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All Books in this Collection
Showing 449–464 of 9481 results
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Against Death
$22.00Montaigne Medal Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards
Against Death is an anthology of creative non-fiction exploring the psychological shifts that occur when we prematurely or unexpectedly confront death.Against Death is a natural outgrowth of the editor’s experience of surviving a vertebral artery dissection and stroke and the subsequent writing of a long poem memoir about the event.
To be “against” something can mean two different things at the same time. “Against” can mean pressed up close to something, yet it can also signify refusal. These texts deal with the affects of this proximity, taking into account any meaning of the word. Rather than showcase only extreme survival stories or difficult biological situations, the pieces in Against Death consider the ways we make sense of death on a personal level and how we integrate that thinking as we continue forward.
Against Death articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient.
Contributors include: angela rawlings, Joe Average, Aislinn Hunter, Jennifer van Evra, Maureen Medved, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Bruce Meyer and many others.
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Against the Hard Angle
$16.95The two sections that comprise matt robinson’s fourth full-length volume of poetry, Against the Hard Angle, though disparate in terms of form — the first consisting primarily of a long poem; the other a collection of shorter lyrical pieces — nonetheless share a common concern with ideas of relationship and its examination. At their core, these are poems about where we stand in relation to the rest of our various worlds.
In the collection’s opening section, the eponymous (and 2009 Malahat Review Long Poem Award winning) “against the hard angle” steadily develops a grudging momentum, all the while searching for a way to articulate loss, in the end becoming a kind of meditative catalogue of relationship breakdown and divorce.
The second section takes as its immediate subject matter a different sort of relationship altogether. Having returned home after nearly a decade elsewhere, these are poems that reference robinson’s native Halifax, NS, more specifically and vividly than in his previous work; these are lines with “the near / magical pull of some deep-seeded magnet now spinning, / we’d guess, completely / and fully out of control — a crazed, elemental / ballet.”
Part extended love song to and for a city and part meditation on what a city can both say to and about us, Against the Hard Angle uses some of Halifax’s most and least famous places as jumping off points for a stop-and-start lyrical tour of eastern Canada’s largest urban centre, a sometimes fraught journey that leaves us “all tendon-tensed, / against impact, near white-knuckled to / breakage.”
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Against the Machine, Evolution
$25.00Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.
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Against the Machine, Luddites
$25.00At war against Napoleon near bankrupt English mill-masters experiment with a new factory system acquiring machines to replace men. A young worker leads the Luddites attacking mills and smashing machines. With increased assaults and even murder North England feels the grip of terrorism. Government agents attempt to suppress the rebellion. In 1812 there are more British troops in North England than fighting Napoleon in Europe. Against the Machine relates the story of the diverse characters caught in this conflict. It unveils the rank exploitation which marked the Industrial Revolution. Timely, intense and reflective of another, technological revolution: our own.
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Against the Machine, Manifesto
$25.00Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children’s generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani’s university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A “manifesto” to be remembered.
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Against the New Authoritarianism
$18.95Against the New Authoritarianism traces the US descent into authoritarianism: the rise of a ruthless market fundamentalism, the emergence of a form of religious correctness that substitutes blind faith for critical reason, the growing militarization of everyday life, the corporate control of all elements of the dominant media, and an educational fundamentalism aimed at destroying any vestige of critical education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a vibrant democracy. Giroux examines the tragic events of Abu Ghraib and analyzes the conditions that made them possible, all the while trying to understand the role that education plays in creating violations of human rights that one largely attributes to authoritarian regimes. And he describes the need for progressives to develop a language of hope as a condition for critically engaged politics and the emergence of new social formations. The book ends with an engaging personal interview with the author.
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Against the Night
$20.95Every evening at sunset, Bernard and Viviane gaze across their boundless estate maintained by Jérémie, the ex-convict gardener. Their daughter Léna returns after running away yet again, but the couple acts as if everything is normal. The scene replays in variations, shifting with the uncertainties of the night. Trapped in a loop of bourgeois malaise, Léna and Jérémie can only picture one escape: to murder Bernard and Viviane and burn everything to the ground.
Against the Night is a fractured, fevered descent into familial collapse and the erosion of identity. Evelyne de la Chenelière’s haunting tragicomedy conjures an absurdist dreamscape where language fabricates reality and everything is up for reinvention. Darkly funny and endlessly fascinating, Against the Night dares us to look into the darkness to see ourselves more clearly.
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Against the Wind
$14.95Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault – the only maternal figure that he has ever known – it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.
Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his “visions.” And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.
After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love and death.
In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist “in his own words” – Joseph’s gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments – in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.
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Agatha
$23.00Set in 1940s Paris, this bittersweet international bestselling debut novel has sold in over twenty-three territories.
A psychiatrist is counting down toward his upcoming retirement. He lives alone in his childhood home and has neither friends nor family.
Often, he resorts to drawing bird caricatures of his patients instead of taking notes. His social life consists of brief conversations with his meticulous secretary, Madame Surrugue, who has reigned over the clinic for more than thirty years. The two of them have no relationship outside the office, where everything runs smoothly and uneventfully.
Until one day, that is, when a young German woman called Agatha arrives and demands to see the doctor, and he soon realizes that underneath her fragile exterior is a strong and fascinating woman. The doctor and Agatha embark upon a course of therapy together, a process that forces the doctor to confront his fear of true intimacy outside the clinic. But is it too late to reconsider your existence as a seventy-one-year-old?
