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Showing 4817–4832 of 9481 results
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Murder on the Rebound
$19.95“Hemlock for Herskowitz!” That’s what the students write in the law school toilets about Professor Mack Herskowitz. Herskowitz (aka “Jerk-o-Twit”) runs his classes like a Marine drill sergeant. He’s bedding one budding lawyer — a former exotic dancer he helped get into the school — but the rest seem to want him dead. And that’s before Herskowitz’s mouthiest critic, first-year law student Tony Albinoni, is poisoned in the professor’s penthouse. Could that “hemlock” have been meant for Jerk-o-Twit?
That’s the newest mystery for Amicus, Q.C. (Questing Cat), and his companion human, judge Ted Mariner. All the while, they’re in a spot of bother of their own, exiled by the Chief Justice to the Mervin Goldfarb and Estelle Holstein-Goldfarb School of Law at Scarborough University. There was Justice Mariner’s very public wrestling match, you see, with Justice Hernando Cactus in the trendy Pasta La Vista restaurant. And then there was that day the not-quite-ancient Mariner passionately smooched his articling student in a rundown bar in the cocaine district.
It’s classic, uproarious Amicus, scrabbling and bustling with feline twists, turns, and shin’s-eye-view witticisms about our justice system in particular and the human tragicomedy in general. Once again, the Falstaffian courthouse cat narrates a seriously funny (and profoundly serious) tale in which the truth is not always what it seems, in death as well as life.
“Smart and amusing . . . Amicus has his purr-suasive ways.”
— Margaret Cannon, the Globe and Mail
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Murder Over Dorval
$15.95By the author of The Crime on Cotes des Neiges, this is the second title in the Véhicule Press Ricochet series of hard-boiled detective novels set in Montreal. Originally published in 1952, Murder Over Dorval follows the investigations of hard-drinking, seasoned private dick, Russell Teed.
First Edition back cover:
In one hand she held a plane ticket for Montreal, in the other, a wad of greenbacks. She was a gorgeous looking redhead. For the sake of her lovely green eyes, Russell Teed took the plane and the money. But it wasn’t long before he realized that whatever she had offered it wasn’t worth it. A razor slash on his leg, a slug in his shoulder and the knowledge that three tough customers were gunning for him meant that Russell Teed Investigations were going to have to finish up their investigations, but quick. Readers of The Crime on Cote des Neiges will know that in a spot like this a Russell Teed adventure is really just climbing into high gear. With a background of Montreal and New York and some pretty terrific action, Murder Over Dorval is definitely Grade A entertainment. -
Murder’s Out of Tune
$19.95“As literate as it is funny,”Maclean’s magazine raved about Murder at Osgoode Hall, Jeffrey Miller’s first novel featuring Amicus the courthouse cat. In Murder’s Out of Tune, Amicus returns, applying his acerbic wit to the case of ageing lion Des Cheshire, a cat who really swings.
For 25 years, Cheshire has been the star sax player in the Billy Wonder Quartet. But he still plays second fiddle — hey diddle diddle — to pianist and leader Billy Wonder. Cheshire’s iron-clad contract with Wonder prevents Des from working with any other band, and it forces him to sign over most of his music publishing royalties. So when Wonder turns up very publicly dead, Cheshire is the main suspect. Which makes him the newest legal challenge for Amicus, Q.C. (Questing Cat), and his companion human, appeal judge Ted Mariner.
Mind you, cat and man have problems of their own to solve. To begin with, the judge’s wife, Penny, has evicted them both from the matrimonial home, suspecting the judge of more than professional relations with his comely new law clerk. And as a couple of “strays” about town, man and cat experience several hair-raising encounters with members of the opposite sex, as well as with their professional rivals.
Yet again, Amicus narrates a tale that is at once literate, funny, moody, and downright jazzy.
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Murders on the Skeena
$24.95Part history, part true crime, Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884-1914 contains the true accounts of murders, crimes, and scandals–some of which remain unsolved to this day–in small-town northern British Columbia. With a focus on the victims as much as the cases themselves, award-winning author Geoff Mynett relates untold stories of BC’s deadly history while providing both the natural and social history of the region.
Hazelton, situated where the Bulkley River joins the Skeena River, was one of the most important sites in the interior of northern BC from 1870-1913. The gold rush, the arrival of the telegraph, and the ability for steam boats to journey upriver increased outside interest in the region. As new modes of transport were built, more non-Indigenous people arrived, and as colonial law and governance increased, so did tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. One such case was that of the murder of Amos “Charley” Youmans in 1884–the escalation of a clash between the laws and customs of the Gitxsan and those of the encroaching traders and settlers. Mynett also recounts the stories of the so-called Skeena River Uprising of 1888, a bank robbery shoot-out, and a deadly dispute between two prospectors.
