmony of neighbourhoods in London, Friedman conveys his excitement at discovering people-friendly places–antidotes to social isolation.
His search for unique spots took him to spiritual places, workplaces, towns’ squares, very cold places and warm ones. They made themselves known unexpectedly, and affected him in some way. He went on to look into their distant and near history, origins and effect on civilizations, the people that inhabit them, and above all, to reflect on what made them special.
Published originally in 2010, this is a completely revised edition including new essays and photographs.
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A Place in the Dark/ The Glamour of Evil
$20.00This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America’s behalf. The central character is an ex-private investigator, of Utica, who is an Italian-American, beset by his long-standing guilt for his deferment from the draft during the Vietnam era and now suffering from serious heart disease. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males, especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in organized crime. How they secretly desire intimacy with such people whom they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a legendary American Mafioso–who loved modern fiction and French existentialism–Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte’s daughter, a crisis that a connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte–for an unusual price.
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A Place of Secrets
$24.95A tragic double homicide, or a hidden serial killer? Sergeant Alice Morrow is determined to solve a mystery spanning sixty years.
When Evelyn Massey is found dead in her home, it seems like an open-and-shut case: Evelyn was one hundred years old — natural causes. But Sergeant Alice Morrow learns that traces of poison were found in Mrs. Massey’s blood. Then the remains of a body some sixty years deceased are discovered in the dead woman’s basement.
Two murders, decades apart. Are they connected?
In the second book in Shane Peacock’s award-winning Northern Gothic Mystery series, Morrow and former NYPD homicide detective Hugh Mercer unearth stunning truths about Evelyn Massey’s life and learn of other disappearances over the past sixty years. Was a serial killer quietly at work in this Ontario town? Could the murderer still be among its citizens, hidden in plain sight?
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A Possible Landscape
$14.00Maureen Harris’s first volume of poetry evokes “a possible landscape,” where the stories that subtly shape us blend with the moments that we are. Here is an Eden where Eve longs for the serpent’s “green quiver,” his “sibilant caress,” where a snake tires of his lover “wearing/the same skin day-out, day-in.” The poems in the first section of this book are sharp new takes on old stories, at once angry, witty and thoughtful. With grace, compassion and sparkle, the rest of the book explores the self in the world of the late twentieth century, the seeming contradictions of the third world, and the ordinary magic of an evening spent with friends.
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A Possible Life
$19.95Daniel Clevenger has a successful career as a professor and writer in Winnipeg. But his two university-aged sons are growing up and Daniel is still haunted by memories of his late wife. Then he meets Magda, an attractive, recently-divorced art historian, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance.
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A Pretty Sight
$17.95Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time’s frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara’s new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay.
‘O’Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at which he excels, here is a writer prepared to put feelings on the line and to argue his case with the reader. This is proud, felt, and affecting work — I can’t think of many other poets so prepared to engage and so equipped to succeed.’ —Simon Armitage
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A Priest in Hell
$19.95“Living in jail is like living in a foreign country. The customs and culture are different, almost alien, and so is the language.”
A Priest in Hell is the compelling true story of life in the U.S. prison system. The book takes fodder for popular reality shows (like Cops) to a new level, giving the reader a frighteningly real sense of the tastes, sounds, smells, culture and lifestyle of jail.
On November 5, 2005, Randall Radic was arrested and charged with ten felonies. Desperation for a monied lifestyle led Radic, a pastor in the northern California community of Ripon, to first mortgage the home provided to him by his church, before selling off the church itself. His crime is exposed when a large bank deposit catches the attention of the authorities. Radic is subsequently convicted of embezzlement, forgery, and fraud, and he spends six months in a California jail before a plea bargain facilitates his release.
At 54, Radic is well above the average age of the prison population, and his background as a priest makes him both a target and a confidante within the prison walls. Through the book, Radic introduces the stories of several of his fellow inmates, detailing their crimes, cases, and struggles. He eventually earns his plea bargain by sharing confessions of a fellow inmate with the district attorney.
Radic considers his time in jail Dante’s version of Hell. This is the gritty, painful reality of crime and consequence.
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A Profession of Hope
$20.00Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award
Gold Medal for the Green Living category in the Living Now Book Awards
Finalist for the High Plains Book Award for creative nonfiction
“This is not the story of a ready-made farm, complete with generations of history, carefully tended tools and sturdy clapboard farmhouse.” In 2006 Jenna Butler and her partner, Thomas, purchased “160 acres more or less” of rough northern bush. They knew they weren’t purchasing anything more than hard work and hope but still they headed up every weekend to clear a spot in those woods where they could plant their first crops.
With the warm wit of Barbara Kingsolver and the stark beauty of Sharon Butala’s writings on the prairie, Jenna Butler shares her journey with us. From beating a hasty retreat from the first overwhelming swarm of mosquitoes, to discussing worm poop with local farmers and becoming forever more the crazy hippie teachers, the stories of Larch Farm spill out of these pages. A Profession of Hope: Farming on the edge of the Grizzly Trail is a beguiling read, as rich and promising as freshly turned earth.
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A Progressive Traditionalist
$45.00Winner of the Heritage Toronto Award
John M. Lyle (1872–1945) was an anomaly among architects: a Beaux-Arts classicist who nevertheless found much inspiration in modernism, allowing his own traditionalist practice to be affected in form and detail by a brave new emphasis on minimalism and indigenous influence. His early works, including countless legendary banks and residences, as well as the iconic Union Station and Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, are exemplary of Beaux-Arts classicism; his later bank designs in Halifax, Calgary and Toronto display a modernist shift and see him championing an idiosyncratic and authentic regional consciousness.
A Progressive Traditionalist traces this aesthetic trajectory through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, documenting Lyle’s training at Yale and in Paris, his early career in New York and his later successin Toronto, including his tireless efforts to raise the profile of the profession through teaching, writing, curating and lecturing, and his attempts to pave the way for a uniquely Canadian architecture.
‘A book on Lyle is long overdue. Glenn McArthur has given us an elegant and thoughtful publication which sets a new standard for documenting our architectural legacy.’
– Bruce Kuwabara, KPMB Architects
‘Most Canadian architects are simply architects who practice in Canada; but for John Lyle, being a Canadian architect meant practicing Canadian architecture in Canada. Glenn McArthur brings Lyle, brilliant designer and passionate cultural nationalist, vividly to life.’ – Christopher Hume
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A Pug Called Poppy
$14.95One day Poppy the Pug meets Smudge the Maine Coon cat at the park, and so begins an extraordinary friendship and a series of adventures ranging from a disastrous coffee-and-play group to a terrible house fire. These eight linked stories also introduce Poppy’s human companion Danielle, cheeky Jackson, Baby Gillian, the dog-hating Wenda, and the dreaded Psycho-Cat, proving that no matter what the situation, life is never dull when there’s a glossy black pug in the neighbourhood!
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A Quiet Night and a Perfect End
$17.95The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They’re peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people’s extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone.
Roig takes her characters, and her readers, on Munro-like passages through miscarriages, infidelities, and disappointments through the motions of everyday life. It may be coping with the feeling of academic failure or coming to terms with the loss of a child who has died too young, an unexpected pregnancy or the intrusion of house guests who are no longer friends. What is uplifting, finally, is the achievement of forgiveness, the small, daily victories over despair. These are stories that remind us why our days and nights are so worth living.