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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • ICEMEN

    ICEMEN

    By: Vern Thiessen
    $18.95

    A wealthy businessman wakes up bound and gagged in a utility shed, kidnapped by his own employees—brothers and icemen Joe and Rennie. In the midst of the Great Depression, the brothers’ ice harvesting livelihood in Kempenfelt Bay is melting away due to the advent of refrigeration, only to further line the pockets of their employers. Desperate to claim what is rightfully theirs, these honest workers turned reluctant captors will stop at nothing to bring their greedy boss to a final reckoning. ICEMEN by Governor General’s Literary Award–winning playwright Vern Thiessen is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that exposes the human cost of capitalism and asks, when the wealthy exploit the working class, who are the real criminals?

  • Idaho Falls

    Idaho Falls

    By: William McKeown
    $19.95

    The little-known true story of a mysterious nuclear reactor disaster — years before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima

    Before the Three Mile Island incident or the Chernobyl disaster, the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown to claim lives happened on U.S. soil. Chronicled here for the first time is the strange tale of SL-1, an experimental military reactor located in Idaho’s Lost River Desert that exploded on the night of January 3, 1961, killing the three crewmembers on duty.

    Through exclusive interviews with the victims’ families and friends, firsthand accounts from rescue workers and nuclear industry insiders, and extensive research into official documents, journalist William McKeown probes the many questions surrounding this devastating blast that have gone unanswered for decades.

    From reports of faulty design and mismanagement to incompetent personnel and even rumors of sabotage after a failed love affair, these plausible explanations raise startling new questions about whether the truth was deliberately suppressed to protect the nuclear energy industry.

  • Idaho Winter

    Idaho Winter

    By: Tony Burgess
    $16.95

    “The world of Tony Burgess is savage and blackly funny … It’s a place where you shouldn’t trust anybody, not even your narrator.” — Uptown Magazine

    “Idaho Winter is absurd and acceptable at the same time; its prose is pleasurable and unnerving.” — Globe and Mail

    Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award

    Idaho Winter is a boy who, through no fault of his own, is loathed by everyone in his town. His father feeds him roadkill for breakfast, the crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road, and parents encourage their children to plot against him. That is, until he meets a young girl named Madison who empathizes with his suffering. But when Madison is attacked by dogs meant to harm Idaho, Idaho gets up and runs home, changing the course of the entire story …

    Idaho soon learns that his suffering has been cruelly designed by a clumsy writer who has made his book meaner than all the others to make it stand out. With this information, Idaho has become armed with the knowledge that the entire world is invented, and that he now has the power to change things — in a novel that is both “one of the finest parodies ever penned of the stereotypically didactic young adult novel” (Macleans) and “the most brilliantly terrifying dream you’ve ever had” (The Globe and Mail).

  • Ideas on the Nature of Science

    Ideas on the Nature of Science

    $24.95

    If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering, and controlling the world, where everything was subject to science, but science itself has largely escaped scrutiny. In this fascinating collection of interviews, CBC Radio’s Ideas producer David Cayley talks to some of the world’s most provocative thinkers about how the ideas of science have directed human thought and shaped human society. Contributors include: Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Margaret Lock, Arthur Zajonc, Rupert Sheldrake, Sajay Samuel, Richard Lewontin, Ruth Hubbard, Ulrich Beck, David Abram, and many others.

  • Identifying Mavor Moore

    Identifying Mavor Moore

    By: Allan Boss
    $24.95

    The enigmatic, obscured figure behind many of the most important moments in building Canada’s theatrical and cultural landscape has largely been ignored by history. In this groundbreaking study of his work, Allan Boss re-locates Moore in Canada’s cultural history. Moore may be a jack of all trades, but Boss exposes a historical record that seems to conceal Moore’s work, challenging the conventions of recorded theatre history in Canada. Painting a picture of Moore’s identity and legacy through his theatrical and artistic work and through an assortment of his literary contributions to the theatre, Boss creates an astounding account of a cultural giant who’s been lost to history.

  • Idler’s Glossary, The

    Idler’s Glossary, The

    By: Joshua Glenn
    $12.95

    Idler’s Glossary, The

  • If I Could Turn and Meet Myself

    If I Could Turn and Meet Myself

    By: Patrick Toner
    $24.95

    At his death in 1985, Alden Nowlan stood in the first rank of Canadian writers. Today, his poetry is beloved by Maritimers and popular across Canada and in the US as well. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself tells his life story, from his birth to a 14-year-old mother in 1933 through his impoverished childhood, his disturbed adolescence, his newspaper career, his struggle with cancer, and his tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick.

