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Showing 321–336 of 9481 results
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A Tale of Two Divas
$24.95A Tale of Two Divas tells the story of two Canadian singers who began as soloists in church choirs, but eventually moved on to spectacular careers. Soprano Jean Forsyth and contralto Edith Miller knew each other well. They met when nineteen-year-old Edith studied vocal music with Jean, almost twenty-five years her senior, in Winnipeg in 1894. After that their paths crisscrossed. This tale of two voices contrasts the ways in which Jean and Edith achieved success. Edith Miller’s path was clear and committed. An only child from Portage la Prairie when there were only about 700 citizens, she forged through to the very top in England, singing in the Proms, at the Festival of Empire to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911, and at Covent Garden before marrying a baronet. Jean Forsyth never married and was drawn to many other interests. What might have been a vocal success story like Edith’s was diluted by the compassion for animals that led her to the founding of the Winnipeg Humane Society, her support of various charities, her dabblings as a actress, her journalism, her utter dedication to the many vocal students she launched on careers of their own, and her fulsome enjoyment of many social events.
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A Taste of Empire
$16.95Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems.
“Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Recently Microsoft released the hit video game Maximo Cortés: Kitchen Gangsta. You’ve seen him on television. You’ve bought his bestselling cookbooks. Now for a limited engagement … it’s the Demon Chef, the Madman of the Kitchen, the Grand Master of Imperial Cuisine … Chef Maximo Cortés.”
The premise of the show is a once-in-a-lifetime cooking demonstration by Chef Maximo Cortés, the renowned inventor of his signature-style “Imperial Cuisine.” The audience excitedly awaits Chef Maximo’s arrival, relaxing with cocktails and complimentary hors d’oeuvres served to their seats. Suddenly their complacency is broken when Maximo’s amusing assistant, Jovanni, appears onstage. The celebrity chef in unavailable, but no worries: Jovanni, too, is an expert at preparing the traditional Filipino dish Rellenong Bangus (Stuffed Milkfish), and the audience follows along on a journey filled with humorous banter and a silky milkfish, sharp chef’s knife in Jovanni’s hand. As he cooks, he deconstructs the dish in humorous and surprising ways, serving up opinions on the European colonization of Asia, the state of modern agriculture, the ethics of food distribution and consumption – only a few of the ideas sampled in this engaging performance piece. When the actual fish dish is cooked and ready to eat, audience members are given tasting plates and even more food for thought. A Taste of Empire is truly a feast for the mind and palate. We call it “Iron Chef meets Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Bon appetit!
Cast of 1 man.
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A Teatro Trilogy
$18.95A Teatro Trilogy is three plays, written by Stewart Lemoine for his company Teatro la Quindicina. Each play, "Shockers Delight!", "Pith!", and "The Margin of the Sky" respond to the question: Well . . . what if THIS happened?
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A Temporary Grace
$22.95In an unflinching examination of the modern love story, A Temporary Grace is a raw and insightful exploration of power, vulnerability, and our urgent need to redefine intimacy.
Set in modern-day Newfoundland, A Temporary Grace weaves together a series of interconnected stories that navigate the complexities of dating in the post-MeToo era and through the oppressive forces that trap us in outdated patterns. Liberation is elusive. Coercive control masquerades behind performative displays of “goodness,” making it difficult to recognize and resist. Brutally honest and yearning for self-actualization, these stories grapple with restless desire as predation and scams plague progressive circles and power imbalances lurk in unconventional relationships.
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A Temporary Stranger
$18.00A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because “There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen… . In that sense, all art is fake… ”
The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of articles paeans, really – to Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, Nellie McClung, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, and others. Here, as friend and editor Karl Siegler states in his Foreword, “we encounter memory-not as a form of nostalgia for a bygone golden age of a romanticised pastoral arcadia … but as an historical record of who did what when, and to what end, throughout the counterculture revolution that shaped the lives of Jamie Reid and his companions over the past six decades.”
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A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl
$18.95In poems that could double as paintings, M. Travis Lane harnesses the brush strokes of language to form a bridge between the artist and natural world in A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl. This is work that sees ?the reds / that glitter in the shaggy firs, / the yellow-mauves in shadowed snow, / the orange-hatched pine tops quivering? and captures it all in vivid detail. A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl is a vital new collection from one of Canada?s most important living poets.
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A Thaw Foretold
$18.95Written between one January and the next, A Thaw Foretold is a passionate exploration of themes that are as timeless and recurrent as the seasons. In language that is both precisely vivid and particular, embracing both colloquial directness and formal elegance, the poems confront the elementals of love and loss, mortality and remembrance. Longing and desolation and dread are powerfully evoked, but so, in counterpoint, are the consolations of shared happiness, comfort and hope. The suspension and tension implied by the title — the promise of flowing water that murmurs beneath ice — gives the sequence of poems unity as well as dynamic and propulsive momentum. The result is a collection that is richly textured, emotionally and intellectually resonant, and thoroughly compelling.
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A thin fire runs through me
$19.95How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in.
Each line a strip of skin torn from me.In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.
Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainor’s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past.
A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainor’s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that “We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.”
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a thin line between
$18.00In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family’s past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, a thin line between works at ‘peeling away the I’s’ to explore concepts of self and family in flux. What emerges is a poignant, and at times humorous, portrait of a Dutch-Canadian family and a close look into a young woman’s exploration of her own being and creative life.
