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Showing 3393–3408 of 9481 results
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How to Pick Up a Maid in Statue Square
$18.95These stories collectively capture various versions of the expat life that share the feeling of being between two worlds, that experience of being neither here nor there and trying to find a way to fill that space.
The stories follow a kind of “life cycle” of expatriates in Hong Kong — a place often called the “most thrilling city on the planet.” They share the feeling of being between two worlds, the experience of being neither here nor there and trying to find a way to fill that space. From the hedonistic first days in How To Pick Up A Maid in Statue Square, as Fast Eddy instructs on how best to approach Filipina maids on their rest day; through the muted middle in Rephrasing Kate, as Kate encounters a charismatic bad boy and is forced to admit her infidelities; to the inevitable end in The Dirty Duck, as Bill realizes his inability to commit and resolves to return home to Australia; Hong Kong alters them all with its frenetic mixture of capitalism and exoticism. Characters exist between the worlds they once knew and this place which now holds them in its spell and shapes them to its ends. Their stories explore how they cope with this space where loneliness and alienation intersect, a place where insomniac young bankers forfeit their ambition while chasing deviant sexual encounters, or consume themselves with climbing the corporate ladder. It is a world where passive domestics live and work for the money they can send home, while their keepers assemble poolside to engage in conversations aroused by the expat’s desire to connect to others who share their fates. Always, of course, there is The Globe a favourite watering hole where, when night falls, they meet to tell their stories.
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How to Play
$25.00In this sensitive critical examination of James Reaney’s plays, Gerald Parker places Reaney’s work in a national and international context. Parker discusses Reaney’s own vision of what theatre is, and considers individual plays with emphasis on the playwright’s passion for the geography and people of Southwestern Ontario. Parker analyzes the intricate fabric of Reaney’s plays from The Killdeer and Listen to the Wind through the Donnelly trilogy.
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How to Swallow a Pig
$16.95Bizarre sexual parables, hilarious science fiction, fables, text-tangles, dirty stories, lush love letters, re-visionary fairy tales, predictions,strange new games, dream transcripts, and a complete handbook of absurdist instructions, including one on the dangerous arts of pig-swallowing. With all the lyricism and wit which have made his columns in NOW magazine and his Dr. Poetry segments on CBC’s Wordbeat so entertaining and provocative, this collection gathers for the first time the very best of Robert Priest’s short prose. A fabulist in the tradition of Borges and Cortazar, he brings to these postcard pieces the same poignant, and twisted but brilliant sensibility which has made him one of the most entertaining and challenging poets of his generation.
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How to Tax a Billionaire
$15.95In 1991 an unnamed wealthy family–widely reported to be the Bronfmans–moved $2 billion out of Canada without having to pay the appropriate taxes. When CHO!CES, a Winnipeg-based social justice coalition, decided to take the federal government to court to force it to collect the tax, an amazing five-year odyssey through the legal and tax system was underway. A wild story of tenacious activists, public interest advocacy, and tax law.
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How To Tell If Your Frog Is Dead
$20.00A tour guide leads a Valentine’s Day-themed ghost walk, visiting the sites of horrific, yet romantic, deaths. A homicide cop solves tough cases using tips from his plants. Scientists discover a new species of religiously observant gophers, and a young math whiz, on the hunt for her escaped boa constrictor, ponders the theory of multiple worlds. Replete with dark humour and cheeky interrogations of philosophy and metaphysics, the thirty-three stories in How to Tell if Your Frog is Dead expose the fundamental absurdity of the human condition.
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How to Write
$16.95How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short ?ction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”
Already early in the twentieth century, the modernist Ezra Pound asserted that poets should “make it new,” and of course by “it” he meant “the tradition”: the materiality of pre-existent writing. The assertion is by no means original, much less post-modern: John Donne, for example, argued centuries ago that “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”
How to Write is an instruction manual for the demise of ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of writers and subjects, words and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices where authors don’t own their words, they merely rent them from other authors. Containing ten pieces of conceptual prose ranging from the purely appropriated through the entirely recomposed, and covering a range of texts from the anonymous to the famous, it includes samplings from, among many others: Lawrence Sterne; Agatha Christie; Bob Kane; Roy Lichtenstein; and every piece of text within one block of the author’s home. Its title story is an exhaustive record of every incidence of the words “write” or “writes” in forty different English-language texts picked aesthetically to represent a disparate number of genres.
