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Showing 433–448 of 9481 results
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After Geometry
$65.00After Geometry is the first extended study of the abstract art of Claude Tousignant. James D. Campbell offers new biographical information on and insights into the man who has been des- cribed (by David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff in Contemporary Canadian Art) as making “among the most striking statements on the nature of painting.”
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After it Rains
$18.00After it Rains, Bill Haugland’s first short story collection, gently probes the human psyche and deftly reveals our foibles.
What happens to a man who faces the loss of home and property after the worst economic downturn in decades? Is a novelist’s coma, in fact, a hidden doorway? Can a photograph, found in an antique store, be the key to a turbulent past? What drives a young man to leap from a bridge in a failed suicide attempt? Should a wife and mother decide to abandon her family in a desperate moment of introspection? Does a blind boy possess a talent that borders on the supernatural?
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After Jack
$19.95Jack Spicer, the barroom soothsayer of the “Berkeley Renaissance,” forged a new kind of poetry with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser in the decade 1945–1955, grounded in their “queer genealogy” of Arthur Rimbaud, Federico García Lorca and other gay writers. Beginning his famous serial poem, After Lorca, in 1956, Spicer described it to Robin Blaser a year later:
“I enclose my eight latest ‘translations.’ Transformations might be a better word. Several are originals and most of the rest change the poem vitally. I can’t seem to make anybody understand this or what I’m doing. They look blank or ask what the spanish is for a word that isn’t in the spanish or praise (like Duncan did) an original poem as typically Lorca. What I am trying to do is establish a tradition. When I’m through … I’d like someone as good as I am to translate these translations into French (or Pushtu) adding more. Do you understand? No. Nobody does.”
Clearly, Spicer had not anticipated the birth of Garry Thomas Morse.Not merely an homage to Jack Spicer, but also a tribute to his Orphic conception of the serial poem, After Jack is a palimpsestuous attempt to achieve the dark art of nekuia, to encourage the means of poetic transmission and to divine the polyphony of both Federico García Lorca and Jack Spicer as their voices interweave, transform and become inexorably entangled with a fresh and undeniably peculiar, disturbingly profane authorial voice.
Only via the enchanted act of re:writing can Billy the Kid make explicit the homosexual subtext of Gore Vidal’s 1955 TV play The Left-Handed Gun, or Walt Whitman turn into an apocalyptic figure, or the knights of the Round Table turn into the enlightened circle of the poet’s friends. But then, as Jack said, “we were never friends.”
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After Light
$23.95After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he’s blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply. His two daughters, rebellious Von and sensitive Rosheen, grow up as isolated as the hothouse roses their mother breeds on the frozen Canadian prairie, and like the roses, they have scant protection against the violent elements that imperil them. Rosheen’s son, Kyle, raised without his mother, knows nothing of the family’s history until 1999, when he and Von gather Rosheen’s art works for an exhibit at a Brooklyn gallery. The story of the Garrisons is shaped by powerful forces – -a rogue north wind, a vengeful orphan, a sugar-dust explosion, an airborne jar of peaches, a scar that refuses to heal, a terrible lie, an unexpected baby, and a desperate drive across treacherous ice. Despite all the their tragedies, the creative fire that drives the Garrisons survives, burning more and more brightly as it’s passed from one generation to the next, into the twenty-first century.
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After Six Days
$7.95Set in the colourful, intense, competitive Montreal of the 1980s, Harrison’s novel explores the efforts of two couples to reach beyond the boundaries of self. Their tangled relationships hang in precarious balance, with the individuals drifting towards confrontation and an awkward, though dramatic, reckoning. After Six Days is written in taut, contemporary prose, its short, explosive scenes alive with the authentic feeling of urban life now.
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After the Error
$19.95Medical errors kill 24,000 Canadians each year, adversely affect hundreds of thousands, and cost close to two billion dollars. Victims of medical errors and their families who speak out often do so at considerable emotional, psychological, and financial expense. But their willingness to share their harrowing stories has helped to lay the foundation for numerous patient safety programs and continues to identify problems, provide solutions, and raise awareness.
After the Error is a collection of true stories from across Canada, and the first book anywhere to recognize what patients affected by medical errors, their families, and immediate healthcare providers have done to prevent others from enduring similar experiences.
