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Showing 385–400 of 9481 results
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Accidental Blooms
$26.00Keiko 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.
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Accidental Genius
$20.00Using 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.
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Accidental Opportunities
$22.95Bridglal (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.”
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Accidents
$17.95In 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.
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Accountable Advances
$14.95A 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.
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Accrete or Crumble
$28.00Accrete or Crumble
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Accusation
$21.95Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the Year
An accusation, regardless of truth, has its own life when let loose in the world.
Accusation, hailed by the Globe and Mail as “a psychological thriller . . . deeply considered, calm on the surface yet, on closer reading, full of ambiguities,” again proves Bush to be one of Canada’s finest authors. Examining the impracticability of determining “truth,” Bush crafts a tale the Montreal Gazette believes “could almost be a crime novel of the Scandinavian variety, striding headlong into the murkier reaches of human motivation.”
While in Copenhagen, journalist Sara Wheeler happens upon a touring Ethiopian circus. After a friend begins a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface — disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while we strive to untangle the narrative slipknots, the concept of “truth” begins to unravel.
Travelling from Canada to Ethiopia and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster.
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Accusation
$32.95Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the Year
While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children’s circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations.
With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada’s finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover “the truth.” After a friend of Sara’s begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past.
Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.
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Ace Theory
$24.95Current opinion always holds asexuality to be invisible. Hence the notion of a happy, gentle, jubilant asexuality is never to be found in any text. Where are we to read it, then?
In this revelatory book, critically acclaimed poet Ryan Fitzpatrick works through the ways in which they have interfaced with a sexual world as an asexual person. Often defined as the orientation of those who don’t experience sexual attraction, asexuality is tied to a shared logic wherein our lives are shaped by sex, by romance, by economic and social pressures that determine what a good life looks like.
Leaping from the eureka-moment of finding the right words to name an unnameable experience, Ace Theory upends rigid definitions by turning over the pieces of a supposedly broken life. Through intellectual analysis, cultural criticism, and personal reflection, Fitzpatrick tangles with the trenchant knot of compulsory sexuality, putting a squeeze on the many pressures that make asexual people feel like they simply don’t fit.
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Acqua Sacra
$21.95Everything seems broken in Suzanna Ricci’s life. Only 42, her marriage to Len has disintegrated. Her relationship to their teenage boys, Robin and Logan, is in need of repair. Now her mother, ‘that martial soul,’ wants her to restore the family home in Acqua Sacra, damaged by earthquake. And she doesn’t care how many trips from Montreal to their vivid Italian patria of Abruzzo her daughter has to make. At least when Len, a dodgy accountant, encourages her to take a job with a Montreal law firm headed by a man named Robert Bliss, Suzanna feels hopeful of being freer of her ex. Until she realizes the crazy cost of disentangling herself, and not just from him or his ‘associates.’ Old World skepticism kicks at New World concerns in Acqua Sacra, Keith Henderson’s brisk new novel about private deception and public corruption. His cast includes an honest architect, a gutsy office clerk, the modern-day witch of a drained lake, and at least one (reformed) dirt-digging lawyer. But what is Suzanna to do when the mob and their extralegal cross-border political shenanigans invade her life? While Montreal’s underworld seems as full of venomous snakes and mean dogs as the Abruzzo mountains, Roman history, Italian mafiosi, dutiful Canadians, and migrant African workers collide, headlong and bizarrely comedic. At the centre of the crash, stunned and sheep-like, lies Suzanna. Henderson, the author ofThe Roof Walkers, again delivers an entertaining and perceptive story in Acqua Sacra about the nature of personal responsibility, this time in an age of multinational delinquency. If Suzanna survives the wreckage, it’ll be by honouring the true meaning of ‘family’ in any global village.
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Across Canada by Story
$22.95More adventures from one of Canada’s premier editors and storytellers
Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country’s leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada’s finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers.
Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist, he discovered even more about the land and its writers and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share.
Now in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnston, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.
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Across the Face of the Storm
$20.00This is an apprenticeship novel, the story of Isabel Cooper, 17, and her 15-year-old brother, Frederick. In early 1911, they leave their Georgetown home after the sudden death of their Mexican mother. They are determined to find their father, a college professor who – like many American leftists – had joined the Mexican revolution a few months earlier. They travel by train, stagecoach, and wagon, at first put off by what they see of turn-of-the-century American South. But they soon learn of the quiet dignity of their mother’s homeland. After an ugly incident not of their making, they escape the federales with the help of Pepe, a lad of many talents. He leads them to refuge with a ragtag militia on its way to join Carranza’s Army of the North, commanded by a woman known as La Maestra
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Act
$19.95“Simply put, I don’t think I would’ve found my voice as an actor without David.” — Scott Speedman, actor
“Act has the roadmap for the most crucial task of an actor: getting present.” — Shawn Doyle, actor
A lively, conversational textbook dedicated to the art of acting from a master teacher.
Act: The Modern Actor’s Handbook is the result of 30 years of one of North America’s most renowned acting teachers teaching some of the world’s most talented screen actors. This is a full tour through the concepts at the heart of Rotenberg’s techniques: states of being, primaries and secondaries, images that you elaborate up or distill down, modifiers, actions and beats, and more. Although his methods loosely draw on the great acting teachers like Hagen and Meisner back to Stanislavski, he teaches new techniques suited to the best of today’s screen actors. This is a major new work in the actor’s library and will be pulled off the shelf time and again to find that key into a scene, to prepare for an audition, or to find that right technique to make the art come alive again.
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Actor Needs Restraint!
$24.95Three plays from the repertoire of iconic Newfoundland and Labrador playwright, actor, and member of the groundbreaking Newfoundland comedy troupe CODCO, Andy Jones.
Based on Jones’ well-known epistolary radio series, An Evening with Uncle Val is a set of comic reportages from the perspective of a retired outport-dweller now living with his family in St. John’s. Uncle Val is sometimes bemused, sometimes outraged by modern life; he has charmed readers over the decades with his stalwart heart concealed in a curmudgeon’s exterior.
Out of the Bin and King o’ Fun are zany, fragmented, occasionally philosophical, always hilarious renditions of contemporary life that demonstrate the versatility of one of Canada’s most talented and beloved theatremakers.
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Acts of the Compassionates
$16.95Acts of the Compassionates
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Ad Sanctos
$19.95All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant ‘image’ of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself andhis writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey