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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • About Love

    About Love

    $14.95

    About Love

  • Above and Below the Waterline

    Above and Below the Waterline

    $16.95

    The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry from novelist, Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters and calm waters, the challenges and dysfunction – but beneath it all, love. Water speaks volumes, Marianne Paul tells us. The paddler learns to read river in the same way a child learns to read symbols on the page – the contours and patterns that hint of submerged rocks, that forewarn of swifts and rapids, the shallows, the gentleness and respite of flat waters.

  • Above Discovery

    Above Discovery

    $20.95

    “It is the part that is missing that I am drawn to, that I try to pin down. My gaze is always divided by what is here and what is no longer here. That, for me, is where the deepest pleasure lies, where the sweet overcomes the bitter.”

    A couple coping with a recent loss are tasked with taking stock of a late biology enthusiast’s hoard. A support worker dedicated to rehabilitating young women suffering from, among other things, a certain unexpected effect of the climate apocalypse faces a truth that shatters the illusion separating her work and her personal life. An archaeologist formerly working in Syria struggles with her decision to flee from unrest, while the people she has left behind face an uncertain fate.

    In Jennifer Falkner’s richly imagined first collection, past and present glancingly converge, making the familiar outlines of myth, history, and everyday life seem suddenly strange. With spare, elegant prose, Falkner introduces the reader to those whose narratives are written in the language of empty space. Above Discovery is a stunning debut collection from an author to watch.

  • Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre

    Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre

    $16.95

    John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot of the comedy Lincoln watched that night, Our American Cousin, as being “kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies.”

    Scratch the surface of any story and underneath you will find layer upon layer of fiction masquerading as fact. The play’s main character, Mark Killman—a feared but much admired director—draws inspiration from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to stage the schizophrenia of America. He hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy. Both are to re-enact the assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of Abraham Lincoln as a wax figure.

    The script is frequently self-referential, building on each of these “retakes” with further allusions to itself, telling the same story many times over in different voices from different points of view. Tremblay quite explicitly stages elements of literary theory with this play, including references to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra and the “desert of the real,” concepts first popularized by the movie The Matrix—the idea that in our post-modern world, the imitator has become more relevant than the imitated, and that the virtual worlds we construct are becoming more “real” to us than the real world.

    Absurd, hilarious and haunting, Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre is an unforgettable mystery that asks the question: How can we ever know who we are and what is true when the world we know is shifting beneath us? Its answer is simple: John Wilkes Booth was the first American star—the actor who kidnapped reality to transform it into theatre.

    Cast of 3 men.

  • Absence of Wings

    Absence of Wings

    $20.00

    Absence of Wings depicts the extraordinary and tragically foreshortened life of A.—Paré’s niece, Brazilian, adopted, racialized, and living with multiple mental health diagnoses. In her deft and clear poetics, accompanied by documentary pieces in the tradition of C.D. Wright’s One with Others, Paré is both witness to and emotionally engaged in the life and death of A. The result is deep and heart-felt, both factional and fictional, poetry and prose, holding its subject, A., heart-close and 3,000 miles away. Absence of Wings unfolds on many levels; it embraces the private and public spheres; it is as intimate as family, as worldly as the public and personal politics that surround each life. It both observes and embraces, always with the important question of the world’s unprotected children in mind.

  • Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be

    Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be

    $20.00

    The 100 wide-ranging and idiosyncratic poems of Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be confront, grapple with, explore, argue with, and ultimately embrace the human condition as they wend their way through the worldly and the otherworldly aspects of absurdity and existence, the ordinary and the extraordinary spheres of being. They are an attempt to make sense out of senselessness.

  • Acadian Driftwood

    Acadian Driftwood

    $22.95

    Winner, Evelyn Richardson Award for Non-Fiction and Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
    Finalist, Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Margaret and John Savage Award for Best First Book (Non-fiction)
    A Hill Times‘ 100 Best Books in 2020 Selection
    On Canada’s History Bestseller List

    Growing up on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Tyler LeBlanc wasn’t fully aware of his family’s Acadian roots — until a chance encounter with an Acadian historian prompted him to delve into his family history. LeBlanc’s discovery that he could trace his family all the way to the time of the Acadian Expulsion and beyond forms the basis of this compelling account of Le Grand Dérangement.

    Piecing together his family history through archival documents, Tyler LeBlanc tells the story of Joseph LeBlanc (his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather), Joseph’s ten siblings, and their families. With descendants scattered across modern-day Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, the LeBlancs provide a window into the diverse fates that awaited the Acadians when they were expelled from their homeland. Some escaped the deportation and were able to retreat into the wilderness. Others found their way back to Acadie. But many were exiled to Britain, France, or the future United States, where they faced suspicion and prejudice and struggled to settle into new lives.

    A unique biographical approach to the history of the Expulsion, Acadian Driftwood is a vivid insight into one family’s experience of this traumatic event.

  • Accelerated Paces

    Accelerated Paces

    $18.00

    Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer’s disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN.

    Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten’s debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top speed. Whether peeking out from the backseat of Mom and Dad’s car or surveying the grimy wings of mental wards, Accelerated Paces hurdles that uneasy terrain between creative fact and honest fiction. These short stories and pieces ignore borders as they jaunt thorough external trips and internal voyages.

    This is both creative non-fiction and creative fiction, which follows the idea of crossing boundaries and blurring borders. Think part of this collection will be an explicit demonstration of how the two genres interplay, of how a non-fiction event can inspire a fictional piece, and, interestingly enough, the reverse as well.

    Stamp your passport, and step on the edge. Buy a ticket, and take the ride.

    Praise for Accelerated Paces:

    “… the American writer’s influence (Hunter S. Thompson) is all over the essay collection Accelerated Paces. Whether it is a description of role-playing a cat in a mental health centre, careering through the streets of Mombasa in a taxi, or even attending a Robert McKee story seminar, Oaten’s writing constantly teeters on the blissed-out edge of chaos. … For Oaten, verisimilitude is debased coinage, and the truth of a situation is captured in the vividness of language.” (Quill & Quire)

    “… filled with personal voyages and literary truths. Blending topics such as the first Gulf war, CNN and religion with Oaten’s personal anecdotes and opinions, this book is nothing short of a good read.” (The Link)

    “Accelerated Paces (Travels across borders and other imaginary boundaries)is Oaten’s first attempt at storybook recognition, and with an eclectic piece like this, it is bound to receive some literary acknowledgment.” (The Silhouette)

  • Accepted

    Accepted

    $27.95

    When Pat Patterson was 17 years old, he was asked to leave his home after telling his parents he was in love with a man. Moving from Montreal to the United States in the 1960s, barely knowing a word of English, he was determined to succeed in the squared circle. Already facing homophobia in his daily life, Pat also lived in the super-macho world of pro wrestling.

    In this fascinating and revealing memoir of a revolutionary talent, pioneer, and creative savant, Patterson recalls the trials and tribulations of climbing to the upper ranks of sports entertainment — as a performer and, later, as a backstage creative force.

    Many in the WWE Universe knew Pat Patterson as a ring legend, the prestigious first holder of WWE’s Intercontinental Championship, a WWE Hall of Famer, and one of Vince McMahon’s “stooges” during the Attitude Era. But Patterson was no stooge. For years, he was one of Vince McMahon’s most trusted advisors. His impact on and importance to the nascent stages of WWE are nearly comparable to that of the Chairman himself. Still as relevant today, Pat Patterson’s no-holds-barred story of going from unknown to WWE luminary is a classic tale of triumph.

  • Access to Information and Social Justice

    Access to Information and Social Justice

    $19.95

    Access to Information and Social Justice combines the political and the practical aspects of Access to Information (ATI) research into a single volume in order to reinvigorate critical social science, investigative journalism, and social activism in Canada. Not only does it expose some of the most important political stories and issues uncovered by ATI researchers in recent years, it also facilitates future investigations by demonstrating, in concrete ways, how any citizen can effectively use ATI requests in their work and in their capacity as socially engaged citizens.

    Edited by Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby, contributors to this book include award-winning journalists and prominent academics, as well as activists working on the frontlines of social and environmental justice in Canada.

  • Accidental Blooms

    Accidental Blooms

    $26.00

    Keiko Honda is living a successful, busy life as a scientist of cancer epidemiology at Columbia University in New York City when one morning she abruptly loses all strength in her legs. She phones a friend to care for her twenty-month-old daughter and rushes to the hospital. Within hours, she can barely breathe. She soon discovers she is permanently paralyzed from the chest down due to a rare autoimmune disease with a frequency of approximately one case per million per year. Suddenly, she’s that one. As Keiko struggles for life, she learns through lived experience the importance of community to healing, one of her prior research interests at Columbia. 

    Seeking a wheelchair-accessible home closer to nature in which to raise her daughter, Keiko moves to Vancouver, Canada. She starts hosting informal artist salons, forms a mutually supportive group of artists and art-loving neighbours and then, surprisingly, becomes an artist herself. While her illness forced her departure from a career she spent twelve years building, it would ultimately provide the opportunity to live a life dedicated to community, friendship and art, as well as the continually evolving process of self-discovery as a mother, Japanese immigrant, survivor and artist.

    When painting with watercolours, artists sometimes produce unintentional, unpredictable eruptions of colour that flow from one region to another across a too-wet surface. Keiko feels a camaraderie with these “accidental blooms,” as she calls them, because she, too, has had to plunge across unfamiliar borders and discovered beauty along the way. Accidental Blooms is a story of profound transformation that demonstrates how tragedy can teach one to see anew.

  • Accidental Genius

    Accidental Genius

    $20.00

    Using many right-wing extremists in North America (which means, in effect, weird Republicans), Garebian takes well-known utterances of egregious political, social, and cultural atrocity and present them as if they were modern poems deserving of serious academic consideration. The intent is to deflate by inflating them in mock-serious fashion. So, there are samples from the likes of Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Bachmann, Antonin Scalia, Donald Trump, etc. but also from names from pop culture, e.g. Snooki, Tom Cruise, etc.

  • Accidental Opportunities

    Accidental Opportunities

    $22.95

    Bridglal (Bridge) Pachai, a life long advocate of social justice, was born in a thatched roof cottage in Umbulwana, South Africa. His journey has taken him from South Africa to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along the way he has taught history at universities in South Africa, Malawi, The Gambia and Halifax. He has also served as director of the Black Cultural Centre in Nova Scotia and as director of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. In the words of Tom McInnis, his senior when Bridge was director of the Human Rights Commission, he could “dance with the lords and be with the paupers.”

  • Accidents

    Accidents

    $17.95

    In Accidents, her third collection of poems, Genni Gunn takes us on a roller coaster ride through past and present in different continents, to explore the various upheavals that alter our lives. From her birthplace in Trieste, where she attempts to unravel the mysterious lives of her parents; to Vancouver with its urban alienation and attraction; to Burma, where disruptions are a way of life under the Generals. Along the way, she treats us to a sardonic and sometimes appalling history of masks, and of spontaneous combustion.

    Poem by poem, Gunn examines the emotional, political, and geological upheaval that inevitably shape us as family members, as lovers, and as citizens, and the humble talismans we carry as reminders of the past. Heartbreak and humour leaven and disrupt these poems in equal measure, as does love.

  • Accountable Advances

    Accountable Advances

    $14.95

    A finely-crafted collection of short stories, Acountable Advances reveals the strange and subtle nuances of everyday life, life in 1957, hidden lives, lives in crisis, and lives just beginning. When a young couple is caught planning premarital sex while “Courting in 1957,” her seemingly progressive parents lock them in a bedroom and won’t release them until they carry out their plan.

  • Accrete or Crumble

    Accrete or Crumble

    $28.00

    Accrete or Crumble