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All Books in this Collection
Showing 4049–4064 of 9489 results
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Lantana Strangling Ixora
$20.95Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2012
This collection is as much about love and people in and out of relationships as it is about origins and the process of estrangement. The lantana is a flower of South American origin, and the ixora of Asian origin. The lantana, a creeper that grows profusely, often engulfing other plants, provides a ready metaphor for the consciousness of the Americas overcoming that of India in the Americas–the mainstreaming and divesting of yoga from its Indian origins being the most visible manifestation. This collection ranges widely in its geographical and historical concerns, from Canada to Guyana to India and places in between, exploring the contradictions in our lives: familial influences, terrorism, literature, politics, race, and the power of language and representation. As always in Persaud’s work, love is ever present. This is a collection that displays mastery over nuances of language, and is at once quirky and humorous as it continues an engagement with the theme of “place as muse.”
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Lapsed WASP
$12.00Victor Coleman is one of Canada’s best-known poets. Born in 1944 in Toronto, he has published many collections of poetry and has been active as an editor (especially with Coach House Press), a curator, and in general as an active force in all the arts. Lapsed W.A.S.P. collects more than a decade of Coleman’s work, including much that appeared in small editions, a process which has been a central part of his aesthetic stance. This is poetry that brings the body and the intelligence memorably together and challenges a reader.
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Lardcake
$12.00Chosen as a “Best Book for 1996” in the Halifax Mail Star. Now in its second printing. Lardcake is a collection of original and frequently humorous poems that find their inspiration in the world of popular culture. Pleas to the spirit of Elvis Presley, monologues from Elly May Clampett and Darrin Stevens, mock epics about Babe Ruth in the underworld, valedictory speeches to please Oprah, lyrics occasioned by pork products and confessions from somebody who claims to have gone out with Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty are all just part of Lardcake’s ingredients. A scholar of contemporary culture and literature, the poet is not satisfied with merely satirizing pop icons but in transforming their apparent realities into distinct celebrations of the powers of art and love. The poems, like the elegy for Alan Hale Jr. — the actor who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island — will naturally please pop aficionados but will also impress readers of contemporary poetry with their expressive details.
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Larder
$20.00Fully immersed in the organic world, Larder is at once an elegant transcription of the spiritual nourishment that comes from our embrace of the earth and of the inevitable loss in our unwillingness to embrace sustainability. In her latest collection, McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
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Largeness of Rescue, The
$18.95The big theme– perhaps the only theme– is the narrative that unfolds between the bookends of our birth and our death. Each of us is born into a time and place– our present– and must answer the questions only we can answer for ourselves: Who are we? What will we do? What choices will we make? The Largeness of Rescue helps us travel along our own storyline by doing what the best art does so well: engages us with ourselves and with our world, and encourages us to slow down and consider our very humanness.
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Larry Gorman
$16.95Lumberman Larry Gorman was no respecter of borders — nor of anything else, it seems. From the time he was a young man growing up on Prince Edward Island until his death in Brewer, Maine in 1917. Larry Gorman composed satirical songs about friend and foe, relative and stranger, without fear or favour. This new edition of Sandy Ives’s celebrated book features more than 70 of Gorman’s songs, 29 with music.
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Lasagna
$19.95The events at Oka in 1990 saw the might of the Canadian Armed Forces in the service of the governments of both Quebec and Canada confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their local community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. The events of that summer have etched themselves indelibly into the minds of North Americans as the latest episode in the continuing 500-year history of “Indian wars” in the Americas.
To the Mohawk nation, a community spanning a territory crossed by the Canada-USA boundary, the confrontation at Oka was simply a temporary open declaration of war by Canada in what Mohawks regard as an ongoing cold war between their nation, and the colonial powers of both Canada and the USA. As in all previous “Indian wars” instantly mythologized by the colonial North American media, the defenders of the community at Oka were presented to North American news consumers as “a criminal element,” terrorizing (with their “Viet Nam military training” and their “Mafia connections”) not only “law abiding citizens,” but their own people as well.
The day after the military stand-off at Oka ended, “Lasagna,” one of the leaders of the Mohawks’ armed resistance, was “unmasked” as Ronald Cross—a man with no criminal record, no connections to the Mafia or any other “criminal underground,” and no military service record in Viet Nam or any other country in the world. Where, then, had these “common knowledge” rumours originated? And why was there such a high degree of media complicity in the “public information strategies” of the governments of Quebec, Canada and the USA ? Where, indeed, did the inflammatory media tag “Warriors” come from, when the closest word in the Mohawk language defining such a concept means, simply and literally, “the men of the community”?
These and other questions are interrogated in a book vital to the understanding of the ongoing struggles of the Native nations in the Americas to achieve what they increasingly define as their “inherent right to self-determination and self government.” -
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
$21.95A series of short nonfiction pieces, Laser Quit Smoking Massage explores the peculiarities of the urban and rural centres of the Canadian West. From prairie towns to sprawling cities, Cole Nowicki’s witty, insightful, and ever curious reportage explores the evolving states of community, family, and belonging.
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Last Bullet Is for You, The
$14.95By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the title of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart’s classic hymn to love, which novelist Angela Carter once described as being “like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning.” Later, Carter wrote privately to a friend, saying that she would hate any daughter of hers to have to write such a novel, adding, “By Grand Central Station I Tore Off his Balls would be more like it, I should hope.” And now along comes Montreal novelist Martine Delvaux with The Last Bullet Is for You. This stream-of-consciousness novel takes the form a love letter, but it is the last one. One last letter filled as much with the memory of love as the desire for revenge. Love is war, wrote Ovid, and this book is a battleground. Writing is both an act of passion and the means to end it once and for all. Writing is the last bullet, shooting through the love story and into what is left of the lover: a ghost, a fiction. And maybe that’s what he was from the start.
