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Showing 4769–4784 of 9481 results
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Motherhouse
$17.95From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.
In 1915, with tensions running high across the country over conscription and linguistic and religious issues, dedicated mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts assemble artillery shells to support the war effort and inadvertently find themselves assembled to bring about change both in their working conditions and in their personal lives. Meanwhile, their beloved soldiers die on battlefields overseas while their children starve at home because of war profiteering. Verdun’s munitions manufacturer employed more than four thousand women during the war, including Fennario’s mother. Tragically, the city of Verdun sacrificed more soldiers to both World Wars than any other place in Canada.
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Motherish
$19.00The women who populate Laura Rock Gaughan’s debut collection, Motherish, veer from playful to distraught, reckless to restrained, anchored to unmoored. Gambling grandmas, athletes and organists, pregnant bus passengers and punitive bank tellers are pushed to the brink by Gaughan’s distinctively precise prose, while they grapple with what it means to mother and be mothered. With various perspectives, Gaughan creates box after box–and actual chicken coops–for her characters to explode from, hide in, emerge, and ultimately transform.
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Mothers Talk Back
$14.95Humorous, ribald, powerful, and filled with wisdom, anecdotes, and shared affrmations, this collection of voices — single and working moms, moms creating extended families, a mom with a special-needs child, moms trying to balance their needs against those of their children — celebrates the quiet heroism of mothers. Inspired by Margaret Dragu’s radio program, Mothers Talk Back features fifteen true accounts of mothering — not the baby-blue-and-pink, sanitized nursery rhyme presented in the popular media, but explorations of the enormous (and underacknowledged) transformation that motherhood brings to a woman’s sense of self, her mate, her body, and her connection to mothers throughout history.
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Mothertalk
$16.95In 1993 Mary Kiyooka sat with her son Roy Kiyooka, one of Canada’s most important avant-garde painters, and a tape recorder and in her native Japanese shared her memories with him—her childhood in Japan, her arrival as a married woman in Canada, and her family’s experience in Alberta during the Japanese internment period.
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Motherwild
$19.95Motherwild is an unvarnished journey, a celebration and depiction of struggles to survive on a sometimes violent, sometimes loving, always alive, Montreal working-class street. Set over the course of a year beginning in December 1959, Joey Cantell is trying to figure out his relationship with his mother. Joey’s personal confusion with her has continued to grow from infancy to adolescence. The rest of the family occasionally present their own challenges, but it was Joey’s “Ma” who exasperated him with her quick wit, strong will, and her drinking.
Then there was Celine Lesage, a girl living downstairs in the apartment block who reminded him of his mother as Celine too was a puzzle that drove him mad but attracted him like no one else.
Most of Joey’s relationships flow from his connection to Celine and his mother, and most of his experience comes from studying their ways. But a pervasive melancholy overrides certain days as Joey struggles with thoughts of what his mother might do to herself or what he might do to her. He even contemplates using the gun he found on slippery Dion Street during a winter bank robbery to silence this mother confusion. Tension builds. Can Joey trust himself not to carry out his violent plan? What can he do to intervene and break the craziness his mother feels? Will his fantasies of Celine ever become reality? What will then become of him? Then an incredible event occurs that will change him for the rest of his life.
Motherwild is a tense drama about the growth to maturity and a teen son’s desperate relationship with his mother, but it is also the story of a working-class family and the social conditions of working-class life in the 1960s.
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Motion Sickness
$24.95Motion Sickness is a flash novel consisting of 55 chapters of exactly 500 words each and accompanied by a wood-cut like, scratchboard illustration. The illustrations are dark and somewhat whimsical as is the text. Penelope, the twenty-year old narrator is a guitarist who writes some lyrics, has a good colour sense and a social conscience. She has kicked a drug habit and is now mainly drinking and sometimes jamming in after-hours clubs as well as writing letters of protest. She finds herself alone when her roommate goes to Calgary to be with her mother who has breast cancer. At the same time she is increasingly attracted to Theo, a slightly older bass player who turns out to be married and who shares a similarly poetic take on the world, but who, unlike her, sticks with people and jobs. He finds her employment with him silk screening T-shirts where they develop a more intimate but non- sexual relationship. In between birth control methods she finds herself pregnant after a drugged threesome which involved the very sexy but potentially violent Stan. She has an abortion. Stan becomes a frightening stalker. Theo remains a stable anchor and it becomes increasingly clear to both of them as well as to Theo’s wife that their intimacy is not to be ignored. This is a smart, engaging, well-written novel that should appeal particularly, but by no means exclusively, to young women dealing with the responsibility of reproductive control, finding their way in the world of creative work and the social life of a young single person.
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Motortherapy
$18.95“Always carry a bar of soap!” his father advises, as Allstair sets off to drive from Nairobi halfway across Africa in a secondhand Austin in the 1950s. “It wasn’t clear to me how you could fix a leak in the gas tank with soap,” Allstair reports, “but I never doubted that sort of instruction coming from him.” So begins the first tale in this sequel to Bill Schermbrucker’s well-received collection Chameleon and Other Stories.
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Mountain
$19.95Seventeen-year-old Camden splits her time between her father, a minor rock star, and her mom, a scruffy “hardware geek” who designs and implements temporary and sustainable power systems and satellite linkups for off-grid music and art festivals, tree-sits, and attends gatherings of alternative healers. Lark, Camden’s father, provides her with brand-name jeans, running shoes, and makeup, while her mother’s world is populated by anarchists, freaks, geeks, and hippies. Naturally, Camden prefers staying with her dad and going to the mall with his credit card and her best friend, but one summer, when Lark is recording a new album, Camden accompanies her mother, Laureen, to a healing camp on a mountain in Northern California. After their arrival, Laureen heads to San Francisco, ostensibly to find her lover, but she never comes back. Alone, penniless, and without much in the way of camping skills, Camden withdraws. Things begin to look up when she is befriended by Skinny, a young man in charge of the security detail at the camp who knew her mother as a child. The summer ends and Camden heads back to Toronto to find her dad, and it’s only there that she learns Laureen’s disappearance is tied, unexpectedly, to the secrets Skinny tried to keep from her for months, until, finally, he couldn’t.