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After the Falls
$18.95In 1960, Cathy McClure, age 12, is thrown out of Catholic school. Her father’s drugstore, faced with a superhighway and encroaching chain stores, has fallen upon hard times. So the family decides to leave Lewiston, New York, for a fresh start in suburban Buffalo. But even as Cathy embraces the tumultuous sixties and throws herself into a new life as cheerleader, Hojo Hostess, and civil rights advocate, trouble — as usual — isn’t far behind. Fiesty and resolute as ever, Cathy soldiers on, but the one thing she can’t fight threatens to dissolve the family that, through her many ups and downs, has always been her solid ground.
Told with the same wit, charm, and candour that made Too Close to the Falls a modern classic, After the Falls is an evocative portrait of a young woman, and a country, finding its way.
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After the Fire & The Particulars
$21.95From the author of Bears comes two dark comedies that expose what we’re capable of when pushed to our breaking point and give in to the temptation of taking matters into our own hands.
Set in the aftermath of the disaster that nearly destroyed Fort McMurray in 2016, After the Fire centres around two couples whose lives have been deeply affected by the ruin. Sisters Laura and Carmell have been channelling their devastation into their daughters’ hockey team, as their Indigenous husbands Barry and Ty grapple with their own demons while digging a very big hole.
In The Particulars, a week’s worth of daily routines for an insomniac is disrupted by a mysterious home invasion. Gordon battles his invaders on two fronts—in his home, where he believes he is dealing with vermin, and in his yard, where insects have taken over his garden. By day, Gordon forges ahead, in control of every aspect of his life. But by night, the scratching he hears in his walls is unravelling him, driving him to the edge of cosmic desperation.
With sharp commentary, Matthew MacKenzie revels in the mundane struggles that disguise the cosmically profound surrounding us all.
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After the Harvest
$22.95After the Harvest re-imagines a clutch of family stories that are the poet’s main connection to a disappeared ancestral farm—a complex bucolic world slipping farther into the realm of myth with every passing season. Soundful, ecclesiastical in cadence, Hawthorne’s poems form an elegy to a lost way of life and work while asserting the power that language holds to recreate.
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After We Drowned
$22.00After the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, everything in fifteen-year-old Jesse’s life deep in rural Louisiana is derailed. His father, Emmett, a rig worker who survived the blast, but carries a terrible secret about a colleague who did not, unravels. He moves the family to Nowheresville, drinks himself to despair, and hounds Jesse about being a man.
When Emmet finally abandons the family, Jesse takes up the burden of being the man of the house: it takes almost no time for him to fail. His mother is sexually assaulted. His firecracker of a sister boldly explores her sexuality, where Jesse falters in his own attempts at romance. Taking his father’s lessons to heart, Jesse lashes out, getting into fist fights, chasing sex, and finding iffy ways to earn money. When he sets in motion a chain of events that leads his family into danger, Jesse must finally decide if he can save his loved ones by being true to his gentle nature, or if proving himself means adopting the cruelty of his father and his surroundings.
Influenced by the dark edginess of Southern Gothic literature but set in 1984 to the music of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Stevie Nicks, After We Drowned ties together themes of environmental crisis and poverty, noting that it is poor people who often bear the brunt of ecological disaster. This is a coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.
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After You’ve Gone
$19.95After You’ve Gone is the story of two generations of musicians, a jazz grandmother and a punk granddaughter, who each struggle with balancing life, love, and art in their respective eras. The novel opens in 2007 with Elsa Taggart and her ex-husband watching their son’s convocation from Seattle University. The events that bring about this everyday moment are then revealed in a series of spirited flashbacks that move convincingly between Elsa and her grandmother. Lita and Elsa’s lives are revealed in a procession of parallel events.
In 1935 Regina, Lita, as a young woman of gypsy ancestry, develops a passion for playing the guitar. Encouraged and wide-eyed she joins a Regina jazz combo and begins a life that she couldn’t imagine and didn’t expect. From the first moment that she falls in love with the group’s lead singer, to the dark moment of his death, Lita’s fate is sealed.
In paralleled abandon, Elsa has become the lead singer / songwriter and guitarist of Speed Queen, a Regina punk band. Her boyfriend Mark Taggart is also in a punk band. In love with the music scene, with each other, and their new baby, they decide their musical prospects would be better in Seattle than in Regina, a move that will prove to bring about significant changes
Though fifty years exist between Lita and Elsa, their circumstances reflect and conform to the lives they have chosen. The daunting risks of the musician’s life coupled with the pursuit of intimate relationships lead to the heartache and grief that comes with such adventure. The pain of rejection and betrayal has to be managed, just as the responsibility of commitments must be maintained. After You’ve Gone is also the story of these two musicians’ generations and how those forces that pushed against a jazz-musician grandmother from the Great Depression and those of a female Punk artist from the 80s, are comparable. Balancing career and art in their respective eras was difficult; balancing love, men, and babies was work. Though they are part of different worlds, both are challenged by the pitfalls of women musicians, both are haunted by the love they had for their men, and both were changed by the babies they birthed. Though neither was looking, they were both sagacious enough to link together their common experience and provide strength for each other, bound by their muse and their blood. -
Afterall
$19.95At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she’s going to spend a night on Vancouver’s mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts’ son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can’t speak in company — whispers in his mother’s ear that he wants to go with her. Mason’s parents, good limousine liberals that they are, reluctantly allow him to go. Disaster, of course, ensues.
