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Showing 4465–4480 of 9248 results
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Men of Action
$14.95After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul’s life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler’s struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate.
‘Like Harley J. Spiller’s Keep the Change, Howard Akler’s Men of Action similarly compresses a great deal – whole lives – into a very few pages … As might be expected, Men of Action delves into the father-son relationship, while also encompassing the father’s life, the parents’ marriage and the son’s youth in Toronto, where Mr. Akler still lives. But its more submerged subject is the act of writing itself, which is demonstrated with the carefully observed, resonant economy of poetry.’
– The New York Times Holiday 2015 Gift Guide
‘What makes someone who they are? What details and actions explain their inner thoughts? What moments matter in the telling of a life? These are futile questions, but what matters is that Akler is asking them in a way we haven’t previously seen. Men of Action not only gracefully succeeds in depicting the nature of human tragedy, but the inherent failures of language to capture it. The book’s brevity is its strength – a genuine testament to the writer’s talent that he is able to take us so far with so little.’
– Stacey May Fowles, The Globe and Mail
‘Men of Action is an insightful and heartbreaking exploration of consciousness, familial relationships, and the sense of self. As he and his family stand a restless vigil through his father’s post-operative coma, Howard Akler explores and reorganizes the past, present, and future of his relationship with his father. Immensely relatable, this collection of essays delves fearlessly into loss, grief, and the understanding that often the moments in which we choose to be completely still are when we take the most important actions.’
– 2016 Toronto Book Awards Jury Citation
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Mend the Living
$19.95Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family.
Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock and grief of Simon’s family as they negotiate the question of organ donation. Maylis de Kerangal offers glimpses into the thoughts and affective lives of each of the characters: Simon, at the core of the novel; Marianne and Sean, his parents, who have been estranged for some months; Revol, the chief surgeon, music enthusiast, and studier of hallucinogenic plants; Cordelia Owl, the capable new nurse who is reeling from a night spent with her former lover; Thomas Rémige, the hospital coordinator, an opera singer, and aficionado of goldfinches; Virgilio, the silvertongued, light-fingered surgeon; Juliette, Simon’s girlfriend, who is building a labyrinth inside a Plexiglass case, waiting for Simon’s call.
The novel also touches upon Claire, the recipient of the heart, whose life has been limited by her condition, who reflects philosophically on what it means to have someone else’s heart beating inside you.
Weaving from hospital corridors to the wild waves of the Atlantic, from the narrow streets of Paris to the countryside in Algeria where goldfinches still sing, from the most intimate details of grief within a car in Le Havre to universal considerations of science, compassion, and humanity, Mend the Living is a powerful and vast-ranging book. In her trademark masterful use of language, playing with pacing and tension and a vibrant vocabulary, Maylis de Kerangal gives us a metaphysical adventure that is at once both collective and intimate.
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Meniscus
$17.95In the middle of his life, Robert Lowell wrote “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” a poem that reflected on Lowell’s recurrent manias and included the lines “My manic statement.” This is Shane Neilson’s manic statement, arching backwards through his personal histories (rural, difficult) and then into the current scale of illness: how it prophecizes and destroys. But this is not a book solely given over to a state; Neilson gives most of the book over to love, how it moves him, the disaster of chasing it, and how it settles all the accounts in his life.
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Menno Moto
$22.95On a motorcycle trip from Manitoba to southern Chile, Cameron Dueck seeks out isolated enclaves of Mennonites—and himself.
“An engrossing account of an unusual adventure, beautifully written and full of much insight about the nature of identity in our ever-changing world, but also the constants that hold us together.”—Adam Shoalts, national best-seller author of Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic and A History of Canada in 10 Maps
Across Latin America, from the plains of Mexico to the jungles of Paraguay, live a cloistered Germanic people. For nearly a century, they have kept their doors and their minds closed, separating their communities from a secular world they view as sinful.
The story of their search for religious and social independence began generations ago in Europe and led them, in the late 1800s, to Canada, where they enjoyed the freedoms they sought under the protection of a nascent government. Yet in the 1920s, when the country many still consider their motherland began to take shape as a nation and their separatism came under scrutiny, groups of Mennonites left for the promises of Latin America: unbroken land and new guarantees of freedom to create autonomous, ethnically pure colonies. There they live as if time stands still—an isolation with dark consequences.
In this memoir of an eight-month, 45,000 kilometre motorcycle journey across the Americas, Mennonite writer Cameron Dueck searches for common ground within his cultural diaspora. From skirmishes with secular neighbours over water rights in Mexico, to a mass-rape scandal in Bolivia, to the Green Hell of Paraguay and the wheat fields of Argentina, Dueck follows his ancestors south, finding reasons to both love and loathe his culture—and, in the process, finding himself.
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Mercy
$17.00Expanding breathlessly in the magnitude of loss, Shirley Camia’s fourth collection, Mercy, confronts despair to emerge anew with a bright offering of elegy. Beginning at her mother’s hospital bed, Camia invites readers to keep vigil while she journeys through seasons of bereavement, from the wake to the graveside, and into a year of processing, searching, and healing. Ethereal and elegant, Camia’s reflections are grounded in grief as they do the aching, earth-shattering work of mourning and moving forward.
