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All Books in this Collection

Showing 3089–3104 of 9481 results

  • GWG

    GWG

    $29.95

    Winner, Alberta Historical Resources Foundation Heritage Award, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publications, and Redgees Legacy Award
    Shortlisted, Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize

    Remember pearl-snap Western shirts, Scrubbies jeans, and denim jackets, George W. Groovy, Cowboy Kings, Red Straps?

    Take a trip down memory lane and relive the GWG story! Remember the slogans “Anything Goes,” “They wear longer, because they’re made stronger,” and Wayne Gretzky’s declaration that “I grew up in GWGs”? GWGs have been a cultural icon in Canada since the company’s founding in 1911. Here, at long last, is the complete, lushly illustrated history of the Great Western Garment Company, whose products were staples for some generations and defined cool for others.

    This lavish book includes archival photographs, advertisements, product photos, and insights on the long history of this iconic Canadian company. Begun in Edmonton, GWG not only manufactured jeans, but also helped immigrant women support their families, becoming a model of management and labour working collaboratively. GWG eventually became the largest workwear manufacturing company in Canada, providing different styles of work and leisure clothing for men, women, and children, and for the military during both world wars. Although Levis acquired the company during the 1960s and ’70s and closed the last factories in 2004, the GWG brand remains a part of pop culture. It is firmly fixed in the Canadian psyche and still holds a place in Canadian hearts.

  • Gypsy Fugue

    Gypsy Fugue

    $24.95

    A life story sure to inspire a new movement of self-discovery and soul-searching for years to come. A story that captures a life richly lived, celebrating fantasy, passion and the ideals that lie within our soul. Who is to say that the outer stories of our lives are more important than the images that haunt our imagination? What if memoir could capture the vital pulse of our inner lives and track the mysterious affinities and longings we so often feel?

    From earliest childhood Marlene Schiwy was enthralled by colourful gypsies that filled her imagination and fantasy. As a young woman she created skirts with laces, embroideries, and beadwork that expressed the darkly shimmering mystery of those gypsies and wondered why they kept appearing in her dreams.

    Gypsy Fugue invites readers on a journey they will never forget. The author travels to Rajasthan, the original home of the Roma. In France, she joins thousands of Gypsies in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer during the annual Roma gathering to honour their patron Saint Sara. She embarks on her own Camino pilgrimage in Spain, birthplace of flamenco and deep song, then faces her mother’s shocking, wrongful death just days after her return. The music of Bach, the psychology of Jung, folktales, poetry, and alchemy keep her company as she meanders through a gypsy territory rich in colour, music, and dance. Running through the book is the scarlet thread of Marlene’s gypsy dreams.

    This book celebrates fantasy, yearning, and the strange unbidden passions that lie inside our souls. As we explore this gypsy landscape, what opens before us is a whole new way of imagining our lives.

  • Habitat

    Habitat

    $16.95

    Raine, unable to respond emotionally when her mother dies, finds herself at this group home, in a community that has little tolerance for its newest residents. The ensuing battle—over whether the group home stays or not—allows Raine to re-awaken her emotions through rage, and a political will she didn’t know existed in her.

  • Habs Nation

    Habs Nation

    $27.95

    The history of the Montreal Canadiens is not just a story about hockey. It’s also the story of how hockey’s most legendary team has always skated hand-in-hand with its home province of Quebec. Brendan Kelly takes a fresh look at the ups and downs of the Habs since the heyday of the “Flying Frenchmen” in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s and shows how the history of the team mirrors the tumultuous changes in Quebec over the past decades.

    Kelly talks to former Canadiens greats like Serge Savard and Bob Gainey, journalists, politicians, filmmakers and even to Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen, maybe the Canadiens’ most famous fan?and they tell the tale of a team and its unique bond with its local fans.

    The glory years of the Habs in the ’70s reflected the exciting times in Quebec back then. In the ’80s, the team and all of Quebec struggled to regain that former glory. However, in the past 25 years, both the team and Quebec have grappled to find their identity. One conclusion is that when the team’s roster was at its most Québécois it had its greatest success on the ice. Since Montreal’s last Quebec superstar, Patrick Roy, was unceremoniously booted out of town, the franchise has failed to win a Stanley Cup and has rarely been amongst the NHL’s elite squads.

    Everything changed for the Habs in 1995 when Serge Savard was fired as general manager and Roy was traded to the Colorado Avalanche?just as everything changed for Quebec that year with the razor-thin loss for the Yes side in the second referendum. Thirty years later, Stanley Cups and referendums are a distant memory for Quebecers.

    The Canadiens may no longer be the “Flying Frenchmen” winning Cups nearly every year but the ties that bind the team to the people remain as strong as ever.

