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Showing 3521–3536 of 9248 results
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In Piazza San Domenico
$17.95Steve Galluccio’s newest stage triumph is a comedy set in 1952 Naples. It recounts how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective lives in different ways. In a world conflicted by traditional values and postwar-era thinking, theatrical archetypes evolve into stereotypes that became hallmarks of the Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni films in the early 1960s.
A favourite of the Montreal Fringe Festival, Steve Galluccio is a playwright with a delightful flair for comedy. His fast-paced plays are full of populist art, local references, and camp sensibility.
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In Plain Sight
$19.95News stories of the less fortunate, the socio-economically disenfranchised in North America are too often presented to fascinate or horrify their consumers with a construct of stereotypes which commodify and intentionally erase the real lives of people “covered” by the popular media.
In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s “Downtown Eastside,” the editors set out to create a space for the voices of women who are seldom heard on their own terms—the words of people who are publicly visible yet who, due to the blur of preconceptions that surround Vancouver’s inner city, remain unseen. To many, the women who offer their stories here are “people without history,” defined only by belonging to a neighbourhood branded by layers of stigma. Their diverse histories are rarely included in the cacophony of media depictions of urban poverty: the “drug problem,” “prostitution” or statistics on crime and violence. These women share the stories of their complex pathways from childhood into and out of the “Downtown Eastside,” through periods of addiction and recovery, strength and illness, affluence and poverty. They confront and challenge the familiar stereotypes applied to drug users, to “wayward women,” and to those who live with disease and/or mental illness.
Leslie A. Robertson’s and Dara Culhane’s introductions to both the collection and the individual stories provide an ethnographic context for a whole culture of complex individuals too often hidden in plain sight within a North American society which defines people more by what they have as consumers, than by who they are as people.
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In Plain Sight
$24.95“Gunfights and well-choreographed scenes of carnage abound . . . This is pure, visceral action.” — Publishers Weekly
Shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel
“You set me loose. Everything that happened was because you saw fit to use me as bait. And what was I on the hook for? You just wanted a bust you could attach your name to so you could get ahead. Don’t try to pretend that you’re Dudley Do-Right. You’re just an opportunist with a badge.”
They should have known better than to look for him. Wilson had been gone for two years until his old boss forced him to come home to be a grinder again. Wilson did the job he was blackmailed into doing and settled things, his way, with everyone. He was free — for two minutes.
A random car accident destroys everything and puts Wilson into the crosshairs again, but this time the gun is in the hands of a cop. Justice isn’t blind in the city; it’s as bent as the tip of a bullet. Dirty cops are using Wilson as bait and the only way for him to stay out of cuffs is to help put someone worse in them. Wilson picks a fight with the Russian mob and lures both cops and robbers into his own trap. Everyone is crooked in the city, but not everyone is a survivor.
In Plain Sight is the third book featuring reluctant mob-enforcer Wilson, following Darwin’s Nightmare (2008) and Grinder (2009).
“Readers who like their mean streets really mean will be thoroughly satisfied.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Grinder
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In Search of New Babylon
$16.95In this atmospheric, post–Cormac McCarthy western novel, four disparate characters criss-cross the desert in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Along the way, these wily characters captivate and intrigue as they seek the American dream in a lawless town in the 1860s.
Reverend Aaron is found lying unconscious on the dusty trail to a family farm somewhere in southern Utah. His hands have been severed at the wrists. On the body are only a few Bibles and sermons. Is he a preacher or a thief?
It’s impossible to say who this stranger might be without understanding those who have brought him to this desert town: Charles Teasdale, a saloon pugilist who hangs himself despite having escaped the noose nine times; Pearl Guthrie, a young saloon girl who marries the same man thirty times over; Russian Bill, an aristocrat turned rustler after killing a hundred innocent men; and an assortment of mercenaries who live on the fringe of mining towns in the American Southwest, where anything and everything is available, except what you are looking for.
All the main characters in this novel are invented, except one. All the towns are real, except for New Babylon. But if such a place were to be imagined, it would be a Wild West town where gunfights are fair play
and the law bans only the lawman. It is a perilous place, where the beauty of the desert landscape takes your breath away with the same power as an open blade and a gash to the throat. -
In Search of Pure Lust
$22.95Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal for LGBT Non- Fiction; Finalist, 2019 International Book Awards for LGBTQ – Non-Fiction; Finalist, 2018 Foreword INDIES Award for LGBT Adult Nonfiction; Finalist, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Awards for LGBTQ Non-Fiction)
In Search of Pure Lust documents an important chapter in lesbian history that is already being distorted and erased, a time when lesbians were reinventing everything from the ground up. Along with violence against women around the globe, lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s were motivated by growing militarism, rampant development, species loss, and living systems in decline. For many, this was the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years — patriarchy.