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Mercy Gene
$22.95Think Maggie Nelson meets Hannah Gadsby.
Told in kaleidoscopic bursts of erratic recollections, daydreams, poetry, and lists, Mercy Gene is the powerful, genre-smashing debut work of auto-fiction by acclaimed writer, playwright, and comedian JD Derbyshire. Inspired by Derbyshire’s critically acclaimed and award-winning stage play, Certified, and anchored by protagonist Janice/Jan/JD, Mercy Gene is a beautiful, humorous, and sometimes brutal look at queerness, gender confusion, institutionalization, addiction, and abuse.
Through flashes of memory and imaginings, Derbyshire illustrates the intense and invisible “side effects” of psychiatric treatment and the unreliability of memory. In a stream-of-conscious narrative that provokes and consoles, eliciting tears and laughter at equal pace, Derbyshire re-examines a life of unspoken and repressed trauma. Between devastating bouts of depression, hilarious side-quests into the author’s dryly sardonic inner monologue, helpless moments at the mercy of their own psyche, and tour-de-force appearances by fictional versions of Miriam Toews and the late, great Margot Kidder, Derbyshire leads readers through a non-linear narrative to treatment, forgiveness, and acceptance.
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Mercy of St. Jude
$19.95At times irreverent and darkly humorous, Mercy of St. Jude is a story of profound loss, and the unforeseen effects that secrets can have on those we love. When Mercedes Hann dies, her great-niece, Annie Byrne, returns to Newfoundland for the funeral. With the family gathered to say goodbye, Annie searches for the truth by trying to unravel the secrets that shaped Mercedes’ life, and, ultimately, her own. As Annie delves into her aunt’s tangled history, however, she soon realizes that she must come to terms with her own past in order to face a future in which Mercedes is no longer available to shoulder the blame. But can Annie trust the truth? And, in the end, whose truth is it?
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Mere Extinction
$19.95“Christie’s audacious writing pulses with life and, yes, movement.” — Globe and Mail
In Evie Christie’s third book mothers nurse babies as the world comes to an end, fathers hustle or drift, the pastoral and the present collide, violence, love, and death gently fill the space and time they have been given. As surreal as they are domestic, Christie’s poems navigate the world they are in, struggle with history, the immediate, and what Richard Polt’s investigation of Heidegger would describe as “the emergency being.”
Bog Girl
After Seamus Heaney
I waited too long, was left waiting
and here I am in my fruit-white youth,
too young to go untouched, a balmy small-town dream
touched up with pink where it mattered.Remember the ways you wanted to touch and did not
and finally broke in through the window and did
until I got smart and found their sophistication: loveless bliss,
made over and over ’til the earth packed under my nails
was gone. Find me here, waiting, gone blue and winter cold,
make out my parts from the windowsill,
not gleaming, all the same, the same as ever. -
Merging
$28.95Merging is a book about relationships and the way our perspective shifts as we become attuned to the workings of the natural world, merging with our surroundings and the creatures we share them with. Working in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, Soren Bondrup-Nielsen catalogues the rich biodiversity of his own backyard, exploring the fields, dyke roads and woodland trails that surround his home in the agricultural heartland of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Framed as a single day’s horseback ride which begins on a spring morning and ends in the dusk of autumn, the narrative engages subjects such as the relative merits of large-scale and small-scale farming and forestry practices, the challenge of fostering sustainable economies in rural communities and the impact our consumer choices have on the natural and economic health of the places we live.
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Mermaid
$31.95First established in response to the need for live theatre in rural areas, Mermaid Theatrebased in Windsor, Nova Scotiaswiftly rose to international acclaim. Author Alice Walsh uses Mermaid’s productions, from The Happy Prince to Guess How Much I Love You, to tell the story of the company’s evolution in the history of Canadian theatre. Walsh describes the first steps taken by its founders and provides an extensive look at the development of each production, as well as the creative trends and decisions that have contributed to Mermaid’s stellar reputation amongst children, parents, educators and directors.
Founded in 1972 by Evelyn Garbary, Lee Lewis and Tom Miller, Mermaid Theatre, over the course of 30 years, has incorporated the work of many actors, collaborating authors, educators, youth, reviewers, designers and audiences worldwide. Beginning with the group’s first seasons touring Nova Scotia with adaptations of fairy tales and fables, Walsh tells the story of Mermaid’s development, going behind the scenes and into the audiences, capturing the spirit of its success.
In the early 1970s, Mermaid’s dramatizations of Mi’kmaq legends laid the foundation for its innovative design. This era, remembered by many of today’s parents, is described from the ground up. Walsh brings us into the company’s workshop and its early experiments with the masks and giant puppets that would become synonymous with the theatre’s name. What followed was a boldly creative approach to local literature, which integrated an astonishing variety of traditions, including Bunraku, Kathakali, black light, collage and mummers.
