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Showing 3297–3312 of 9248 results
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How Linda Died
$21.95A husband’s unflinching account of his wife’s unravelling. How Linda Died is Frank Davey’s powerful and painfully precise account of his wife’s fight against an inoperable brain tumor.
Linda’s proud refusal to tell anyone about her deteriorating condition left Frank with few people to confide in. As Linda’s mind fell victim to cancer, Frank took to recording his memories with increasingly compulsive and private intensity. He found himself reckoning with the demons of a past that Linda could no longer share and mourning the loss of a present she could no longer enjoy. At the same time, he found himself reflecting on the habits, rituals, and diversions that punctuated his life. How could he reconcile his passion for showing prize-winning Great Danes with’s debilitating illness? How could he talk about the great wines he loved or the fabulous coq au vin they had shared right after he talked about the clinical details of her approaching death or her bizarre behaviour?
What makes this book so special — and in many ways so brilliantly odd — is the life-defining contrasts it records, often in a single breath. At once a shattering portrayal of a devastating disease and an obsessive record of one man’s self-interrogation amidst a welter of conflicting emotions, How Linda Died is a gripping memoir, beautiful in its morbidity and searing in its relentless refusal to sidestep the truth.
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How Loveta Got Her Baby
$19.95Two young men and a girl go scavenging for fossils—but find something entirely different instead. A girl inherits a baby from the estate of her older sister. An apparently aimless young man turns out to have surprising powers. From Journey Prize-nominee Nicholas Ruddock comes an outstanding new collection of short fiction. How Loveta Got Her Baby is a set of linked stories about growing up unsure of the world and trying to stand up straight, about love from afar and love up close, love imagined, love going right and wrong and sideways, about being young and imperfect. Stories that are by turns, funny, tender, sexy, painful, passionate, heartbreaking, and joyous: Ruddick writes with deft insight into who we are, and how we change.
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How the Blessed Live
$18.95On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes.
But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle – Vancouver, Montreal, the island – that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family.
Part Egyptian myth, part Alice in Wonderland, How the Blessed Live is an ethereally quiet, unexpected debut from a novelist to be watched.
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How the Cougar Came to be Called the Ghost Cat/Ta’n Petalu Telui’tut Skite’kmujewe
$17.99The human need to belong is very powerful, so much so that we often sacrifice parts of who we are in order to be accepted. This is the tale of a young cougar, Ajig, who makes this sacrifice – and pays dearly. A curious and adventurous cougar, Ajig decides to build a new home in a strange forest. When he finds that all of the animals in the forest are afraid of him, Ajig agrees to stop behaving like a cougar so that he can make friends. But when Ajig tries to return to his birthplace, he learns that he is no longer welcome. Lost between two worlds, the young cougar becomes a “ghost cat.” This beautifully illustrated book, written in both Mi’kmaw and English, reflects the experiences of First Nations peoples’ assimilation into the Euro-Canadian school system, but speaks to everyone who is marginalized or at risk.
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How to Avoid Huge Ships
$20.00Both “grave and brave, serious and hilarious”–new poems from a Governor General’s Award-winning poet.
How to Avoid Huge Ships, Julie Bruck’s fourth collection of poetry, is a book of arguments and spells against the ambushes of age. This is, of course, a pointless exercise with a rich history. Bruck’s new poems excavate a middle zone¾as old parents wither and regress, while the young declare their independence. Parents grow down, children up, and it’s from the uncomfortable in-between that these poems peer into what Philip Larkin describes as “the long slide.” But what if we haven’t reached the end of the infinite adolescence we thought we’d been promised? We’re still here in this world of flying ottomans, alongside a middle-schooler named Dow Jones, and the prehistoric miracle of a blue heron’s foot. We may be afraid, but we’re still amused–sometimes, even awed.
Looking squarely at the way things are, glossing over none of the absurdities and injustices of contemporary life, Julie Bruck pays ardent attention to it all. This is a subtle art, restrained. Its power often lies in what is not said right out but which fires up in a reader. The touch is light, even when the subject is heavy. One has a steady sense of being trusted to catch and feel the intangible muchness housed in deceptively plain poems.
“She is the poet laureate of aftermath, of what we do in the wake of things. She picks up the broken pieces of what’s left, and these she patches together, as she can, into beautifully-wrought poems that bear eloquent witness to what remains.” ¾Seán Kennedy
“Alert and precise, perceptive and measured, Julie Bruck’s poems calibrate situations both grave and brave, serious and hilarious, whilst avoiding the ‘large ships’ of heavy-handed conclusion. Here are genuine smarts, mature talent, and a wide-angle vision.” –Sharon Thesen
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How to Be Eaten by a Lion
$18.95From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon (“the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt”), to the salmon run in British Columbia (“The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know”), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.Startling and haunting, the poems delve into the ways in which these moments are transformative, beautiful and unexpected. Being eaten by a lion is a gift rather than a loss, an opportunity for grace: “Instead, focus on your life, / its crimson liquor he grows drunk on. / Notice the way the red highlights his face, / how the snub nose is softened, the lips made / fuller; notice his deft musculature, his rapture.”Lyrical and rich with visceral imagery, How to Be Eaten by a Lion lingers, exploring the world with an eye for detail and an ear for music.
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How to Be Found
$19.95A young adult novel about inner-city teens who live on a razor’s edge and understand that chosen family is just as important as blood
Michie and her best friend, Trissa, grew up like sisters in a ramshackle duplex owned by their single moms. But now that they’re sixteen, their differences in identity and experience have caused a rift. Michie’s an introvert obsessed with a book called A Girl’s Guide to Murder. Shiny, extroverted Trissa, on the other hand, dances at the hottest nightclub in town.
