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Showing 3937–3952 of 9481 results
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Kechika Chronicler
$26.00Willard Freer lived in remote areas of northern BC for most of his life. Born in Kamloops in 1910 and raised in the Peace River country, Freer came to the Kechika River valley in 1942, where he worked for a number of years with famed packer and guide Skook Davidson. He then built a cabin about 35 kilometres to the north and spent the rest of his life in the valley, and at Fireside, an Alaska Highway lodge near the junction of the Kechika and Liard rivers.
By all accounts, Freer was a quiet, introverted person, who faithfully kept a daily diary from 1942 to 1975. Most of the entries are brief, but cumulatively they provide a detailed record of life in northern BC and southern Yukon Territory. Due to his proximity to the famed Alaska Highway and the historic Davie Trail, Willard encountered many of the Indigenous people who lived, worked and travelled through the Kechika valley, as well as casual visitors, bush pilots, government survey parties including the Geological Survey of Canada, major mining companies, and branches of the US Army in northern BC during World War II.
Willard Freer’s diaries are the most extensive written record of daily life in one of the most remote regions of British Columbia. Kechika Chronicler provides a voice for his story.
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Keefer Street
$24.95“Required reading for any person troubled by our world right now.” – Maureen Medved
Jake’s life is shaped by the Spanish Civil War and the not-so-civil wars that go on within families and intimate relationships.
With engaging wit and originality, David Spaner does for Vancouver what writers like Mordecai Richler and Philip Roth did for Montreal and Newark. Jake Feldman grows up on Keefer Street in the dynamic working-class immigrant neighbourhood of Strathcona in Vancouver. This is the first novel to bring to life the vibrancy of Strathcona and its largely Jewish Keefer Street.
Jake’s left-wing, rabble-rousing street politics of his youth eventually lead him to leave Depression-era Vancouver to join the international volunteers fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. But his return home is unheralded and his idealism is worn down by the mundaneness of everyday life and family conflict.
Fifty years later, he recaptures the passion of his youth during a reunion of civil war volunteers in Spain. Keefer Street explores how to preserve your idealism in order to live a life of purpose. -
Keep My Memory Safe
$24.95Born in Hong Kong to unwed parents, Stephanie Chitpin was transported illegally to the Island of Mauritius by Ah Pak, the head nun of a Buddhist temple with the help of Mr. Chui, a benevolent Chinese businessman. Ah Pak raised her as an orphan ward of the temple, Fook Soo Am, known as the Pagoda. Encouraged by Mr. Chui and in spite of Ah Pak’s opposition, she did very well at school. The scars incurred by classmates’ name calling (bastard, and more) the shame of being an orphan raised in a temple, tragic deaths, and other obstacles did not prevent her from pursuing her education and finishing high school at the age of 16. Although Ah Pak had other plans for her, Mr. Chui stood by her with diplomacy and tact throughout her school years and onto university in Canada on a scholarship.
Keep My Memory Safe poetically chronicles life in the temple and in Mauritius, and the move to Canada. This immigration story is totally unique as no other orphaned temple nuns are known to have gone on to acquire a topnotch education and become academics.
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Keeper of Tides
$19.95At age ninety-two, Ivadoile Spears is in the grip of early dementia. Alone except for a cat named Rose and an old cedar box filled with photographs, Ivadoile is stubbornly set on living out her remaining years in the now-vacant Tides Inn on Cape Breton Island. The only child of cold and withdrawn parents and widowed by the age of twenty-eight, a younger Ivadoile turned the Tides Inn into a retreat for the broken-spirited. But she had not been prepared for Ambrose Kane – a southerner who entered, bringing a cold wind in his dirty shirt.
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Keeping Count
$20.00Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane’s 18th collection of poetry, begins in the poet’s favourite terrain: short, condensed lyric that focuses on the natural world. “But pull a thread: music turns,” Lane writes, and the book progressively defamiliarizes the reader, moving from ecopoetry to a longer poetry of interiority in the second section, concluding with a final section that focuses on issues of mortality. As George Elliott Clarke has written so aptly, “If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: Like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity.”
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Keeping the Peace
$19.95Keeping the Peace
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Keeping the Public in Public Education
$14.95In his trenchant essay, Salutin explores and defends public education at a time when the public sector “dares not utter its name for fear of derision and worse.” He simplifies complex issues with the observation that “almost anything can work” if educators are genuinely committed and teachers are respected rather than demonized. He travels to Finland to study the world’s most successful public education system. He challenges the sacred cow of educational “choice” and emphasizes that public element of public education instils a natural pride in community and diversity, something no other form of teaching can offer.