Peeling back historical, social, political, and geographical layers, Murders on the Skeena draws almost exclusively from documents from the time to reveal the fascinating secrets and surprising consequences of these captivating true crime tales.
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Murmuration
$20.00A.B. Dillon’s newest collection is a hybrid of memoir and prose poetry, curated masterfully upon the physics of flock behaviour called murmuration, which uses the rule of sevens — the idea that an optimal balance can be achieved when the birds interact with about seven of their neighbors. This is the construct that is used for the poet to delve into personal loss, grief, and redemption.
These poems create reader intimacy through precision and expansiveness, revelation and inventiveness. The energy, playfulness, and acuity of the language pulls us up and into the swell of emotion, to subsume and vault us through the human condition. Murmuration is, at its core, a consideration of interconnectedness.
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Murmurs of Decline
$22.95The KANAVUCCHIRAI quintet develop the context of Sri Lanka’s tragic civil war. As the youth in the island village of Nainativu realize that their education and prospects are being curtailed by an increasingly Sinhala majoritarian nationalist government, they begin to rise up in opposition. Volumes 1 and 2, through its main characters, the young woman Rajalakshmi and her betrothed, Suthan, described the growth of the armed struggle from the 1980s onwards as the young people sail to Tamil Nadu in India to join the resistance.
Volumes 3 and 4 return to the micro-environment of Nainativu and the main island of Sri Lanka and the Tamil struggle as it takes shape there. Volume 5 returns to the surviving characters from the first two volumes, and serves more as an afterward that places their story in a global context, as international actors enter the scene. These novels also bring in other characters that speak to the different political and ideological movements at the time: both militant and pacifist, leftist and nationalist. Devakanthan shows how different political movements drew inspiration from each other, and how divisions appeared and grew within what was first seen as an unshakeable organization.
Devakanthan’s characters are richly detailed, both male and female protagonists endowed with internal lives. The quintet thoughtfully and sensitively narrates the story of simple men and women trapped within a national struggle. As a whole it describes how a movement united by lofty goals begins to fall apart, as disagreements appear and former allies go their separate ways.
The quintet won the Government of Tamil Nadu Novel of the Year Award (1998) for THIRUPPADAIYAATCHI (His Sacred Army), and the Tamil Literary Garden’s Best Novel Award (Canada, 2014).
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Museum of Kindness
$20.00A meditative and piercing collection that explores traumas both ordinary and out of the ordinary.
Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie’s searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines “genres” familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising a child who has a disability. It is a collection about thresholds big and small. In poems grounded in the domestic and in workaday life, poems burnished by silence and the weight of the unspoken, poems by turns ironic and sincere, Elmslie asks “What, exactly, is / unthinkable?” Confronted by “the mismatch / between our need for meaning / and our inability to find it,” the poet reflects on the possibility of the miraculous in hard-won insights, in “a comparatively / uncomplicated joy.”
Of the “Museum of Kindness” evoked in the title poem, Elmslie writes, “There isn’t one.” This and many other poems in the collection confront that absence and emerge from the silence to consider the duality of loss, the gift of “ordinary comfort,” and the transformative possibilities of art. Candid, forthright, urgent, celebratory, and wise, this is a book for all of us; in it, we encounter a sober and unflinching gaze that meets us where we really live.
“… These poems are so acute, so clear-eyed in their brutal wisdom, that I had to put the book down to rest between poems, like a woman in labor, entirely wrung out. Museum of Kindness is a masterpiece of loss transformed by love into some of the most greathearted, lyrically daring poems I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Susan Elmslie has written a brilliant, unforgettable book.” –Rachel Rose, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate
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Music from a Strange Planet
$22.95Off-beat, provocative, philosophical, Music from a Strange Planet traces the fault lines of identity and emotional attachment. Grief, tenderness, and longing soak the pages, admitting the reader into the intimate places of the heart: An awkward child envisions herself as a darkling beetle; an unemployed business analyst prefers water-walking over “rebranding” himself; after being kidnapped, a psychologist rejects the idea of marrying herself; and in the squatters’ district, a biogenetically-altered couple visits an attic to observe a large cocoon. From the ruins of a dystopian city to the inner self-created landscapes of a coma victim, this unique story collection places characters at the core of their vulnerabilities. With a masterfully crafted tone and a register that ranges from contemplative to comic, the subversive, immersive stories in this collection brim with humanity. Expect your planet to tilt a little to the strange after reading this engaging, vivid and incisive collection of stories.