This is a long overdue and unvarnished insider’s account of those times. The memoir, centered in the Northeast U.S. and then later in Quebec, combines a personal story with the story of a political movement. The book is full of celebration, but also depicts the shadow side of the lesbian movement, taking the reader into the bitter squabbles that divided women, both personally and politically. On a deeper level, the memoir charts a long and difficult quest for love. Over and over, the narrator dives headlong into rapturous passions that either fizzle out or come to brutal and ugly endings.
In the mid-’80s, when a friend invites her to a Zen retreat, she as desperate enough to say yes. A period of difficult self-examination ensues and, over a period of years, she begins to learn an altogether different approach to desire. The last section of the memoir traces the fallout from that collision between hot-blooded lesbian desire and spacious, temperate Zen mind. What the search for pure lust uncovers, in the end, is something that looks a lot like love.
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In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo
$20.00When Henry Robinson’s daughter Starr is born with Williams syndrome, he swears to devote his life to making her happy. More than twenty years later, Henry and Starr, along with Henry’s co-worker Darren, set off on an unexpected road trip as Henry strives to hold onto his daughter’s childhood and to hold off the future. In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo is a charming, tender and often funny story of a father struggling to let his daughters grow up and of a family struggling against hard odds, taking care of each other when the world lets them down.
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In Sickness and In Health / Yom Kippur in a Gym
$22.95This flip book is comprised of two novellas:
In Sickness and In Health – Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be “normal”. By age 45 she has a “normal” life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.
Yom Kippur in a Gym – Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can’t accept her husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, plans to commit suicide. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Rachel worries about losing her job. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.
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In the Backyard
$20.00Attempting to make sense of her life, and change her sad disposition to a happy one, the author of In the Backyard: Relearning the Art of Aging, Dying and Making Love seeks out the help of her in-house therapist/husband, Dr. George Nemeth. The accredited psychologist’s answers to the big questions provide a compassionate and humorous backdrop on to how to seize the day and not give up hope when faced with the nasty realities of poor health and unrealized aspirations.
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In the Belly of the Horse
$22.95Second Place Winner, 2017 International Latino Book Awards (Best Latino Focused Fiction Book – English); Finalist for the 2018 Latino Books Into Movies Awards (Drama)
In the Belly of the Horse is a gripping story illuminating an historic period in the life of a Peruvian family separated and kept apart by seemingly insurmountable forces during a time of civil conflict. Outraged and fearful that war is surging too close to home, Manuel Perez takes his seven-year-old son Salvador into hiding. Otilia, his wife and mother of the child, stays behind to protect the family property. As the elusive enemy roams the countryside, she waits, distraught, for Manuel to return. This is Peru in the 1990s, a struggling nation with a large disparity in standards of living, where the majority live in squalor and face daily injustices. When Manuel does not return, Otilia rushes out of the house to search for him and their son. While the violent Shining Path guerilla movement incites revolution and brutal government forces respond, Otilia makes her way to a remote mining camp in the Andes Mountains. Rather than reporting the disappearance of her husband and son to the unscrupulous authorities, she works in the camp’s kitchen, keeping a low profile and waiting for danger to pass. Aware that she is facing a grim reality, scared by the unrestrained violence around her, and heartbroken that her appeal to find her loved ones are going unanswered, Otilia agonizes over what to do next. This novel provides some understanding of the situation in which countless people find themselves due to armed conflict within and between the political powers around them, and explores many aspects of the psychology of the victims, the difficulty of finding out the truth, and the actions of various groups working with people from many countries who are enduring the pain of loss and displacement.
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In the Belly of the Sphinx
$25.00Grant Buday’s new novel is an eccentric coming-of-age story that captures the late-Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt, auras, and the afterlife.
Smart, stubborn, and forthright Pearl Greyland-Smith is nine years old when we first meet her, in 1882. She lives with her widowed mother, Florence, in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood. Pearl’s father was a Hussar who died in Afghanistan, or that’s what Florence has always told Pearl. But when an Irish woman named Cassidy arrives at their door and addresses Florence as Sinead, Pearl begins to realize she may not know very much about her origins at all.
An avid reader with a rich inner life, as Pearl grows up she nonetheless confronts the scarcity of choices available to women. Yet while lacking in certain amenities, Pearl and Florence’s days are anything but dull, populated by characters easily at home in a Dickens novel: the earnest and enigmatic amateur scientist Charles Gloster, their bawdy, theosophist housemaid Carpy, inspector Osmo Beattie, and imperialist newspaper columnist Harry Hearne. Then a fateful encounter at a solstice fête throws Pearl’s whole future into question.
