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Showing 4657–4672 of 9489 results
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Mischief in High Places
$22.95Mischief in High Places examines the spectacular career and personal life of the man who, in 1919, first became elected prime minister of Newfoundland.
The political successes of Sir Richard Squires’ career are overshadowed by a legacy of scandal and deceit that paved the way for Newfoundland’s loss of democracy in 1933.
Perhaps best known for slipping out of the Colonial Building during the 1932 riot, Squires had survived three corruption-ridden terms in office in the final decades of responsible government while living a high-flying lifestyle with his wife, Helena.
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Misconduct of the Heart
$22.95Toronto Book Award Winner Cordelia Strube is back with another caustic, subversive, and darkly humorous book
Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter.
In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen, while trying to learn to forgive herself and maybe allow some love back into her life. Stevie’s biting, hilarious take on her own and others’ foibles will make you cheer and will have you loving Misconduct of the Heart (in the immortal words of Stevie’s best line cook) “like never tomorrow.”
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Miscreations
$19.95Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Award and the Cuffer Prize for Fiction
Miscreations, the second collection by Grant Loveys, mulls over the metaphorical concept of miscreation — how people, objects, and relationships are imperfectly designed by their various creators — through the use of direct, visceral language, and frank, sometimes shocking, imagery.
Unconcerned with aesthetic imperfections, Miscreations focuses instead on how people and situations can be created from unstable, often opposing, elements and examines how these people and situations manage to survive. This is poetry that looks beyond a misprinted shirt and deep into the person wearing it … beyond empty memes and Instagram platitudes and into the complicated, flawed and searching human readers who navigate a world that is often at odds with itself.
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Miser of Middlegate, The
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Misplaced Love
$16.95A bittersweet, gently satirical collection of fiction set mostly in Winnipeg’s Jewish community and Toronto, the stories in Misplaced Love are often tragedies that border on the farcical.
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Miss Caledonia
$15.95How does a farm girl in 1950s Ontario escape the stall-cleaning, cow-milking, hay-baling drudgery of life on Rural Route 2? She becomes a movie star, of course! The quickest route to Hollywood for a plucky gal in the mid-twentieth century was to enter as many beauty pageants as possible and to sing, twirl and pivot her way into the hearts of judges.ÊAnd so Peggy Ann Douglas did just that, as did so many other young women of her generation, hoping to follow in the footsteps of starlets like Debbie Reynolds.
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Miss Julie
$16.95As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture—even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.
David French’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant has an eerie feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of Miss Julie, French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original—scenes of conflict, desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission and deceit—and backgrounded the historical elements of the play which have made it a favourite “period-piece” of the repertory theatre circuit. His revisioning of Miss Julie foregrounds the ruptures of identity and faith that ambition and desire eternally work in their rending of social norms, strictures and conventions, and he has re-enacted them in a contemporary idiom and vernacular that virtually cries out for the casting-call of a Paris Hilton to play the lead role.
As with his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, David French, one of Canada’s best-loved playwrights, has here once again paid homage to one of the enduring masters who have brought to the stage the most elemental and universal dramas of the human condition.
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Miss Lamp
$19.95When a mad dentist steals people’s teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town.
Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate.
Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp’s memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There’s Miss Lamp’s mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There’s the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There’s naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp’s grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair – could it be love?
These characters’ stories weave together into a tangle – like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floralhotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else’s shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.
‘To read Miss Lamp is to see daily life again in clear, sharp lines and delightfully bright colours.’ – Larissa Lai
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Miss Matty
$24.95Fran longs to be a star of stage and screen, but she’s too poor to afford elocution and dance lessons. When she lands the leading role of Miss Matty in a school production of Cranford, she’s determined to make a splash. Far away, in Europe, World War II rages on, but Fran isn’t worried, because her boyfriend is stationed in Canada. Her life seems to be heading in the right direction, finally — until she begins to unravel a web of lies and deception. Much as she wants to cling to familiar fantasies, Fran may have no choice but to face the truth.
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Miss O
$26.95Miss O: My Life in Dance is the candid autobiography of Betty Oliphant, founder of Canada’s renowned National Ballet School. World War, two failed marriages, two daughters, an abortion, a long battle with depression, back-breaking work, eventual world-wide recognition, and friendships with some of leading dancers of our time make Betty Oliphant’s exceptionally frank autobiography both a vivid picture of the birth of ballet in Canada and the story of an exceptional woman. With an introduction from Mikhail Baryshnikov.”Betty Oliphant has written a moving account of her pioneering efforts to launch ballet in Canada. She paints vivid behind-the-scenes pictures of the school and company she founded and of the ballet stars she nurtured, among them Veronica Tennant, Karen Kain and Rex Harrington. With characteristic candour, she recounts her many battles along the way and her experiences with international stars Erik Bruhm and Rudolf Nureyev.”–Diane Solway, author of A Dance Against Time
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Miss Take
$16.95Sixteen-year-old Miles has run away from home, inviting his childhood companion, the fourteen-year-old Inuit orphan Chateaugué, to join him in a rented flat opposite Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Montreal. There they construct a chaste life for themselves, living as brother and sister. They spend their days riding bicycles wildly through the streets of the city, dodging the automobiles that symbolize for them the adult world they despise, a world that has dominated the landscape with its roadmaps of social discourse. They spend hours at the library, laughing with disdain at how the classics have become venerated, how their authors’ words and turns of phrase have become confused with the things and actions they signify. Enthralled by the works of the “mad” poet Nelligan, Miles begins a journal, determined to free language from the constraints of convention, but finds he cannot write anything without immediately conjuring up its opposite.
