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Showing 3681–3696 of 9248 results
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Island: How Islands Transform the World
$26.95Ever since humans have been travelling and telling tales, we have been fascinated by islands. Creation stories around the world speak of land rising out of the water, of islands beginning on the backs of turtles or as a result of the ingenuity of birds. The tradition continues into the modern era: from Noah to Prospero and Gulliver, from Ulysses to Robinson Crusoe and Anne of Green Gables, islands have fuelled the dreams of our storytellers.
Much of what makes islands so compelling are the natural forces that shape them: geological processes that wrench land up from the ocean floor, evolutionary shifts that cause naked rock to bloom with unique flora and fauna. These forces too have inspired explorers, scientists, settlers, sailors, and artists.
J. Edward Chamberlin draws on history, literature, art, anthropology, biology, and geology, to create a compelling and accessible exploration of the impact islands have made on human history. He has also written a poignant and powerful reminder of who and where we are: castaways, on our own island in space.
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Islands of Grass
$39.95From esteemed naturalist Trevor Herriot and acclaimed nature photographer Branimir Gjetvag, Islands of Grass is a beautiful, well-researched call-to-action and a passionately wrought love letter to the prairie grasslands that are rapidly disappearing in the wake of modernity”s relentless push. Before the arrival of settlers, the Great Northern Plain sprawled across the centre of the continent and rivalled the African savannah for wildlife, with herds of bison and pronghorn antelope numbering in the millions. It was also the home for species of birds and animals that lived nowhere else. Today that range is threatened by human incursion and in some areas there are only pockets of unadulterated prairie grassland left, small islands of a unique environment. In those small plots of grasslands species cling to survival, unable to thrive in any other environment. In presenting the irreplaceable beauty and the complexity of the Grasslands, Trevor and Branimir ask the reader to both admire its majesty and consider its value. Full of extraordinary photos supported by the thought-provoking prose of Trevor Herriot, this book will bring the wonder of the grasslands to a wider audience.
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Isobel and Emile
$18.95This is the story of Isobel and Emile. They wake up beside each other one morning, and they slowly get out of bed. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They do not want it to be the last time but they know that it is. They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not. She stands on the platform and she watches him go. He is going to the city, where he will be an artist. He will make puppets, andfilms of puppets, that struggle to say something he does not have the words for. She will stay in the small town, in the small room where they lived. She will work at a small grocery store and write letters to Emile while she works up the courage to do something more.Told in a stark, minimalist voice, Isobel and Emile is the hypnotizing story of two lovers without each other. It is a story of struggling with loss and a loneliness that threatens to consume them. It is about staying true to whatthey hold dear, no matter that it is hopeless and that nothing will ever come of it, because sometimes that is all that is left. And sometimes, it is enough.
‘Isobel & Emile is the literary equivalent of a Phil Collins song. The kind you listen to during a painful breakup. The kind that perfectly captures the subtleties of longing and puts rhythm and words to the things that are rolling around inside you … it will probably live under your skin long after you’ve put it back on the shelf.’
– Montreal Gazette
‘This is a love story that’s beautiful in its simplicity … the story carefully tactile and heart-wrenching.’
– The Coast
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Isolated
$17.95Isolated brings together two inventive, disturbing plays by one of Canada’s most intriguing dramatic voices.
In Recovery, people around the world are addicted to a mysterious substance. Large recovery centres are set up, promising refuge, treatment and healing to millions of addicts. But all is not what it seems. Following three residents of a facility in Antarctica, McArthur delivers a quirky and unsettling play that reveals the fear and isolation of the oppressed individual, and the consequences of a medicalized society.
In Get Away, David finds two beautiful teenagers when he escapes to an isolated cabin where he hopes to cure his unusually persistent listlessness. Sensing that they might need protecting – and may be crucial to his survival – he invites them in, but the roles of predator and prey become unclear as the three become dangerously intertwined. Both fantastical and horrifying, Get Away provides a resonating look at the destructive nature of longing and our desperate need for love.
‘[MacArthur] has a beautiful voice and his analysis of the unpredictability of our sexuality, at once nurturing and predatory, is shrewd.’