This delightful coming-of-age story, imbued with the Victorian fascination for auras and the afterlife, will appeal to readers of Patrick DeWitt and Eleanor Catton. Once again Grant Buday has turned distant West Coast history upside down and created a vivid world intimately relevant to us today.
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In the Blood
$20.00In his debut full-length collection, former City of New Westminster Poet Laureate Alan Hill delivers a deeply revealing and heartfelt depiction of a lifetime of mental illness—both his own and that of his brother. In the Blood traces the brothers’ relationship from childhood to adulthood, and examines how his brother’s diagnosis became inextricably intertwined with Hill’s own mental health struggles. As his brother spends much of his life in and out of institutions, Hill grapples with his own guilt, shame, and loss. Moving from the past to the present and back again, In the Blood looks for meaning and comfort in the confusion of childhood and the untethered searching of adulthood. With stark vulnerability, Hill reveals the intricate and often hidden bonds that are both broken and created by mental illness and pushes toward a form of relief, release and recovery.
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In the Body
$18.95An unflinching look at the human body and the ways it defines, fails, and frees us
Building on themes introduced in her novel Girl in Shades, Allison Baggio explores the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds with In the Body, a collection of 12 short stories and the novella “As She Was.”
Baggio’s range of voice and breadth of vision are showcased in stories like “Spilt Milk,” where an ordinary fare leads an Indo-Canadian taxi driver, who is unhappy with his current circumstances, to marry his passenger’s unattractive sister. In “Possessed,” a man receives a heart transplant and begins to suspect that his new heart is still attached to its old owner.
The novella follows a teenage girl who, after a motorcycle accident, is left with a serious brain injury that dramatically alters her personality and body. The five people closest to her must reflect on who she was in order to come to terms with who she has become.
In the Body is a stunning examination of the clash between how we perceive our own bodies and how we are perceived by others.
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In the Bowl of My Eye
$20.95In his ninth collection of poetry, Keith Garebian pays attention to inner and outer realities of place and psyche, turning conventional landscape poetry inside-out. Focusing on the Lakeshore Road area of Mississauga/Etobicoke, Garebian explores small and large things, creating a space in which inner and outer landscapes meet, resulting in a striking poetic vessel of cognition, perception, and sensitivity. Meditatively alert, these poems open up perceptions of a sentient world within a specific geography, history, and sociology, while providing insights into suburbia and some of its characters, including the poet and his own personal life. The world of lake, park, and road is conjoined with a suburban world of apartment, shopping mall, immigrants, and fraught lives through language that has a deep-rooted sense of mood, tone, and melody.
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In the Cage
$19.95A feared cage fighter in Mixed Martial Arts, Daniel is closing in on greatness—until an injury derails his career. Out of work in his country hometown, Daniel slips into the underworld, moonlighting as muscle for a childhood-friend-turned-mid-level-gangster. While his wife works nights and his twelve-year-old daughter gets into scraps of her own, Daniel tries to escape and build a nobler life for his family—but he sinks deeper into a violent, unpredictable world, soon sparking a conflict that can only be settled in blood.
Written with equal parts tenderness and horror, In the Cage weaves together a grittily masterful tale of violence, family, and resilience as Kevin Hardcastle penetrates what it means to survive in the rural underclass.
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In the Capital City of Autumn
$20.00Tim Bowling is in top form in his latest collection of poetry, In the Capital City of Autumn.
Threading through autumnal themes such as the loss of his mother and the demolition of his childhood home, his children growing and the inevitable passage of time, Bowling writes with rich lyricism and imagery. Sweet William and loosely woven woollen mitts for his mother, the moon as “an egg in the pocket of a running thief” for time, salmon for eternity. In the Capital City of Autumn, the characters of The Great Gatsby come to life, and three a.m. brings wisdom. These are masterful poems, lightened with a touch of whimsy, poems to sink into on a quiet evening.
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In the Care of Strangers
Sad, shocking, and truthful, Growing My Way Home chronicles one woman’s struggle through events all too common among a People who have been separated from their culture and their language. From abuse to early involvement in the criminal justice system, from her experiences as a thirteen-year-old drug dealer, a fifteen-year-old parent, and finally an award-winning writer, artist, and filmmaker, Jenn Ashton has survived it all. A work of autofiction based on her teenage journals and fifty years of lived experience, Growing My Way Home documents a long journey to acceptance and understanding.