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Showing 4065–4080 of 9248 results
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Letters From the Land of Fear
$25.00For 11 months Calvin White worked for Doctors Without Borders as a mental health specialist in the off-the-radar region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Unlike the higher profile emergency situations which draw that international humanitarian organization’s attention, the milieu for White’s mission was the quiet, slow death in an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. As White’s forward says: “This is a small story about small people written by a small person so maybe there is no interest in it. On the other hand, since most of us on the planet are also small, maybe there is.” White takes the reader inside the daily heartbeat of humans we’ve never heard of but come to see as sharing the same pulse. It is a remarkable journey of intimacy and hope, one that reconfigures our understanding of sadness and, ultimately, reaffirms the common spirit of humanity.
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Letters I Didn’t Write
$16.95Letters I Didn’t Write is a contemplative collection of poems imbued with a sense of longing for opportunities lost and lives unfulfilled. Acclaimed poet John Mackenzie explores a sweeping range of subjects, from the tragedies of war to the musings of a discouraged physics major to the violent end of Spanish poet Federico Garc�a Lorca. At the centre of MacKenzie’s collection is a series of poems inspired by country singer Hank Williams, “an angel from Montgomery/who has written himself like a virus into music.”Ultimately, MacKenzie’s finest skill is his ability to transport readers to a greater context of human relationships, community, and our search for home and a sense of belonging. His questioning brings us all closer to “the fragments found scrawled/in the margins of silence, disaster, epiphany.”
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Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry, 19291954
$25.00From the beginning, John Sutherland recognized that his literary gifts lay in criticism rather than in poetry. His independence from the academy and his largely autodidactic training gave him a unique perspective as a critic of Canadian literature. What these letters document, beyond a purely personal struggle, is a period (1942-1956) of great importance in the development of Canadian poetry, and it is above all the nuts and bolts of that development that they bring into keen relief: the economics of publishing books and literary magazines in the days before The Canada Council, and the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of trying wholly to live a life in literature at that time.
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Letters of Marshall McLuhan
$36.95Inspiring correspondence from the originator of “The Medium Is the Message,” available for the first time in over 25 years
Called an “oracle” and a “sage,” Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) became one of the most famous men of the sixties and seventies. His reputation as a groundbreaking communications theorist was established by his many books, including The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967), and his work earned him a cult-like following that’s still devoted to this day.
The letters in this collection—which in the early years provide a fascinating background to McLuhan’s life and intellectual growth—are filled with discussions of ideas that altered people’s understanding of many aspects of the electronic age they live in. They reveal not only the amiability of a man who earned the friendship and respect of many outstanding people, but also his staggering knowledge of the great writers and thinkers of the past and present, which inspired him to become his time’s most renowned interpreter. Collectively, these letters offer a readable and comprehensible gloss on the ideas that made McLuhan’s name. His correspondents—distinguished scholars and colleagues, celebrated politicians, famous journalists, and stars of popular culture—range from Ann Landers to Tom Wolfe to Susan Sontag to Jimmy Carter.
This rich and varied collection of over 400 letters is an important contribution to the cultural history of the twentieth century and paints a fascinating portrait of a man who exerted a singular influence throughout the western world.
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Letters to Brian
$21.00In daily love letters written to her husband and soul companion, Brian, over the year following his death from brain cancer, critically acclaimed author, playwright, and jazz singer Martha Brooks leads us on a journey through grief that is both deeply personal and undeniably universal.
By turns funny, shattering, and uplifting, Brooks wrestles with the crucial question of how to continue a lifelong romance once your lover is gone. The answer seems to come from Brian himself, leaving timely clues and orchestrating surprising synchronicities of healing through family, friends, and complete strangers. Through her “Letters to Brian”, Brooks learns not to overcome her grief but to live with loss. And she comes to realize that we are never truly alone.
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Letters to Little Comrade
$20.00In this reissue of Dan K. Woo’s debut novel we meet Little Comrade, a young woman at the mercy of the fates in the fictional country of Quina. Framed as an advice booklet, Letters to Little Comrade takes us on a dystopic journey that circles around Little Comrade’s attempts to find happiness and purpose in her life, whether by finding fulfilling work, finding love, by pleasing her parents or by leaving her country.
With chapter titles such as “Keep Calm, There Is Hope,” “Exercise Is Healthy for the Spirit” and “Too Much Romance Is Unproductive” the author moves effortlessly between the bracing tone of a self-help book and the bleak story of Little Comrade. Woo also skilfully weaves in social commentary on gender relations, worker exploitation and government propaganda, with matter-of-fact descriptions and fatherly advice. The resulting book is a captivating and tragic story with a nameless, yet unforgettable, heroine.
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Letters to Singapore
$22.00Growing up in Singapore, Simran always knew what was expected of her: to learn how to be a good mother and wife. The only problem? Simran has no interest in any of this. After a close escape (almost at the altar!), Simran earns a reprieve to attend the University of Calgary in Canada. Letters exchanged back home to her mother, sister and friends reveal that no matter which path women take, traditional or independent, life is fraught with conflict, hilarity and peril. Simran’s experience as a brave and hopeful young woman and a new Canadian will touch your heart; her thoughtful determination to chart her own course will inspire you.