With How to Write, beaulieu suggests writers and artists would be better served to “make it reframed, make it borrowed, make it re-contextualized.” By recasting the canon with cut-up directions for successful writing, catalogues of events, and lists of vocabulary, he gleefully illustrates Picasso’s dictum that “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
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How We Eat
$19.95An informative look at the history of eating that’s a tasty combo of fact and fun
We enjoy watching celebrity chefs on TV, but so few of us choose to cook at home. The gourmet health food industry is soaring, yet a longtime love affair with fast food endures. Food and eating habits — good and bad — have shaped cultures, accounted for behaviors, and created a sense of individual as well as cultural identity… but how? And why?
Social psychology professor Leon Rappoport treats the dinner table like the therapist’s couch, asking us to lie back and spill our guts. Tracing our culinary customs from the Stone Age to the microwave, from the raw to the nuked, How We Eat illuminates our complex and often contradictory eating habits. Along the way, we meet with the hugely successful Fanny Farmer and Betty Crocker, encounter a murder case in which a Twinkie was suspect number one, learn about the table manners of cannibals, and, ultimately, that perhaps we truly are what we eat.
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how we play at it
$15.95“at first: the suspension of / disbelief. then, comparison — the compulsion // to equate it”: Adam and Eve, hockey sticks and baseball games, the hairbrushes the dead leave behind, photographs and stains on the carpet, love in filthy apartments, someone’s cat hit by a car. Matt Robinson’s second collection of poetry catalogues the bits and pieces, the art and artefacts, the acts and atrocities that make up the living of lives. In poems whose images and metaphors weave into and around each other, how we play at it: a list articulates and exposes — at times even interrogates — how it is we “play” about our days. Grief; the epic stories and everyday myths we create and tell; the interaction of fathers and sons; the games we season our time with, the battles we wage; how, who, and what we love: all these appear as “a million dark spots — all // those shadows — strobe-dancing, cutting across” the page.
These are poems engaged with the personal, colloquial, and the more lyrically metaphoric aspects of language. Through a highly controlled use of the couplet and single line, employing a diction and syntax at times flowing and at others jagged, they seek to reflect some of the intra- and inter-personal dynamics that are — that might be or at least help move towards an understanding of — ‘it’; it is a swirling, explosive mixture of “an idea, some conjecture or / philosophy” and the “orchestrations of your arms. the guttural music: song.”
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How You Were Born
$23.00This tenth-anniversary edition of Kate Cayley’s award-winning collection includes three new stories.
A young mother intrudes into the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what’s best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin’s predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures.
The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.
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Hoyden
$18.95hoy-den: n. A high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl. Chronicling a year in Toronto, Hoyden follows the gradual rise and quick plummet of Abigail Somerhaze, a bright-eyed photojournalist wannabe who spends her weekends helping the homeless, developing her portfolio, and dreaming of driving down Route 66. But when her bank balance becomes frightening, she’s forced to suck up her fantasies and join a dot-com company on the verge of greatness. In doing so she devolves from a pretty woman with a keen eye and a keener wit to a bitter biddy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Eking out an existence in a city where you are what you do, Abi struggles with swapping her soul for a steady paycheque, battles bon amis and bosses, veers further and further away from journalistic greatness, and comes face to face with herself. But can she say when and can she say how much? Grab some vino, turn on the jazz, and join Abi as she drunkenly tours the Corridors of Power, soberly teeters on the buttresses of poverty, and ultimately uncovers the admin within. Written with the quick wit of Dave Eggers and Helen Fielding, and the manic pace and pop culture references of Bret Easton Ellis, this book announces the debut of a remarkably funny new talent.
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HTO
$24.95Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is a city dominated by water. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto’s water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city’s surface water. In HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, thirty-four contributors examine the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and call into question the city’s past, present and future engagement with water.