To escape the boredom that history seems to have decreed shall be re-enacted endlessly by all grown-ups, Miles and Chateaugué enter into a suicide pact to preserve their childhood freedom and purity from the debasement of the adult roles pre-ordained for them.
Destitute after spending what little money they have, Miles goes to a bar in search of a drink, where he is seduced by an older woman, and suddenly finds himself both attracted and repelled by the pleasures and debasements of the flesh. Having stepped out of their world of childhood innocence, can he return to Chateaugué and consummate their vows, or is this brush with experience irrevocable?
Written in a style that echoes the work of Arthur Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs, Ducharme’s vision is darkly prophetic of a world that has lost its innocence, and on which “our lady of good help” now only gazes with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile.
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Miss Wondergem’s Dreadfully Dreadful Pie
$9.95Miss Wondergem’s Bakery, coming quite soon! In fact, it will open tomorrow at noon!There’s a brand new bakery in town, and no one could be happier about it than Verna, Myrna and Bradley McGrew. As much as they love their mother, the McGrew children dread what comes out of her kitchen – and with very good reason. But when the three young McGrews meet the new bakery’s owner, they’re in for a most unpleasant surprise
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Missing Children
$16.95Dr. Lorne Thorpe, a well-known pediatrician, is on a rare outing with his daughter Shawn when she is abducted. Although Shawn is eventually returned, seemingly unharmed but refusing to talk about what has happened, it seems that she is not the only child who has gone missing from their Troutstream neighbourhood. Detective Beldon has been put on the case, but Dr. Thorpe’s increasingly erratic behaviour is hindering his investigation. And it’s imperative to solve the mystery before more children disappear.
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Missing Line, The
$17.95Recipient of the 2006 Poetry Prize of the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award.In this collection of poetry, acclaimed poet and writer Renee Norman captures the sensuous and surreal, the serious and the serene, the simple truths about life, love, self and family.
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Missing Matisse
$22.95Who is the mysterious woman in the Matisse drawing, “Woman in a Blouse, Dreaming?” What secrets is she hiding? Chloe Rea grew up with the Matisse sketch and believes the woman in the famous Rumanian blouse is her grandmother. But the sketch now belongs to Adam Jensen, who inherited it after his brother’s sudden death in the south of France. Now Chloe wants the sketch back, but someone else is willing to kill for it. When a prominent art dealer in Toronto is murdered, Chloe and Adam flee to France to walk in the footsteps of Matisse and the beautiful Russian named Lydia. Her remarkable story, set amid the darkness and treachery of wartime Nice, holds the key to a missing masterpiece. Missing Matisse is a novel with a puzzle, set in the contemporary world of art theft and the historical reality of World War II, France. The heart of the story is the enigmatic and complex Lydia Delectorskaya, a Russian orphan who became Matisse’s muse, model, caregiver, administrator, and companion for twenty years. Lydia Delectorskaya is a fascinating figure, though little is known about her life after Matisse’s death. Brief accounts of her relationship with Matisse are noted in Hilary Spurling’s biography Matisse The Master (2005). While the author has held true to those facts, she has also imagined an inner life for Lydia, one that comes from her study of the paintings and her knowledge of the history of Nice and Vence during World War II. In Missing Matisse, Jan Rehner gives Lydia a voice, and pays tribute to her remarkable contribution to some of Matisse’s greatest paintings.
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Mission Creep
$18.95A spun radio dial passing clean through poetry. A stuttering loop of Endgame recorded by Stockhausen, remixed by Kraftwerk. The chatter of minotaurs and metadata. Transmissions from far-off futures or new pasts, recordings from a recoded present topped off with a cherry. Evel Knievel, above it all, mysterious, forever taciturn. Mission Creep comes on with the inferno of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on your tongue like the last snowflake of a nuclear winter.
Praise for Joshua Trotter:
‘Joshua Trotter’s long-awaited debut is here, and it’s every bit as good as we’d hoped. His poems have the one maker’s mark of authenticity that absolutely cannot be faked: a fresh style that holds novelty and tradition in creative tension. … By turns funny and terrifying, airy and claustrophobic, non-representational and razor-sharp, Trotter is stock to buy early and hold.’
– National Post (on All This Could Be Yours)‘A miracle of meter and meteorology’
– Poetry Foundation (on All This Could Be Yours)