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Last Chance to Renew
$19.95The short-story collection Last Chance to Renew by Scott Randall is a rare jewel. If Alice Munro were a man, she would be Scott Randall. The stories are set in southern Ontario, from the Ottawa Valley to the Toronto area. They examine the small moments in ordinary lives with the exacting detail and intimate characterization that Munro has honed to a fine art. This uniquely female storytelling style coupled with a focus on the intimate lives of women has found a huge audience with book-buyers who are, demographically speaking, middle- to upper-middle-class women in their 30s and 40s. But rarely are women given glimpses into the minds of ordinary, middle-class men, often not even their own husbands. Randall uses the “feminine” style and subject matter of popular female authors to see into the minds of men coping with the same problems of marriage, pregnancy, home-buying, child-rearing and widowhood as their wives, but looking at it from their perspective.
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Last Days of Montreal
$22.95Montreal is a city that has always represented the ideal of languages and peoples meeting, mixing and producing a culture greater than the sum of diverse parts. Last Days of Montreal travels through an imaginary cityscape, powered by apples, beer, the dream of love, and a dark but determined joie de vivre which Montrealers adopt to survive the rising tide of bitter political schism, economic downturn, language laws, record snowfalls, crumbling streets and a baseball team on the verge of disappearing. The locus is a quiet enclave in the north-east end.
Donald is an idealistic anglo from Toronto who came to Montreal on the strength of his father’s “Liberal” hopes. But Pascale, his pure-laine wife, is inspired by a messianic “Lucien” and she sees the future differently. Bruce is a divorced Montreal-born anglo from the West Island, a failing stockbroker and an uncertain father, who is struggling to build a new life on the East Side where he now lives with Geneviève, a French ex-pat and freelance translator. Bruce sees the blue and white Quebec flag everywhere he looks, but when he tries to explain the “near-death experience” his country suffered in the referendum to Geneviève, she is not as sympathetic as he might wish. She is concerned with something beyond politics.
If Bruce and Donald represent a cry from the middle-class, horrid Last Days is their hyper-echo. Loud and legless, Last Days is a dissolute tramp, a self-appointed prophet of doom, wheeling around in his electric wheelchair, warning all citizens that Montreal is killing itself with this ridiculous French/English political war. Last Days’ world is the downtown streets. But a fateful meeting on the Cartier Bridge sparks love. A true Montrealer, Last Days heads into the north end, in search of his heart’s desire.
The time span is from the early 90’s through to a blessed spring following the Ice Storm of January 1998. At its centre is that cold, nerve-wracking day in November 1995. Last Days of Montreal is emotional history.
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Last Goldfish, The
$22.95Twenty-five years ago and counting, Louisa, my true, essential, always-there-for-everything friend, died. We were 22.
When Anita Lahey opens her binder in grade nine French and gasps over an unsigned form, the girl with the burst of red hair in front of her whispers, Forge it! Thus begins an intense, joyful friendship, one of those powerful bonds forged in youth that shapes a person’s identity and changes the course of a life.
Anita and Louisa navigate the wilds of 1980s suburban adolescence against the backdrop of dramatic world events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. They make carpe diem their manifesto and hatch ambitious plans. But when Louisa’s life takes a shocking turn, into hospital wards, medical tests, and treatments, a new possibility confronts them, one that alters, with devastating finality, the prospect of the future for them both.
Equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, The Last Goldfish is a poignant memoir of youth, friendship, and the impermanence of life.
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Last Half of the Year, The
$19.95Jason Dade, quixotic hero of this 1970s coming-of-age novel, is on a quest. He must decipher cryptic signs on his journey to meet an elusive figure known only as The Man. His father, Saul Dade, broods restlessly at hope, helpless to intervene. Their interwoven narratives include idyllic descriptions of rural childhood, the grim spectre of war, the harsh realities of leaving the nest … and finding the way back home.The Last Half of the Year renews the age-old configuration of innocence and experience in this, at times, darkly humourous story of a father and son whose lives cast shadows over one another across time.It is a book about generations, the passage of time, and the reckless and resilience of youth.
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Last Hummingbird West of Chile
$22.95***IPPY AWARDS: LITERARY FICTION – BRONZE***
An audacious tale of murder, privilege, and servitude – of both humans and nature.
A stunning work of imaginative fiction, Last Hummingbird West of Chile spins a tale of adventure that is in turn comedic, violent, poignant and thoughtful. Through the exploits of a young sailor born in questionable circumstance and a pair of murderous servants, as well as an assortment of other 19th century regulars, the vital subjects of today—race, religion, sexuality, environment—are framed in history and human culture.
Through narration by human protagonists, a tree, a hummingbird, various beasts, and the landscape itself, Ruddock tells a story of colonialism and environment, brutality and privilege, and the best and worst of human nature.
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Last Journey of Captain Harte, The
$14.95The Last Journey of Captain Harte is a comic and complex family drama that takes a middle-aged widow from her small prairie world into a surreal world of possibility. When Marguerite Waker receives a far-away phone call from the nomadic Captain Harte, an old friend of her husband, her imagination is awakened. As Captain Harte makes his circuitous way home, Marguerite follows his journey and prepares for a different life.
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Last Night at Wyrmwood High
$14.99Wyrmwood Secondary School has had the same grad prank for the past 50 years. This year Amber, a werewolf, Tiffany, a vampire, and Steph, a reptile, have set out to change that. The problem is, the school is cursed. And the end of school isn’t going to go as planned. Last Night at Wyrmwood High is a full-colour, all- ages graphic novel full of wit, witches, and other things that start with W.