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Ken Danby
$45.00Ken Danby (1940-2007) was one of Canada’s foremost practitioners of contemporary realism. Rooted in the Canadian psyche, nourished by his Ontario rural roots, Danby’s subject matter was broad and expansive, yet it was the images of Canadian landscapes and life that captured the public’s attention. At the Crease, a 1972 egg tempera painting depicting a nameless hockey goalie viewed from ice-level, was his best-known work, and for many, it defined him as an artist.
An accomplished painter, watercolourist, printmaker, and commercial artist, Danby’s career began to unfold with a modernist narrative in the 1960s and 1970s. It intersected with the fervent nationalism expressed in the music of Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. According to art historian Patrick Hutchings, Danby’s paintings bring us “face to face with a moment of our own time.”
Ken Danby: Beyond the Crease, the first major book on Ken Danby’s creative practise in two decades, examines the depth and breadth of Danby’s work. Designed to accompany a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton, it features an essay by art historian Ihor Holubizky, a detailed chronology by Christine Braun, more than sixty reproductions of Danby&#s major paintings, including At the Crease, Lacing Up, Pancho, and Pulling Out, and dozens of archival photographs, as well as Danby’s own words about his life and work drawn from an unpublished autobiographical essay that he completed shortly before his death.
Danby’s work is highly collectable and can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée des beaux arts, Montreal; the Art Gallery of Vancouver; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum. Ken Danby became a member of the Order of Canada in 2001.
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Kerfuffle
$20.00Welcome to Blakkat Theatre, home of the improv comedy troupe Kerfuffle!
Please permit us to introduce our Cast of Players:
NELLIE WOLFE: age 28, recent orphan, pregnant disabled avenger and sword thief
ANDY MCLEAN: age 21, redhead, devoted bike rider and aspiring Anarchist
CONSTANZIA FORGIONE: age 28, reluctant waitress, emerging gay poet and Nellie’s BFF
CALVAIRE PERSONNE: age 29, PHD candidate, brother to a living sister and a dead twin
SHERMAN SILVERSTEIN: turning 30, father, maker of Jesus Toast, married, for now
YOU, OUR AUDIENCE-PARTICIPANT: at every age, your input is an essential ingredient
Kerfuffle is a seriously funny book about serious matters. Jumping on and off stage, the troupe do their best to make sense and nonsense of their lives and the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Uncertain which player is her baby daddy, nine-months-pregnant Nellie Wolfe wields her crutch as both prop and weapon to hunt him down. She bands with feminist friends to teach the troupe’s male members about the responsible use of their members. From hidden weapons to the marketing of Jesus Toast, simmering personal and political secrets build to an explosive on-stage reveal. It’s an inside-Anarchy exposé of G20’s crucible moments from black balaclavas to a burning police car to life inside the kettle. As satire at its best, it offers both belly laughs and a demand for justice.
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Kerosene
$18.95In Kerosene, her debut book of poetry, Jamella Hagen weaves individual memories into a narrative that charts the process of orientation and growing maturity within shifting geographical locations.Patterned on the author’s own experience, the collection follows the story of a young woman’s life, encompassing the beauty and harshness of a childhood spent in the wilderness of Northern BC, the difficult process of adapting to city life, a period of extensive travel in South America, and her eventual return to the north. From a position of experience, the poet is able to contemplate the events of her lifetime with a thoughtful and sometimes gently ironic voice.Equal to the strength and wisdom of the memoir, however, is the richness and vividness of detail distilled through her clear and accessible style. Whether she’s describing enigmatic memories of her mother, the exquisite but steadily disappearing Perito Moreno Glacier, or the moonshine still on her kitchen table, Hagen has mastered the trick of animating fleeting moments with an elegant touch that evokes both familiarity and wonder.
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Kerouac & Presley
$22.95Kerouac & Presley takes you on the road, guitar slung over your shoulder. Beginning in the Montreal neighbourhood where a teenage girl was brutally murdered in 1975, the International Year of the Woman, to an Abbey in Connecticut where a former starlet and Elvis co-star fled Hollywood to become a nun. This is the story of a wanderer who sets out to rewrite “the blank and flawless page” that is America. Inspired by the history of Quebec and America, Kerouac & Presley is an American prayer in prose and paragraphs.
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Kerrisdale Elegies
$18.95It is extraordinary that one can take the measure of how radically cultural sensibilities can change throughout a century by a careful reading of only two texts—in this case Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, written in the midst of the First World War, and George Bowering’s brilliant response to Rilke’s call, the Kerrisdale Elegies, composed in the midst of the Cold War.
Rilke’s poem begins and ends with a modernist appeal to the transcendent. It opens with; “Who, if I were to scream, would then hear me, among the angelic orders … ,” and ends with a nostalgic evocation of the muse of grief attendant at the spectacle of the sacrifice of youth; “we who aspire to an ascendant fortune, are overcome by astonishment at the fortunate’s fall.” [Rilke’s italics]
Compare to Bowering’s opening; “If I did complain, who among my friends would hear?” and his closing; “The single events that raise our eyes and stop our time are saying goodbye, lover, goodbye.”
Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies are a profoundly compelling illustration of Pound’s instruction to all translators—to “make it new.” In the intertextuality of these two great masterworks is to be found the birth of a post-modern writing that is self-aware, where the other is discovered in the process of the writer writing, and is not a referent, neither secular nor divine, outside of the text itself, and therefore ultimately estranged from both the writer and the reader.
Williams’ dictum, too, that writers should write “no ideas but in things” so thoroughly infuses Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies, that while they are an exact equivalent to Rilke’s emblematic masterpiece—separated as they are by three generations of one of the most tumultuous centuries in human history—they are not a translation, but a living, vibrant transformation of the work.
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Kid Rex
$19.95Kid Rex is the story of one woman’s struggle to overcome anorexia. After knowing other friends with anorexia and being baffled by their behavior (often wondering, “Why doesn’t she just eat?!”) Moisin suddenly found herself prone to the same disease, not eating at all and going weeks at a time taking in nothing but water and the occasional black coffee. She learns how to deceive the therapists her worried family sends her to, giving them all of the symptoms of depression so they’ll misdiagnose her and let her continue to be anorexic.
When she recognizes that she has a serious problem, though, she finally owns up to a therapist working at her university. She tells him that she’s an anorexic who needs to go to some group meetings to work through her condition. He looks at her doubtfully and says, “No, I don’t think you’re an anorexic.” All that runs through her mind is that she must be fat. Shortly after this devastating therapy visit, the Twin Towers fall in the September 11th attacks, and Moisin watches it happen from her apartment window. Her ensuing depression quickens her already dangerous downward spiral.
Kid Rex is a book about hope, and looking to oneself and to those around you to help get out from under the hold of such a dreadful and powerful disease. This book is written for people who are also suffering from anorexia to let them know they’re not alone, but Moisin never takes on a know-it-all tone. Books on anorexia that are currently available are either preachy, or more commonly, clinical accounts written by doctors, not people suffering from the disease.
The book is also written for families and friends who find themselves unable to understand why their loved one won’t just eat. When Moisin goes to a clinic and they plop down a tray of food in front of her, even the most sceptical reader will gasp and realize what an unsympathetic thing they’ve done to her. Moisin actually puts the reader into the head of someone suffering from anorexia, in beautiful and moving prose. The result is a book that is truly unforgettable.
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Kids in Triage
$18.00From the winner of the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award comes a remarkable debut poetry collection. In a culture that is at once desensitized by the media while it fetishizes fear and outrage, how can we talk about emergencies, both public and private in a way that still communicates their horrors, in a way that still matters? Kilby Smith-McGregor answers this question with a dizzying range of voices animated by desire, humour, pleasure and grief.
This is poetry that strikes a balance between baroque elegance and haunting understatement. In it we witness the horror of spontaneous human combustion, as well as the awkwardness of swimming lessons; the precision of code breaking, as well as the disorder of hard drinking. Effortlessly combining the languages of myth, medicine and metaphysics, Kids in Triage is rich in vivid language and arresting images, a multi-faceted feast for the imagination.
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Kiki
$20.00Alice Ernestine Prin became Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, during the height of the Crazy Years when creativity and unbridled passion had reached a fever pitch. Kiki performed in cabarets, made art, posed nude, was incarcerated, starred in avant-garde silent films, modelled for Man Ray, Gargallo, Foujita, Kisling, Sandy Calder and others. Kiki is an homage to an era where freedom, innovation, l’amour fou, creative risk and celebration of life were paramount. Journal entries, silent film play-by-plays, cut ups, boldfaced lies, gossip and whimsy provide readers with playful and provocative fodder for their imaginations in order to recreate the spirit of Montparnasse between the wars. The author urges you to grab a glass of champagne and dance.
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Kill All the Judges
$26.95Complex, fascinating, and fun … Kill All the Judges is a classic crime work, from an author heralded as one of Canada’s best, and with good reason.” — Shelf Life
Finalist for the Stephen Leacock Humour Prize
Is someone systematically killing the judges called to the British Columbian bar? At least one has been murdered and several have disappeared. Arthur Beauchamp returns from retirement once again to take on the case, this time defending his former nemesis, backwoods poet Cudworth Brown. He finds himself chasing all kinds of leads, including tracking down a mystery novel that Brown’s unreliable former lawyer has been writing, just as Beauchamp’s own wife, Margaret, has announced her candidacy for the Green Party.
Complex, madcap, and peopled with some of the most delightfully eccentric characters to be found between two covers, Kill All the Judges proves William Deverell’s mastery of the hilariously comedic crime novel.