– The Globe and Mail (about Get Away)
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Isolated Incident
$22.95When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. But many see it as a hate crime. Among them is Kashif Siddiqui, the son of Pakistani immigrants. Kashif joins a group of volunteers at an Islamic Cultural Centre on a security watch during the festive Eid night, a potential target of another attack. When an attack materializes, Eid night becomes a test of friendship, family, and faith for the community; it also ends in near-tragedy and a declaration of love and reconciliation.
Recommended by CBC Books, Quill & Quire, Hamilton Review of Books, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity), Isolated Incident is Mariam Pirbhai’s debut novel. Isolated Incident depicts the disturbing rise in hate-crimes directed at Canadian Muslims living in Ontario and Quebec, while also calling into question issues of land and belonging for both immigrant and settler. Will the children of South Asian immigrants, like Kashif Siddiqui and Arubah Anwar, be able to cultivate a new relationship to what is at once an Indigenous and colonized land-even as they are, themselves, under attack for their difference and their beliefs? Pirbhai enters provocative new territory in Canadian literature, seeing in the Pakistani-Canadian and Muslim diasporas a reservoir of experience and story, where questions of faith and community, migration and citizenship, misogyny and Islamophobia, are central to the political and social tenor of our times. As Quill & Quire reviewer Zeahaa Rehman notes, “reading Isolated Incident is not unlike receiving a series of pinpricks that ultimately form a bruise in the reader’s heart, reminding them of their relationship to the deeply rooted Islamophobia in Canada.”
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Isolation And Commitment
$14.95Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian’s, student’s, and teacher’s wishes. Each book contains clear information on a major Canadian novel. Attractively produced, they contain a chronology of the author’s life, information on the importance of the book and its critical reception, an in-depth reading of the text, and a selected list of works cited. This volume examines Settlers of the Marsh by F.P. Grove.
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Isolde’s Dream and Other Stories
$21.95Isolde’s Dream and Other Stories
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IsThisAnOlogy?
$19.95IsThisAnOlogy? is a journey of discovery! Andie interviews different “ologists” and learns all about different types of science.
IsThisAnOlogy? explores big jobs, big science, and the biggest questions. Learn about fossils, bird migration, beekeeping, the science behind making food delicious, and the chemistry involved in cheese making. IsThisAnOlogy? features illustrations, interviews, comics, photographs, charts, recipes, and experiments you can try at home. Science can be a fun hands-on activity!
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It Doesn’t Suck
$18.95A new edition of the first book in the acclaimed Pop Classics seriesThe Worst. Movie. Ever. is a masterpiece. Seriously. Enough time has passed since Showgirls flopped spectacularly that it’s time for a good hard look back at the sequined spectacle. A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn’t Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must-read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.This expanded edition includes an exclusive interview between the author and Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven, as well as a new preface.About the Pop Classics SeriesShort books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.
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It Is an Honest Ghost
$18.95From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted …
Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there’s a ghost in the old mill they’re stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown.
It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality – if anything, that is.
‘A thrilling collection: hot-headed, existential, crystalline. Goldbach’s novella Hic et Ubique illuminates the nightmare of being a man in this world – the twisted, spiritual conversion of buddy into warrior. This book is cadenced and visionary.’ – Tamara Faith Berger
‘Searching and restless, a new Goldbach story is a thing to celebrate. A whole collection of them? A Mardi Gras of mischievous goodness. This fiction slays hearts in the most wondrous of ways.’ – Jeff Parker
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It is Just That Your House is So Far Away
$19.95His father dead, approaching forty, Jeff Mott is drifting across China, because he wants to learn the language. The Chinese agree that his Mandarin is pretty good, but only want to speak English with him. He starts teaching in a small town north of Beijing, and meets a young woman, Wang Bian Fu, and falls in love; however, as they get to know each other, Bian Fu’s family life and emotions seem increasingly more complex and disturbing—there is more to her than he can handle, he senses, something hidden. Their relationship becomes dominated by the walls and back alleys of Beijing, where they find humiliations, surprising differences, and barriers. They become engaged.