Walsh takes a critical look at the personalities and influences that have shaped Mermaid’s evolving style and management as a company. Highlighting key playersGarbary, Lewis and Miller, along with Jim Morrow, Graham Whitehead, Chris Heide, Stephen Naylor and othersshe examines the theatre’s growth from a garage in Wolfville to the current multi-storeyed headquarters and full-time staff based in Windsor. For decades now, the company’s adventurous and amibitous approach to children’s theatre has proved successful both on stage and off, with hits like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, When Dinosaurs Dine by Moonlight, Borrowed Black, Gulliver’s Travels, Peter & the Wolf and Sam Slick.
Mermaid provides insight into the business and politics of managing a theatre company, as well as the creative energy and raw materials involved in building and touring productions around the world. In 30 years, Mermaid has become known for its dramatizations of fairy tales, legends, contemporary literature, and most recently, stories for very young audiences. Recreating productions from their inception, through the design and rehearsal phases, to opening night at children’s festivals, cultural exchanges and school gymnasiums at home and abroad, Walsh captures the magic of Mermaid. Photographs, quotes and reviews, coupled with Walsh’s clarity and comprehensive telling, bring the theatre’s history of inspiring designs to life on the page.
This book measures 5.75 x 8.5 inches and is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in an offset-printed cover. The text is printed offset on laid paper. Included are 32 pages of black & white and colour photo reproductions.
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Mermaid Legs
$18.95Sisters Billie, Ava, and Scarlet start a new tradition of family dinners every second Sunday, rain or shine. But when Billie doesn’t show up one night, her sisters have every reason to worry. With a history of self-harm and regularly being on and off her medication, they’ve become all too familiar with Billie’s unpredictable behaviour. Now that Billie has disappeared—leaving behind her disastrous apartment, her phone, and a mysterious message—a frantic chase ensues, pushing their unshakable bond to its limits.
From the celebrated author of The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble and co-author of The Drowning Girls, Beth Graham’s Mermaid Legs tells the story of a precarious life fluctuating between calm and chaos, and those on the sidelines desperately trying to catch up. A deep dive into the stigmas, challenges, and mysteries of mental illness, this compassionate family saga illuminates the beauty of neurodiversity and the unyielding strength of sisterhood.
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Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play
$18.00In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later as an adult, he read a story about how Kurt Schwitters’ “interior house-sculpture” (“Merz Structure No. 2”) was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building down. This sad ‘unmaking,’ so similar in nature to his own haunting experience, became the inspiration for Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play, a collection of experimental poetry that explores the dynamic, if often unsettling, relationship between making and unmaking, bliss and pain, utterance and silence.
As diverse in form as they are in artistic/cultural references, the poems of Merz Structure No. 2 invoke an endless bounty of characters: the poet remembers Harold Ramis; Kafka summons the courage to tell his dad where to go; another tornado razes another small town; Yorick returns to run balls-out into the sea; Louise Bourgeois smashes a tea cup against one of her sculptures.
Readers who connect with Phil Hall’s artistic investigations in Killdeer and Lisa Robertson’s clear-eyed take on humanity in Magenta Soul Whip will enjoy Kennedy’s feeling examination of loss in Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play.
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Meshom and the Little One
$15.00After ten-year-old Shawna moves to the West Coast with her mother, she misses Meshom (her grandfather) but is surprised when he arrives for her birthday.
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Message Sticks
$21.95Translated from the French into English by Phyllis Aronoff.
This bilingual work (English and Innu-aimun) is an invitation to dialogue. Message sticks are the signs that allow the nomadic Innu to orient themselves inland and find their way. The poetry brings the language of the nutshimit (the back country) to life again, recalling the sound of the drum. Simple and beautiful, Joséphine Bacon’s poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimun language. Charting unwritten history, it provides a vision into the intensity of the elders’ words.
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Messenger
$18.95As in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, two brothers struggle for power and ideals each believes are right. Set in the late nineteenth century in a coastal town in Norway, Enemy charts the journey of an idealistic and naive doctor who believes people will behave responsibly if given the facts, shown leadership, and pointed in the right direction. Instead, he discovers that, as individuals, we come with our own baggage, secrets, and self-interest that often defy and divert lofty goals. Ibsen explores the whole messy idea of democracy and how things change. Or don’t.
Messenger takes place in another country, Canada, and in another century but tackles similar themes. It is a memory play, set both in the present day and in 1990, when the Progressive Conservative government of the day, contrary to the public record, in fact set lofty goals of joining –
if not leading – the world in tackling climate change. The mechanism by which that goal was lost is played out primarily between two brothers. One brother, Peter, is the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who wants to maintain political control and has many players and interests to juggle to keep his Prime Minister in office. The other brother, Thomas, is an idealist, a newly minted Cabinet minister who tries to show leadership and tell the truth about impending environmental crises and get the whole country on board with the rightness of his vision. The stakes are raised when strong family loyalties are tested by the crisis that ensues when Thomas refuses to back down from what he knows is right. A timely play in terms of environmental issues, full of lots of great political dirty tricks.Cast of 3 men and 1 woman.
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Messenger 93
$15.95