HTO explores everything from waste disposal, waterfront reclamation and community watershed initiatives to the founding of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority after Hurricane Hazel, a psychogeographic exploration of High Level Pumping Station and a critical look at the city’s Wet Weather Flow Management Master Plan. In between, there are descriptions of Toronto’s geological past, the history of Taddle Creek and a Ninjalicious-style tale of infiltration of the city’s storm sewers, complete with a colour-image section. Together, these essays provide a context for a critical observation of the city’s relationship to water, and how that relationship will have to change in the coming decades.
Includes essays by Richard Anderson, Bert Archer, Chris Bilton, James Brown, Michael Cook, Nick Eyles, Liz Forsberg, Mark Fram, Ed Freeman, Chris Hardwicke, Michael Harrison, Maggie Helwig, Lorraine Johnson, Joanna Kidd, John Lorinc, Robert MacDonald, Steven Manell, Michael McMahon, Shawn Micallef, Gary Miedema, Helen Mills, Mahesh Patel, Wayne Reeves, Frank Remiz, RiverSides, David Robertson, Jane Schmidt, Murray Seymour, Eduardo Sousa, Andrew Stewart, Kim Storey, Ron Williamson and Georgia Ydreos.
‘HTO fittingly reminds readers … that we have astonishing power to enactchange … invaluable’
– Canadian Water Treatment
‘ A poignant reminder to any city-dweller of the cultural, historical and environmental importance of fresh water, public health, lakes, rivers and streams’
– Canadian Architect
‘An intense and multifaceted approach to the relationship between the natural and urban world.’
– Corporate Knights
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Hugh MacLennan and His Works
$9.95This volume explores the life and works of Hugh MacLennan. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.
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Human
$20.00At the behest of the vampiric Shadow Council, Aleksandar Svetoslav, Prince of his House, moves to America to re-establish their foothold there. It was a territory lost when opportunistic vampire hunters laid waste to the hedonistic House Üstrel. He did not expect to find the assets of House Üstrel in such shambles.
Nor did he expect that this tedious mission would lead to the beautiful police officer Alicia Wilde, who resurrects feelings in him that he had long thought dead. He certainly did not anticipate her partner, Detective Stephen Brody, who not only knows what Aleksandar is but has vowed revenge on all his kind.
Things spiral quickly out of control as Aleksandar is drawn into a cat and mouse game with a deranged kidnapper targeting those closest to him. Betrayal draws Aleksandar and Detective Brody together in a frantic battle to save Alicia and the city from a true monster.
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Human Misunderstanding
$16.00Human Misunderstanding is the latest work by award-winning poet Kathy Mac. The first of the book’s three long poems compares a fictional child soldier (a hero) with a real child soldier (a victim). The second juxtaposes eighteenth century philosophy with one person’s search for another in downtown Halifax. The final poem explores two court cases in which an immigrant faces deportation, and torture, if found guilty of assault in a Canadian court.
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Human Resources
$16.95Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into themachine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.
Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen,reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste – and the creative potential of salvage.
‘In this bad-mouthing and incandescent burlesque, Rachel Zolf transforms a necessary social anger into the pure fuel that takes us to “the beautiful excess of the unshackled referent.�* We learn something new about guts, and about how dictions slip across one another, entwining, shimmering, wisecracking. For Zolf,political invention takes precedent, works the search engine.’ – Lisa Robertson
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Human Scale, The
$22.95Whether investigating a gruesome triple-murder, a fairy tale marriage gone horribly wrong, or a brilliant con artist, Michael Lista has proven himself one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation. In his belief that crime reporting thrives the closer it moves to “the human scale”—where every uncovered secret reveals the truth of our obligations to each other—Lista builds his compulsively readable narratives from details (fake flowers, a little girl’s necklace) others might pass over, details that provide a doorway into the extreme situations he is drawn to. The Human Scale not only includes Lista’s most celebrated magazine stories to date, but comes with postscripts that describe his process in writing each piece, and the fallout from publication. Here is long-form journalism in its most hallowed form: brilliant and bingeable.