In the midst of this, he also mixes with other expatriates where he teaches, and comes to find that there are many ways of being the foreigner in China, the outsider, not all of them savoury. As he teaches his students English, his students teach him that there is much more to being Chinese than language. Classroom spies, things you don’t say, peasants, villages. Above all, there are manners and rules. He begins to miss his young daughter, Melissa.
And then he learns the truth about his Chinese fiancée, a truth concealed behind her considerable deception.
Jeff, his heart divided, has to make a choice, and flies back to Canada, promising to return. Bian Fu promises to solve the barriers to their marriage “in a Chinese way.”
Separated, the lovers continue to plan, through their heated and awkward, long-distance telephone calls, and through the Chinese characters, the ancient poems and proverbs, mangled in Jeff’s fumbling words. As they head towards marriage, Jeff wonders, is it Bian Fu that he loves? or China? or is it that he has imagined both of them as he wishes, not as they are? As Confucius says near the end of the novel, “It is not that I do not love you, it is just that your house is so far away.”
Poignant and ironic, and searchingly funny, It is Just That Your House is So Far Away delivers a Beijing love story and a vision of 1990s China on the edge of globalism.
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It Is Solved By Walking
$16.95When Margaret learns of the death of her former husband, she recalls their earliest days together as Ph.D. candidates, beginning a journey through her past. Told through the sensations of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful sexual memories from before, after and during their marriage. Stevens, a guiding voice in her head for twenty-five years, cajoles Margaret into unearthing the reasons she never became the poet, scholar, wife or mother she thought she would be. Bold and poetic, It is Solved by Walking is an intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.
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it is what it is, what is it
$14.95Here’s some poems for when you’re confused or pretending you’re not. Poems for when you want to laugh or cry or laugh until you cry or cry until you laugh. Poems for when you’re fine or “fine” or when you yell FINE and walk away. Here’s some poems for you to come back to and some poems you can take with you. Poems about life and ghouls and parenting and love and regret and freaking out. Here’s some poems with question marks and exclamation points. Poems about a long time ago and tomorrow and the sci-fi future. Poems to turn shrugs into hugs and vice versa. Here’s some poems to just sit back and enjoy the ride with, but please keep your hands and feet inside the book at all times.
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It Takes a Village
$14.95It Takes a Village: Spinning the Collective Yarn reflects on the collaborative process through which we discover our singular stories. It argues that sharing oral traditions is the best means to blaze pathways to performance.
Every day we tell stories, and listen to them, in countless exchanges with people in all walks of life. Not all of the stories we tell are ours. Our stories are raised up from the communities that are our people, and they are added to the words that end up making us who we are. How do we find the ones that let us land here and now?
Peter Balkwill’s It Takes a Village: Spinning the Collective Yarn is the 2023 Pratt Lecture, the oldest public lecture at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Pratt Lectures were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E. J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, Mary Dalton, George Elliott Clarke, and Dionne Brand.
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It Was Dark There All the Time
$24.95“My parents were slaves in New York State. My master’s sons-in-law … came into the garden where my sister and I were playing among the currant bushes, tied their handkerchiefs over our mouths, carried us to a vessel, put us in the hold, and sailed up the river. I know not how far nor how long — it was dark there all the time.”
Sophia Burthen’s account of her arrival as an enslaved person into what is now Canada sometime in the late 18th century, was recorded by Benjamin Drew in 1855. In It Was Dark There All the Time, writer and curator Andrew Hunter builds on the testimony of Drew’s interview to piece together Burthen’s life, while reckoning with the legacy of whiteness and colonialism in the recording of her story. In so doing, Hunter demonstrates the role that the slave trade played in pre-Confederation Canada and its continuing impact on contemporary Canadian society.
Evocatively written with sharp, incisive observations and illustrated with archival images and contemporary works of art, It Was Dark There All the Time offers a necessary correction to the prevailing perception of Canada as a place unsullied by slavery and its legacy.
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it was never going to be okay
$18.95it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:i am fivemy sisters are saying boyi do not know what the word means but—i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,the hollowness of the o, the blade of y