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Leviathan
$18.95In his new collection of poems, Carmine Starnino writes of mid-life within the context of family life, testing traditional views of masculinity against contemporary experience. Adopting the swagger of the “unoutshoutable big shots” of that generation of cabbies, factory-lifers and hard-ass dads that sired us, Starnino pursues the leviathan machismo that seemed to propel them. How does it square with the urbane young fathers he encounters taking their toddlers to play in the park, or the gear-obsessed quest for the perfect weed-free lawn? Moving from putting his restless child to bed to the hospital bedside of his dying father, Starnino’s poems offer an intimate if unresolved portrait of an apprenticeship into manhood.
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Ley Lines
$22.95Set in the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Ley Lines begins in the mythical boom town of Sawdust City, Yukon Territory. Luckless prospector Steve Ladle has accepted an unusual job offer: accompany a local con artist to the unconquered top of a nearby mountain. What he finds there briefly upends the town’s fading fortunes, attracting a crowd of gawkers and acolytes, while inadvertently setting in motion a series of events that brings about the town’s ruin.
In the aftermath, a ragtag group of characters is sent reeling across the Klondike, struggling to come to grips with a world that has been suddenly and unpredictably upturned. As they attempt to carve out a place for themselves, our protagonists reckon with the various personal, historical and supernatural forces that have brought them to this moment.
A wildly inventive, psychedelic odyssey, Ley Lines flips the frontier narrative on its ear, and heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in Canadian fiction.
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Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way
$35.00Eight years in the making, Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way is a community oral history of Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, the first case in Canada to result in a declaration of Aboriginal Rights and Title to a specific piece of land. Told from the perspective of the Plaintiff, Chief Roger William, joined by fifty Xeni Gwet’ins, Tŝilhqot’ins, and allies, this book encompasses ancient stories of creation, modern stories of genocide through smallpox and residential school, and stories of resistance including the Tŝilhqot’in War, direct actions against logging and mining, and the twenty-five-year battle in Canadian courts to win recognition of what Tŝilhqot’ins never gave up and have always known. “We are the land,” as Chief Roger says. After the violence of colonialism, he understands the court case as “bringing our sight back.” This book witnesses the power of that vision, its continuity with the Tŝilhqot’in world before the arrival of colonizers two centuries ago, and its potential for a future of freedom and self-determination for the Tŝilhqot’in People.
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Li’l Bastard
$17.95Finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry
David McGimpsey’s fifth collection of poems takes to new levels the melding of the deeply personal and the culturally popular that drove his acclaimed book Sitcom (nominated for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) – this is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar.
Written in part as an homage to the poetic idols of his youth, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, Li’l Bastard is a collection of ‘chubby sonnets’ – sixteen-line poems organized in eight twenty-poem sequences – that explore the poet’s obsessions and engagements with America and Canada, popular culture, love and death, aging, baseball and beer and Barnaby Jones. Adopting a wild array of tone and artistic strategies, from picaresque to fantasy, to observational humour and the simple song lyric, these poems map the poet’s midlife crisis on a wild flight that touches down in Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas and Los Angeles.
Poignant and often achingly funny, Li’l Bastard will no doubt cement McGimpsey’s status as a beloved and ever-surprising original.
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Lies I Told My Sister
$23.95After a nine month estrangement, sisters Lily and Rose, are reunited in a hospital emergency room when the younger sister’s husband has been badly injured in a car crash. While waiting for updates, they reminisce about their childhood memories in an effort to unearth the family tragedy – the death of their older sister Tansy. Lily and Rose begin to unravel the lies of omission that pulled them even farther apart.
Lies I Told My Sister is an exploration of how our community of loved ones can both buoy us up or tear us down. How innocently kept secrets can cause profound chasms.
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Life Class
$21.95Nerina, a young woman living in Venice after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, is looking for a way to move to America. Her charm and grace bring her to the attention of Helena, a woman who seeks out “individuals with useful skills” for her contacts in the international art community.
Nerina successfully adapts to the social and professional expectations of working with creative people. In fact, she is so successful that her greatest challenge lies not in achieving her dream, but in finding for a dream to pursue in the first place – a journey that takes her from Italy to New York, and finally Montreal.
Ann Charney’s Life Class is an unusual diaspora novel, casting its protagonist not as a leaf scattered by wind, but as a brave explorer following her ambitions.
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Life Expectancy
$16.95How do you go on after making a life-altering discovery about yourself?
Sophie St. John’s grandmother, a world-renowned writer, may be as talented as she is rude, but Sophie is just Sophie: clumsy, emotional, and prone to outbursts.
When she stars in a class play based on her grandmother’s famous novel and then comes across an old legal case while doing research for homework, Sophie uncovers a profound, devastating, life-changing secret — a secret her parents have kept from her since birth.
Faced with a revelation that changes her entire future, Sophie must confront her dysfunctional family, ponder her life goals, and summon the courage to finally start living on her own terms.
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Life Experience Coolant
$18.00Life Experience Coolant is a collection of four long poems informed by artistic isolation, directionless reading, and the avoidance mechanisms that make poetry simultaneously possible and impossible at our current cultural velocity. Using methodologies of textual appropriation, collage, rehistoricization and self-sufficent rhetoricality, Life Experience Collant address transgenderedness, the late-late-late capitalist situation, gaming culture and new media, contemporary Canadian politics, and satirizations of conceptual poetics and antimemoir. As well as love.
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Life Finds A Way
$24.99Life Finds a Way is an anthology of comics about what happens after the end of the world. It asks the question, where are the helpers? How do you rebuild once the worst has happened? We want to tell stories of humanity at its best, despite dire circumstances. We want to explore how to look at an apocalypse as a problem to be solved. We want to remind people that creativity, resilience, and community are the strengths of humanity. Just because the world as we knew it is gone doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to end with it.