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Age 16
$22.99Best Books of 2024 lists: NYPL, The Globe and Mail • Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024, Ms. magazine • Kids Indie Next Pick
A powerful coming-of-age graphic novel about how mothers and daughters pass down—and rebel against—standards of size, gender, race, beauty, and worth.
Guangdong, 1954 Sixteen-year-old Mei Laan longs for a future of freedom, and her beauty may be the key to getting it. Can an arranged marriage in Hong Kong be the answer to all her problems?
Hong Kong, 1972 Sixteen-year-old Lydia wants nothing more than to dance and to gain approval from her mother, who is largely absent and sharply critical, especially about the way she looks. Maybe her way to happiness is starting over in Toronto?
Toronto, 2000 Sixteen-year-old Roz is grappling with who she wants to be in the world. The only thing she is certain of is that if she were thinner, things would be better. How can she start living her life, instead of just photographing it?
When Roz’s estranged por por abruptly arrives for a seemingly indefinite visit, three generations are now under one roof. Delicate relationships are suddenly upended, and long-suppressed family secrets begin to surface.
Award-winning creator of Living With Viola Rosena Fung pulls from her own family history in her YA debut to give us an emotional and poignant story about how every generation is affected by those that came before, and affect those that come after.
“Moving and emotional.” —Victoria Ying, Harvey Award–winning author of Hungry Ghost
“Crucial.” —Deb JJ Lee, creator of In Limbo
“Beautiful.” —Fiona Smyth, illustrator of Sex Is a Funny Word
Content Warning: body image, disordered eating.
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Age of Arousal
$17.95It’s a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It’s 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden – spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica – arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.
Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self – genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original.
The book includes notes and a rousing, thoughtful essay on Victorian women’s suffrage by the playwright.
‘Endlessly witty, vigorous, funny… brilliantly inventive.’ – Calgary Herald
‘Griffiths is one of Canada’s ‘originals’ known not only for the quality of her work, but for the sheer range of her career.’ – Maclean’s
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Aging Cheerleader’s Alphabet, The
$14.95In The Aging Cheerleader’s Alphabet, Lynes has crafted a moving portrait of a woman whose humour and chutzpah challenge a world that sees her as a relic of another age. Part nostalgia, part cultural critique with respect to women’s experience of aging, Lynes’ Cheerleader does handsprings, walkovers, and roundoffs over the very language that seeks to define her.
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Agnes in the sky
$8.95In Brandt’s second book of poetry, the raw vioce of repression gives way to a “healed heart.””These poems achieve that delicate balance between resistance and affirmation, where opposites are not rejected but burn passionately and sustain each other, as they do in our lives.”–Erin Mouré
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Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War
$18.95Through ear-splitting, thunderous explosions and fearful eerie flashes in the distance, the nurses of the Canadian Army Nursing Service in World War I waited for the inevitable arrival of wounded soldiers. At the Casualty Clearing Houses, they worked at a feverish pace to give emergency care for bleeding gashes, broken and missing limbs, and the devastating injuries of war.
Exploring the many ways in which trained and volunteer nurses gave their time, talents, and even their lives to the First World War effort, Shawna M. Quinn considers the experiences of New Brunswick’s nursing sisters — the gruelling conditions of work and the brutal realities they faced from possible attacks and bombings. Using letters, diaries, and published accounts, Quinn paints a complete picture of the adventurous young women who witnessed first-hand the horrors of the Great War.
Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War is volume 15 in the New Brunswick Military heritage Series.
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Agnes, Murderess
$29.95Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel inspired by the bloody legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia in the late nineteenth century. Fascinated by this legend–which originated in a 1970s guide to buried treasure in BC, and has never been verified–Sarah Leavitt has imagined an entirely new story for the mysterious Agnes: her immigration to Canada from an isolated Scottish Island; her complex entanglement with shiny things; and her terrifying grandmother, Gormul, who haunts Agnes’s dreams and waking life.
Leavitt puts a decidedly queer twist on the story, moving from women’s passionate friendships in the gardens of St John’s Wood to female relationships in the Canadian wild. At the same time, the book grapples with the dangerous pre-conceived notions held by settlers that the country was a “new world,” free of ghosts and history. Agnes, Murderess presents a tortured, complicated woman struggling to escape her past. It is a spine-chilling tale of ghosts and murder, friendship and betrayal, love and greed, fate and choice.
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AGO
$24.95AGO’s collection of close to 95,000 works ranges from cutting-edge contemporary art such as Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) by Pierre Huyghe to European masterpieces such as Peter Paul Ruben’s The Massacre of the Innocents; from the vast collection by the Group of Seven to works by established and emerging Indigenous Canadian artists.
Art has the ability to bridge cultures and create new ways of communicating. At its highest achievement, it gives pleasure through the act of looking and empowers us to perceive the world through a wider lens.
AGO: Highlights from the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario recognizes the remarkable collection of the AGO. Featuring more than 300 works, this book showcases the depth and diversity of the Gallery’s holdings — from Rubens’s masterpiece, The Massacre of the Innocents, to Arnaud Maggs’s After Nadar photographs. Each entry includes a stunning reproduction, an insightful description, and detailed archival information.
Over the last decade, the AGO’s world-renowned collection has grown immeasurably. Now readers have the chance to explore in print form many of these acquisitions, including photographs, First Nations objects, African art, and pieces from the Thomson Collection.