  • Hagiography

    Hagiography

    $16.95

    Jen Currin’s acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in her new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new territory. These poems push life’s barely hidden strangeness into the light, and present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event. In Hagiography, mind and sense and the world they move through are interwoven to create a mysterious, familiar, vexing and continuously fascinating human drama.

    There are no saints in Hagiography, but there are many curious characters looking for spiritual truth. Hagiography is populated by seekers: ghosts, spiders, sisters, pilgrims, children, tigers, therapists, witches, grandfathers and birds. Hagiography starts with death and ends with birth. In between, life after life.

    Hagiography is a delight for the reader’s heart and mind – hagios, meaning sacred, plus graphein, to write. One lovely poem after another guides us through what holds us like a light.’ – Robin Blaser

    ‘Currin’s language is not so much surreal as it is devoted to the strangeness of what really happens to bodies and selves in the world … this book is a conversionnarrative … it is a story of how we believe language can change and how we believe change can speak.’

    – Aaron McCollough, author of Little Ease and Double Venus

  • Hair-Trigger

    Hair-Trigger

    $17.95

    Well into his forties, Derrick Rowe finds himself chasing stray women and stealing cash from the bookstore he manages. Having decided it’s time to stop spinning his wheels, he’s recently turned to robbing banks. Meanwhile, he bails his friend Jack Lofton out of jail, a burly fellow in an alcoholic free-fall of his own. Rowe soon enlists both Lofton and a tough young clerk at the bookstore in another heist, setting the stage for an armed bank robbery, a drive-by shooting, and further complications for all. Told from different perspectives in Clark’s signature clear, concise prose, Hair-Trigger follows the various trails and exploits that lead to a violent climax involving Rowe, Lofton, the police, and several gangsters.

  • Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract

    Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract

    $21.95

    A cultural planner’s immodest proposal: change how we think about children and we just might change the world.

    We live in an ‘adultitarian’ state, where the rules are based on very adult priori- ties and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and power- less; they understand they’re subject to an authoritarian regime, whether they buy into it or not. But their unique perspectives also offer incredible potential for social, cultural and economic innovation.

    Cultural planner and performance director Darren O’Donnell has been collaborating with children for years through his company, Mammalian Diving Reflex; their most well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (exactly what it sounds like) has been performed internationally. O’Donnell suggests that working with children in the cultural industries in a manner that maintains a large space for their participation can be understood as a pilot for a vision of a very different role for young people in the world – one that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child considers a ‘new social contract.’

    Haircuts by Children is a practical proposal for the inclusion of children in as many realms as possible, not only as an expression of their rights, but as a way to intervene in the world and to disrupt the stark economic inequalities perpetuated by the status quo. Deeply practical and wildly whimsical, Haircuts by Children might actually make total sense.

    ‘No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O’Donnell’s talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses … The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.’

    The Globe and Mail

  • Half Life

    Half Life

    $15.95

    Two nursing home residents, both in their eighties, meet and fall in love, rekindling what might have been a wartime romance.

    Had they previously met somewhere else under different circumstances? Why is their love so troubling for their children? Indeed, the light at dusk is sometimes warmer and more enveloping than that of the midday sun. Characters navigate between being and appearance, between cowardice and dissoluteness. The award-winning author of Possible Worlds brings us this poetic and moving meditation on identity, aging, and the nature of memory. What shines through when memory fades away?

  • Half Rock

    Half Rock

    $19.95

    “Sick for the language nan speaks,” Robin Durnford’s poems pursue the “dervish verbs” of a torquey local idiom, their punchy rhythms and visceral imagery invoking a sort of barbaric yawp for Newfoundland’s south coast. Whether she’s writing of childbirth, family lore or teenage shenanigans, her work is rooted, her “tongue still twists / in the deserted weeds of barren banks / for recitations, caribou, heroic deeds, and blessèd / fishing coast I cannot leave.”

  • Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True

    Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True

    $19.95

    The world of Dave Paddon’s recitations is quirky, riotously funny, and utterly unique; a place of tall tales and plain foolishness, where fog is so thick you can use it for cannonballs, and a polar bear hijacks a bingo tournament. Berry pickers turn combatants and the result is a bay full of jam; a local handyman turns doctor and uses the spare parts in his shed to patch up his neighbours.

    Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True brings together thirteen recitations long-loved by Paddon’s many local fans. Great for older kids and grown-ups alike, this is a wonderful cross-over book. Paddon has been called Newfoundland and Labrador’s Robert Service, and for good reason. His recitations are non-stop fun, fully engaging the verve and tang of the province’s rich language. (The book has a glossary at the back for those from up-along.) These were written to be recited, and readers will surely find themselves reading aloud to family and friends.Duncan Major’s illustrations capture the energy and wit of the recitations. While this is Major’s first trade publication, he and Paddon have collaborated on several letterpress chapbooks featuring Paddon’s recitations and Major’s artwork; they are a perfect pairing.

  • Half-Cracked

    Half-Cracked

    $18.95

    Sisters Sissy and Yewina have been on their own for who knows how long exactly. It’s just them (and their hens) in a weathered farmhouse miles from town. Their rural, woodsy East Coast community has been losing residents for years, but the almost-forgotten stories have lived on for the sisters in different ways. While Yewina is more guarded and level-headed, dreamer Sissy has a flair for twisting fact with fantasy. When Scott, a folklorist from Scottsdale, Arizona, shows up at their door in hopes of chronicling whispers, he’s in for much more of a story than he expected. This unique and quirky ode to folklore storytelling and to small lives lived large illuminates how living our own truths can make us legends.

  • Half-Earth

    Half-Earth

    $21.95

    In his second full-length poetry collection, Half-Earth, Blair Trewartha explores what it means to survive in a world beset by climate crisis and the ever-distorting realities of digitized human life. Throughout, the poet weaves dreamlike narratives and excavates scenes of deep history that connect to both family and illness, all the while questioning how to raise young children through a pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than sermonizing or catastrophizing, Trewartha presents moments that exist on the brink of both the past and the future, replete with prehistoric tusks frozen in forgotten tundra, a decaying family farmhouse, firestorms, the zeitgeist by algorithm, and a toddler’s visualization of death. Half-Earth is a long-awaited beacon from one of Canada’s finest poets.

  • Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter

    Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter

    $24.95

    Intergenerational conflicts unfold in a context of environmental change and degradation in this eerily original debut short fiction collection.

     

    Emily Paskevics takes her characters–mothers, daughters, fathers, sisters–into the wilderness to lose themselves in their primal nature . . . or to find what they’ve always been missing, as they struggle in a borderland between irrevocable environmental change and hope for ecological connection and healing.

     

    A man searches for his wife and son who have mysteriously vanished into the woods while they were exploring a small island in Northern Ontario– are they truly lost, or did the woods rescue them from an inadequate husband and father? A mother takes her daughters into the remote wilderness to tell them about a harrowing encounter with a mountain lion, only to find that her story has already been told and is no longer quite her own. An old woman stands on a frozen river, contemplating her own death, until she locks eyes with a curious fox. A retired professor-turned-beekeeper has an affair with a former student, and ultimately learns that she can live alone on the edge of wilderness.

    Subtly subverting traditional nature writing, in Paskevics’ stories the forest is burning, rivers are flooding, and the exploitation of land looms large. At a time when human-animal sharing of territory is more fraught than ever, these enthralling tales challenge us to consider how our own existence intersects with the wild creatures we share the earth with, and to understand our place in a threatened ecosystem.

  • Halfsoul Part 1: Tale

    Halfsoul Part 1: Tale

    $30.00

    For those willing and desperate enough, a trade for power can be made for half of your soul. Four individuals are hired by HSEA (Halfsoul Extermination Association) to hunt and exterminate those who trade their souls, which quickly becomes a struggle of mixed feelings and personal demons.

    Tale is a problem child. His new job gives him a chance to right his wrongs – but only if he’s able to escape the shadow of his past.

  • Halfsoul Part 2: Nalia

    Halfsoul Part 2: Nalia

    $30.00

    For those willing and desperate enough, a trade for power can be made for half of your soul. Four individuals are hired by HSEA (Halfsoul Extermination Association) to hunt and exterminate those who trade their souls, which quickly becomes a struggle of mixed feelings and personal demons.

    Nalia struggles with the scars of being an outcast after decades of belittlement of her invisible disability. Working for HSEA has given her a place to fit in, but her conflicting feelings about the morals of HSEA makes her question her true wishes.

  • Halfsoul Part 3: Zach

    Halfsoul Part 3: Zach

    $30.00

    For those willing and desperate enough, demons offer a trade of power for half of your soul. Those who agree to this trade become halfsouls, but also become targets of the Halfsoul Extermination Association (HSEA).

    Following the journey of four individuals hired by HSEA, Zach is finding it hard to adjust to life ever since he ran from the HSEA and his parents, who run the
    organisation. Now, Zach must learn to draw the line that separates him from his parents, the fine line between love and safety, and from guilt to empowerment. Despite his sense of solitude, Zach is not as alone as he thinks. Halfsoul explores what it means to lose a part of yourself and how to get it back.