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A Thing of Beauty
$19.95March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with “reality” pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable march of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation.
Presented here, side by side, is Tremblay’s fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.
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A Thoroughly Wicked Woman
$19.95On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville Street could have slipped the poison into the mixture of Epsom salts and beer that Jackson took on the morning of his death. Reporters from Vancouver’s newspapers chose Jackson’s teary-eyed, fragile, 24-year-old wife, Theresa, as their first choice for the guilty party. Then as the days went by, their preference shifted to the dead man’s steely-eyed, light-fingered, American mother-in-law, Esther Jones. Suspicion also fell on the two boarders – Esther’s nephew Harry Fisher and Ernest Exall. All of them had the opportunity to plant the poison.
Eventually the police followed up on the newspapers’ revelations, the most important being that Harry Fisher was not Esther’s nephew but her son. Fisher fled to Washington, and in his absence his mother and sister were arrested–not for murder but for perjured testimony at the coroner’s inquest. What followed was a series of hearings and trials in the city’s courtrooms with fledgling lawyers trying to make their names in combat with the celebrated defence counsel Joseph Martin, KC. At the same time the newspapers, which were locked in a deadly circulation war, tried desperately to trump each other with juicy bits of information, all of it splashed on their front pages week after week. In the end the two women served time in the BC Penitentiary, but no one was ever tried for the murder of Thomas Jackson.
Acclaimed writer Betty Keller has based her sensational story of murder and intrigue on actual events that occurred in Vancouver’s pre-World War I years. -
A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream
$19.95A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy and its challenging aftermath; a troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her; a young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone, as they navigate the triangle of responsibilities between motherhood, work, and love.
Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of women who could easily live next door, drop off their kids at the same school, or work in the next cubicle.
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A Tidy Armageddon
$26.95“Samuel Beckett meets Stephen King in an absurd and eerie coming-of-end tale that should serve as some sort of warning.”— Peter Darbyshire, author of Has the World Ended Yet?“This book is the furthest apocalypse from Mad Max that you can get. Instead, it’s a transfixing and brilliant attack on consumerism and, in a way, humanity’s inability to look before we leap…”— Post Apocalyptic MediaThe world is transformed into what looks like a massive warehouse overnight, and the result is a suspenseful and action-rich tale as humanity is forced to face the scale of its consumptionA provocative eco-novel featuring an apocalypse like no other, A Tidy Armageddon describes the current world transformed. Civilization has been dismantled by an unknown hand and reassembled into a vast maze of blocks, each comprised of a single item, packed Tetris-style and stacked nine storeys tall: watering cans, electrical transformers, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else human culture has ever produced. In rich, descriptive prose shattered by moments of suspense and action, the novel chronicles the journey of a diverse group of soldiers led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree sergeant and Afghanistan vet, who must reconcile a desperate hunt for her daughter with the responsibility to safeguard the recruits under her command. Passing with fear and wonder through this mausoleum of human excess, provisioning themselves from its treasures while searching for those they love, this band of misfits amalgamates into their own dysfunctional family as they race to outrun the approaching winter.
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A Tilt
$18.95Having practiced as a psychiatrist for many years, as well as having personally experienced years of intensive personal psychoanalysis, has given the poet, Farideh de Bosset, the opportunity to look at, and experience, life with an acute intensity of joy and pain. Each poem records the events of a woman’s everyday life, as well as the poet’s experiences of talking to, and healing with, patients, and friends and family, as well as the impact of literature and art, the countries she’s lived in and visited, and, of cours,e her dreams and her understanding of those dreams on her work, her creation of art, and her life. Aware of the everyday juggling between different structures of the psyche and the external world in each and every one of us contributes to the poet’s awe and admiration for the enduring nature of the human spirit.
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A Time of Questions
$22.95The KANAVUCCHIRAI quintet develop the context of Sri Lanka’s tragic civil war. As the youth in the island village of Nainativu realize that their education and prospects are being curtailed by an increasingly Sinhala majoritarian nationalist government, they begin to rise up in opposition. Volumes 1 and 2, through its main characters, the young woman Rajalakshmi and her betrothed, Suthan, described the growth of the armed struggle from the 1980s onwards as the young people sail to Tamil Nadu in India to join the resistance.
Volumes 3 and 4 return to the micro-environment of Nainativu and the main island of Sri Lanka and the Tamil struggle as it takes shape there. Volume 5 returns to the surviving characters from the first two volumes, and serves more as an afterward that places their story in a global context, as international actors enter the scene. These novels also bring in other characters that speak to the different political and ideological movements at the time: both militant and pacifist, leftist and nationalist. Devakanthan shows how different political movements drew inspiration from each other, and how divisions appeared and grew within what was first seen as an unshakeable organization.
Devakanthan’s characters are richly detailed, both male and female protagonists endowed with internal lives. The quintet thoughtfully and sensitively narrates the story of simple men and women trapped within a national struggle. As a whole it describes how a movement united by lofty goals begins to fall apart, as disagreements appear and former allies go their separate ways.
The quintet won the Government of Tamil Nadu Novel of the Year Award (1998) for THIRUPPADAIYAATCHI (His Sacred Army), and the Tamil Literary Garden’s Best Novel Award (Canada, 2014).
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A Toilet Paper
$5.00‘A Toilet Paper’ is a humorous examination, from a historical linguistic viewpoint, of four commonly used words relating to our posterior orifice and that which comes out of it.