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Mountain Blues
$19.95Welcome to Eldorado, a small mountain town in the Kootenays, chock-a-block with aging hippies, eccentrics, loggers, and protestors. When Roy Breen moves to Eldorado after over a decade of working as a journalist in Vancouver, he is impressed by the soaring glacial vistas and the friendliness of the townsfolk, as well as the quality of the coffee they pour. Unfortunately the threat of cutbacks is looming over the local hospital and Roy must find a way to balance his journalistic integrity with the need to join his new neighbours in fighting to keep the hospital open.
In the vein of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, poet Sean Arthur Joyce’s debut novel Mountain Blues is a tale of warmth and joviality.
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Mountain Man
$24.95Life was one big adventure for Hiram Cody Tegart. At times unbelievable and others just downright impressive, Mountain Man is the celebration of a legend of a man and a legendary way of life that is quickly disappearing.
Cody was born in 1950 on a ranch in BC’s Columbia Valley. The bush that surrounded his family’s farm was the best playground any kid could ask for. Growing up with wildlife, guns and one misadventure after another, Cody quickly gained the skills he needed to help his father manage their guiding and outfitting operation. Located around the Palliser River, his father’s guiding territory extended to the Kootenay National Park and Alberta border. Cody eventually purchased the hunting business and built it into one of the most prosperous in BC. By 1984 he had an unprecedented success rate of 85 percent in elk hunts and an amazing 100 percent in goat hunts. This entertaining memoir is a collection of Cody’s most unruly, shocking and hilarious escapades. Cody sums up his well-lived outdoor life with his favourite saying: “Get tough or die!”
In Mountain Man, co-author and friend Andrew Bruce Richards collects tales written by Cody, but also includes his own memories and stories from other hunters, guides and friends to give a full account of this remarkable life. Mountain Man is an ode to Cody and a way of life that celebrates the thrill of a bull elk bugling on a frosty morning, the excitement of a hunt and the satisfaction of sitting in a smoky cabin afterwards with a strong drink and the smell of elk steaks on the grill lingering in the air.
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Mouse Tales
$12.95Mouse Tales, the first volume in the “Happy the Pocket Mouse” series, has been read to tens of thousands of students in Atlantic Canada and Ontario over the past five years, and has gathered a substantial following. Here, now, thanks to the artistic vision of Andrea Torrey Balsara, fans everywhere will delight in the new and revised hard-cover edition. Readers of all ages will identify with Happy’s bedtime struggle after a long day, his request for a story to help him fall asleep, and his nighttime anxieties when he must come to grips with the wicked witch of Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel, the big bad wolf, and his own imagined “Three Bears.” Readers will be won over by the insatiably curious and determined little mouse, and his kind and endlessly patient friend, John. Mouse Tales proves that best friends come in all sizes, and guarantees a giggle.
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Mouse Vacation
$12.95In this fourth volume of the beloved “Happy the Pocket Mouse” picture book series, Happy and his human friend John debate as to where their next adventure should take them. John suggests a walk through the forest or a visit to the museum, but these are too lacklustre for Happy’s thirst for excitement. When Happy then proposes a grand vacation to the likes of New York or Paris, John reasons that those places are too expensive and that they will have to compromise. Happy then suggests a camping trip in New Zealand, but John contends that it is too far away. “Why am I the only one compromising here?” Happy questions. In the end, Happy and John embark on an overnight bus trip to the seaport to view the majestic Tall Ships, and Happy is enthralled by these “ghosts of the past.”
Andrea Torrey Balsara brings to life the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids, and other exotic locales with 32 pages of brilliant, full-colour illustrations. -
Mouth of Truth
$20.00Mouth of Truth is a gripping account of impossible choices , divided loyalties and unimaginable horrors. Batya Lightenberg , a Canadian wife and mother tries to live a normal life in oblivion of her troubled past while carrying a legacy of guilt and buried secrets inherited partly from her father, a successful lawyer, turned Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto. Compelled by a need to unearth the truth about her family, Batya sets out for Eastern Canada, Italy and Poland on a mission of discovery and healing.
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Mouthpiece
$19.95Winner of the 2017 Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best New Canadian Play
Winner of three Dora Mavor Moore Awards
Stage Award for Best Performance, 2017 Edinburgh Festival FringeMouthpiece follows one woman, for one day, as she tries to find her voice. Two performers express the inner conflict that exists within a modern woman’s head: the push and pull, the past and the present, the progress and the regression. Interweaving a cappella harmony, dissonance, text, and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous, and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche.
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Movements in Jars
$16.95Meghan Jackson’s poems are a series of studies of small moments, like figures of fine glass. Formerly publishing quietly under the name meghan lynch, her movements in jars is a work honed and steeled over an extended period of time, and one that many of her readers have been waiting on with bated breath. Her poems are the alabaster that captures without destroying and explores and displays without diminishing; hers is a sacred, scrying art.
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Moving
$18.95Ghost Tree is a life journey about the search for home: imaginative, spiritual, emotional and actual. Underlying the poems are two lost homes–the poet’s childhood home, which she moved from when she was seven–and her mother’s–a home shattered by her own mother’s illness and her little brother’s death at seven. The poems also record a two-generational struggle with depression.