One night, Michie wakes up to find Trissa missing, having left only a cryptic note. The cops write her off as a party girl who’s probably already met a foul end, and the mothers fall apart from fear and grief, but Michie refuses to believe it. Enlisting help from her friend Anwar, who she’s been in love with forever, Michie sets off to look for Trissa, knowing she’s the only one who will. The search takes them into unfamiliar, dangerous territory: the backrooms of Trissa’s luxury nightclub, dark alleyways, the online sex industry, and rural cottage country.
As she begins to unravel Trissa’s secrets against a backdrop of cold authority figures, shady characters, and a serial killer targeting girls in the city, Michie knows she’s plunging into danger – but she’s determined to find her chosen sister and to bring her home safe.
Ages 14 and up.
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How to Breathe Underwater
$22.95How to Breathe Underwater
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How to Breathe Water
$24.95A road trip through the prairies prompts acclaimed writer Sharon Butala to unearth the stories of the natural world around her, and at the same time revisit her own personal histories.
After an isolating and demoralizing year during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friend invites Sharon Butala to join her on a road trip – together they will drive the thirteen hundred kilometers from Calgary to Winnipeg, stopping as they please along the way. Sharon, relieved for a change of scenery, is keen to see again some of the locations that have been significant to her life on the prairies, including the ranch she lived on for thirty-three years with her husband before his death.
But along the way, the sites they visit – landmarks of Indigenous history, sites where her ancestors struggled to eke out a living – prompt Sharon to unearth her own personal history. She sifts through memories of a difficult childhood, of traumas deeply buried, of relationships both complicated and gratifying. Taking stock of the people and places she has lost and left behind brings her to the ultimate confrontation – with mortality – which she explores with uncommon wisdom and frankness.
Her most intimate work to date, Sharon Butala’s How to Breathe Water is a love letter to the lands and waters of the prairies and a stirring exploration of the places and moments that mark and mold our lives.
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How to Build a Boat
$24.95Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • Shortlisted for the 2023 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year • One of the Globe and Mail‘s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • One of the Globe 100’s Best Books of 2023 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 • A NYPL Book of the Day
Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of certain objects, books with dust jackets, rivers, cats, and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he wants most in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked, and at his new school, despite the daily barrage of bullies and cathedral bells, he meets two teachers who might be able to help him, though each struggles against inertias of their own.
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy’s irrepressible dream finds expression through a community propelled by love out of grief. Lyrical and compassionate, it’s a novel about the courage of conviction and the power of the imagination to transform—and how sometimes the best way to break free of old walls is to build something beautiful within them.
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How to Dance in this Rarefied Air
$20.95Now entering his nineties, Rienzi Crusz is widely published, and respected and loved for his unabashedly romantic and finely crafted poetry, though always existing below the mainstream radar.
How to Dance in this Rarefied Air offers select and new poems setting out his journey as a poet writing in Canada since the 1970s. It offers a poetics fashioned to meet the demands of writing on the cusp between two worlds, hence the songs of exile, the idioms of defiance and survival, a poetry fashioned to meet the existential concerns of the immigrant encounter. But Crusz has gone beyond the theme of mere displacement, by confronting themes such as love, politics, nature, God, and poetics itself. And always there remains the self-conscious, bordering on the postmodern, and, above all, a delightful irony.
Introduced by Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
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How to Die: A Book About Being Alive
$21.95A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death—and an argument for how it can make us happy.
“He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book about Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.
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How to Examine a Wolverine
$19.95Crammed with useful info, funny recollections, heartfelt anecdotes, and lots of cute furry creatures, a collection for all animal lovers!
This collection of over 60 stories and essays, drawn from Dr. Schott’s 30 years in small animal practice, covers an astonishing breadth of experiences, emotions, and species. Schott has tales of creatures ranging from tiny honeybees to massive Burmese pythons, although the emphasis is on dogs and cats and the interesting, often quirky, people who love them. He also doles out advice on current topics such as CBD oil, raw diets, and COVID-19, as well as the mysteries of catnip, dog flatulence, and duck erectile dysfunction. Schott’s candor gives the reader a behind-the-scenes look at a profession that is much admired but often misunderstood. What is it really like to be a veterinarian? More to the point, what is it really like to be a veterinarian when confused pet parents call at 2:00 a.m.? Or when your patient bolts for the road? Or when you’re asked to spay a dog on a resort’s kitchen table? Readers will also learn how to make a sheep sit on its bum and, yes, how to examine a wolverine.
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How to Fail as a Popstar
$18.95The first play by multi-media artist Vivek Shraya, about fame and personal transformation.
Described as “cultural rocket fuel” by Vanity Fair, Vivek Shraya is a multi-media artist whose art, music, novels, and poetry and children’s books explore the beauty and the power of personal and cultural transformation. How to Fail as a Popstar is Vivek’s debut theatrical work, a one-person show that chronicles her journey from singing in shopping malls to “not quite” pop music superstardom with beguiling humor and insight. A reflection on the power of pop culture, dreams, disappointments, and self-determination, this astonishing work is a raw, honest, and hopeful depiction of the search to find one’s authentic voice.
The book includes colour photographs from the show’s 2020 production in Toronto, and a foreword by its director Brendan Healy.
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How to Get Along With Women
$16.95Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better or for worse-we see ourselves for what we truly are.
“How to Get Along With Women is at once stunning and daring.”—Canada Arts Connect
“De Mariaffi’s writing is biting and captivating.”—The Book Stylist
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How to Get There From Here
$16.95Malls and Velcro, television and art galleries, restaurants and bars, drugs and alcohol are the backdrops and props of modern life in the city, but even the disenchanted and confused benefit from the ever-changing constellations and confrontations with other people and other dreams.