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Music Lessons
$22.95Bob Wiseman believes most things in life are universal or, as Lauryn Hill says, everything is everything. Bearing in mind that advice, Wiseman writes about finding the link between music and daily life, like what is common between Mary Margaret O’Hara, hiding around the corner with the lights turned off in order to record herself and his 5-year-old insisting he stop hurrying to her dance lesson and marvel at the fluff ball she is blowing toward the ceiling. Each entry is unique and compellingly written, but the themes throughout — on improvisational music, life lessons, and conflict — are ubiquitous.
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Music, Late and Soon
$24.95Shortlisted for the J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.
After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.
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Musical Cheers
$9.95Musical Cheers
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Muskoka
$22.95A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father’s glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.
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Muslimah Who Fell to Earth, The
$24.95These twenty-one personal stories are told by women from practically all backgrounds and persuasions–devout and not-so devout, professionals and housewives, westernized and traditional, wearing jeans, hijab, or niqab, straight and gay, and originally from Africa, North America, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia–revealing in their own ways what it means to them to be a Muslim woman (a “Muslimah”). What we get is a complex of stories, all challenging conventions and stereotypes, and united by two ideas–Islam (or the Quran) and nationality (Canadian).
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Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good
$24.95Legend would have it that Mussolini put roofs over Italians? heads, developed the economy, had trains running on time, stood up for justice and against the mafia, protected the Jews from Nazi Germany, was a feminist, and put Italy on the map as a respected power. The founder of fascism?s only mistake was allying with Hitler.
<p Though this is entirely false, it didn?t prevent Antonio Tahani, president of the European Union, from declaring in 2019 that “if we must be honest, he [Mussolini] did positive things to realize infrastructures ? he reclaimed many parts of our Italy.& “ In fact, only 6 percent of the improvements referred to were done during the 21 years of fascist rule.
<p Surgically, but with wit, Francesco Filippi demolishes each and every myth that has taken root about Mussolini and fascism in an uplifting handbook for political and intellectual self-defense. No stones are left unturned, including the colonial devastation of Libya and Ethiopia.
<p Though written first for Italians, it is relevant and timely for North Americans. Through a study of Mussolini and Italy, Filippi shows how such legends are built on webs of lie, manipulation of History, and constant uncontested repetition, explaining at the same time why so many people fall victim to the propaganda.
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Mustard
$17.95Mustard shouldn’t still be here, but he is. Imaginary friends don’t normally stay with their Person until that Person is a troubled teenager, exhibiting strangely violent behaviour. Imaginary friends don’t suddenly become visible to their Person’s mom and then go on a date with them, either. But Mustard is special. At least that’s what he thinks. And he’s not ready to leave his best friend, Thai, even though he’s in deep trouble with some unsavoury characters who are ready to enforce some serious rules. And, oh yeah, he’s falling in love with Sadie, Thai’s recently separated, wine-guzzling mom, who doesn’t believe he’s real.
A twisted fairy tale about friendship, love, growing up, moving on and finding magic where you least expect it, this darkly comedic bedtime story by Canadian theatre’s indie darling blurs imagination with reality in order to save a family from its own destruction.
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Muthologos
$39.95Charles Olson’s insistence that the public value of any articulation is inseparable from the particulars of the time and place of its origins resulted in the proprioceptive methodology of his composition—in his speech and his writing, in both poetry and prose. Olson did not “lecture”—he “talked.” His encyclopedic knowledge of the subjects that interested him engaged in a manner always as surprising to himself as to his listeners. This element of discovery was to him a true measure of what is authentic in language, and it exhibits itself most in the impromptu exchanges of which Muthologos is mainly composed. Olson once de?ned “Muthologos” as “what is said about what is said,” which encompasses a breadth of discourse that would de?ne the near and far range of where the poet’s mind went in a lifetime’s intent to go places. In this new compilation of Charles Olson’s transcribed lectures and interviews, we ?nally get all of what is preserved of a life of talk, allowing Muthologos to stand, along with The Maximus Poems, Collected Poems, Collected Prose and Selected Letters as one of the “standard texts” of this great poet’s oeuvre.
Ralph Maud’s second edition of Muthologos, some thirty years after George Butterick’s ?rst, adds several new items: “At Goddard College, April 1962”; a second Vancouver 1963 discussion, “Duende, Muse, and Angel”; a short addition to the “BBC Interview”; a second “On Black Mountain”; and a further hour of Olson’s conversation with Herb Kenny. In addition, all the available tapes of these talks and interviews have been listened to again, and many of their previous transcription errors have been corrected. Textual notes to each piece identify these corrections, and also reveal the provenance of the tapes and the particular way in which each transcription was created.