    Nowlan founded his success and peace of mind on his belief that he was a composite of many selves. In 12 books of poetry, two novels, a book of stories, and 15 years of weekly columns for the Saint John Telegraph Journal, he fictionalized his own life. At the same time, he hid some of the most significant facts about his background from everyone, including those closest to him. His overall personal honesty ensured that even today people accept his “authorized version” as the full and only story.

    In If I Could Turn and Meet Myself, Patrick Toner portrays a more complex and more richly humane Nowlan than any previous commentator, including Nowlan himself.

  • If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You

    If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You

    By: Adèle Barclay
    $18.95

    If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.

    Amidst the comings and goings, there’s a sincere desire to connect to others, an essential need to reach out, to redraft the narratives that make kinship radical and near. These poems are love letters to the uncomfortable, the unfathomable, and the altered geographies that define our own misshapen understandings of the world.

    “With a depth of feeling for places and their connecting joys and aches, these are beautifully written poems, vivid as the morning paper, bracing as moonshine.”

    -David McGimpsey, author of Sitcom and Asbestos Heights

    “Brims with cracking imagery and whip-smart delivery.”
    —The Winnipeg Free Press

    “Adèle Barclay has that rare gift of making something entirely new feel familiar, every door she opens we want to swoon right in.”
    —Today’s Book of Poetry

  • If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display

    If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display

    By: Nick Thran
    $22.95

    Essays, stories and poems on the interior lives of bookstores.Nick Thran’s volume of essays, stories and poems is a quietly powerful meditation on a life of reading, writing and bookselling. Thran, who returned to bookselling when he moved with his family to Fredericton, NB, captures the rare magic of reading communities. Here, the bookstore itself sits in the middle of an expanding root system, connecting lives, nurturing interests and stoking passions. It is a place for both private daydreaming and the small talk that staves off loneliness. And it is the fertile ground on which so many authors—including Thran—find the courage to write.

  • If It’s No Trouble . . . A Big Polar Bear

    If It’s No Trouble . . . A Big Polar Bear

    By: Lisa Dalrymple
    $12.95

    Natalie’s finished her Christmas list. It’s really quite perfect with one little twist: A remote control scooter, some candy to share and, if it’s no trouble, a big polar bear.

  • If Language

    If Language

    By: Gregory Betts
    $20.00

    Most anagrammaticians satisfy their urge with the rearranged name of a celebrity (Marshall McLuhan = Malls launch harm) or perhaps, if more adventurous, a familiar aphorism (The Medium is the Message = The Media is the Muse’s Gem). The true devotees of the clan turn to games like Scrabble and Humbug. Gregory Betts’ If Language takes this one-time parlour game to its evolutionary extreme, constructing 56 paragraph-long perfect anagrams of an original seed-text. Each poem is exactly 525 letters; the same letters that echo throughout the book is radically different forms. These poems test the endless possibilities of the constraint. They tell the mystical history of anagrams, from its use by early scientists to escape Christian zealots to Rosicrucian symbology to Greek mythology to Kabbalism. They explore how individualities happen in words and limited vocabularies. If Language asks the question: what are the limits of individuality within a closed system? Betts uses his own experiences, relationships and uncertainties to explore this question with humour, with intellect, and with a manic obsession capable of turning a simple game into this wildly original exploration.

  • If Pigs Could Fly

    If Pigs Could Fly

    By: David Arnason
    $16.95

    Written in three parts, master storyteller Arnason’s second volume of fractured prairie tales includes political fables, Ukrainian tales and fabulations, leaving no stone unturned in his parody of Canada’s political and cultural landscape.”Fairy tales on speed make great fiction.”–Rob McLennan, The Ottawa Express

  • If Pressed

    If Pressed

    By: Andrew McEwan
    $18.00

    If Pressed–the second collection of poetry from Andrew McEwan—explores forms of pressurized and pressurizing language as a means to shed light on the depressions we live among.

    Overlapping language of fear and speculation gain momentum in these poems, where layers of atmospheric and emotional lexicons—ranging from descriptions of the mid-2000s financial crisis and subsequent recession, to writing on melancholia from the 1600s, to weather reports and condo listings, to pharmaceutical sales pitches and literary book reviews—focus attention on the ways that anxiety so easily and completely infiltrates our daily personal and public experiences.

  • If Tenderness be Gold

    If Tenderness be Gold

    By: Eleanor Albanese
    $22.95

    If Tenderness Be Gold is set in 19th-century and early 20th-century northern Ontario and Manitoba. An Irish mother, an Italian herbalist, and a Scottish midwife come together on the night of a difficult birth, and the result of their union has effects that echo through the generations.