So begins this fast-paced, tightly wound, funny and quirky first novel from a fresh new voice in Canadian fiction. Follow Beth, well-meaning but ultimately misguided, through one night on the streets as she frantically searches for the boy she has lost, ruminates on the shopping cart as a status symbol, loses her shoes, meets a writer, knocks herself out cold, discovers romaine lettuce as a hair accessory, and maybe — just maybe — falls in love after all.
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Afterimage
$16.95Seeing beyond Winston’s disfiguring scars and foreseeing a future with him, Lise falls in love and the couple soon marry. Years later, having inherited Lise’s gift, two of their children, Theresa and Jerome, must struggle to find their place within the community. But for Leo, their middle child, that is just the start of his worries. As he grows older and the chasm between himself and his family grows, Leo realizes that he doesn’t belong to his family. While familial tensions mount and secrets are revealed, the Evans family come to see the monumental effect even the smallest spark can create. Based on the short story by Michael Crummey, Afterimage explores the connections built within both family and community, of finding a place to belong.
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Afterletters
$18.00Lovers wrote letters. Letters crossed absence, longing, joy, passion, loss and heartbreak. Sometimes letters were answered. Sometimes not. And sometimes not for years, but then—
In 1948, in the exhausted aftermath of WWII, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann met in Vienna. They began a difficult and intense but intermittent relationship which lasted until the early 1960s, broken off only when Bachmann could no longer deal with Celan’s increasing mental instability. And yet, despite the break, the relationship continued to haunt both of them.
In Afterletters, R. Kolewe weaves together fragments of letters and other works of these two poets, to give us a stunning sequence of poems that explore the traces of loss and love, in language that breaks, recombines and scintillates, “star-crossed, star-covered, star-thrown.”
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Afterlife Crisis
$22.95For readers of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and P.G. Wodehouse, and fans of The Good Place – a tongue in cheek fantasy that imagines Isaac Newton in the afterlife.
Where do you go after you die? Detroit.
“Finally, a hitchhiker’s guide to the hereafter.” — Corey Redekop, author of Husk
Something’s rotten in the afterlife. At least that’s how it seems to Rhinnick Feynman, the one man who perceives that someone in the afterlife is tugging at history’s threads and retroactively unraveling the past. Doing his best to navigate a netherworld in which history won’t stop changing for the worse, Rhinnick sets off on a quest to put things right.
This would be a good deal easier if Rhinnick didn’t believe he was a character in a novel and that the Author was changing the past through editorial revision. And it’d be better if Rhinnick didn’t find himself facing off against Isaac Newton, Jack the Ripper, Ancient Egyptians, a pack of frenzied Napoleons, and the prophet Norm Stradamus. Come to think of it, it’d be nice if Rhinnick could manage to steer clear of the afterlife’s mental health establishment and a bevy of unexpected fiancées.
Undeterred by these terrors, Rhinnick recognizes himself as The Man the Hour Produced, and the only one equipped to outwit the forces of science and mental health.
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Afterlife of Birds, The
$21.95A gorgeous, deeply felt debut novel about obsession, loneliness, and the surprising ways we find to connect with each other.
Henry Jett’s life is slowly going nowhere. His girlfriend recently left, and his job in a local garage is uninspiring, considering that he doesn’t particularly like cars. Henry finds solace in his eccentric passion, rebuilding the skeletons of birds and animals. Meanwhile Henry’s brother, Dan, is disappearing into an obsession of his own.
Without Dan to rely on, Henry begins to engage in new ways with the people around him in his Prairie city: the 80-year-old Russian émigré who delights in telling stories; the very pregnant former employee of his mother’s; the lawyer who may or may not be his brother’s ex-girlfriend. Gradually they demand that Henry become a participant in his own story, and Henry must forge his own way of living in the world.
In The Afterlife of Birds, award-winning poet Elizabeth Philips draws together unforgettable characters who subtly, powerfully demonstrate the beauty of ordinary lives and finding our place in the world.