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Showing 5073–5088 of 9489 results
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Not Anywhere, Just Not
$23.95Boy meets Girl, Boy marries Girl, and years later Boy mysteriously disappears in this Gordon Lish–style novel.
The boy and the girl have been married for decades, mostly getting along as they go about their lives. But one day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Will he return? Who might she be if she moves on without him?
This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which God sometimes lives in the garage – she likes to sleep on the freezer – and gigantic words can fall from the sky. Not Anywhere, Just Not cracks open the small dramas of our lives to show the dread and wonder inside all of us.
“Ken Sparling is a brilliant writer and this book, like all his books, is a beauty. Sparling chronicles the times I fear most—the moments of loneliness, of loss, of ennui—and somehow makes them seem worthwhile, even wondrous, and often flat-out funny. His work makes life look livable, which makes him a wizard to me.” – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
“A gorgeous rendition of the domestic uncanny, Not Anywhere, Just Not is an ostensibly quiet book that slowly and carefully unnerves and unsettles you–both because of its precise swapping out of reality and because of just how familiar it so often seems. All of us, Sparling seems to say, are on the verge of vanishing at any moment.” – Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unravelling of the World
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Not Being on a Boat
$21.95Rutledge, an aging, divorced man, has treated himself to a Cruise on the Mariola. The Cruise is not just any cruise. It’s the whole shebang. It’s around the world. It’s a lifestyle change: G & Ts and tuxedos and cigars and cognac galore. The service is top-rate. And Rutledge’s steward, Raoul, is a good kid.
But then a day trip to a Caribbean port ends in commotion. Some people don’t make it back onto the ship. Rutledge, nonplussed, makes use of the vacant machines in the Fitness Room and the unoccupied loungers on deck. But soon, crew members seem few and far between, and the menu in the Captain’s Mess significantly diminished. Rutledge gets the feeling that something is amiss. And that’s just unacceptable.
Welcome aboard Esme Keith’s debut dystopic novel, a cunning parody of modern day luxury and the coveted all-inclusive vacation, from the refreshingly blunt point of view of a man unable to see beyond his own needs, with hilarious results.
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Not Even the Sound of a River
$24.95Not Even the Sound of a River is a moving tale of love’s phantom pains as shared through the relationships between three generations of mothers and daughters.
Hanna drives down the St. Lawrence River to her late mother’s hometown, hoping to find out more about the distant woman who began to reveal herself only through notebooks discovered in her effects. As the river widens, so does Hanna’s understanding of the matriarchs in her family. She learns that her mother’s one true love, Antoine, died on the St. Lawrence when she was twenty, and that her grandmother also lost a young love to the same water. Both women remained shipwrecked after these tragedies, their tales mirroring other survivors’—such as the few who did not perish in the Empress of Ireland sinking when more than a thousand people lost their lives on the river in 1914.
Told through multiple perspectives, newspaper accounts, and historical documents, Dorion’s narrative exquisitely describes the depths of love, the reality of living when dreams have failed us, and the complex nuance of blood ties. Not Even the Sound of a River is a tender and profound story that defies time or place.
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Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light
$20.00Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light begins with a provocative, sometimes humorous exposé of two lovers and their collisions and triumphs, and evolves into a high-voltage portrait gallery, depicting heroes and artists, scientists and politicians, mothers and their conflicted daughters. Cora Siré draws on a multi-dimensional palette to deepen her exploration of identity, displacement and the cosmic powers of love and art.
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Not My Fate
$24.95Josephine Caplin (Jo) was born into a world marred by maternal abandonment, alcoholism and traumatic epileptic seizures. In grade three, she was apprehended by child services and separated from her protective brother and her early caregivers, her father and uncle, who were kind men with drinking problems. Placed into many alienating and lonely foster homes, Jo would not see her family again until she was fourteen. Throughout her life Jo fought symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome, abuse by sadistic men and the collective horror of generations of ancestors forced into residential schools, causing many to believe Jo was destined to repeat a hopeless cycle. Yet she did not surrender to others’ despairing expectations: against all odds, Jo fought to create her own cycle full of hope and growth.
Born of a Métis-Canadian background, author Janet Romain delicately and proudly tells the story of her heroic friend and explores the tragic aftermath of Canada’s residential schools and the effects of colonization. Jo is a courageous woman who determined her own fate and reclaimed her life. Not My Fate: Story of a Nisga’a Survivor is her struggle to move past a legacy of hardship toward a life of peace and forgiveness.
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Not of Reason
$22.95Rita Moir’s mother and sister underwent heart surgery in the same week; a year later her sister was dead and her elderly mother lived many more years. Not of Reason: A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness is a family memoir centred on the deaths of the author’s sister and mother and the final restoration of what is considered “the natural order.”
Encouraged by her mother to “opt for joy,” Moir remained grounded within her rural BC community in the Slocan Valley, becoming deeply involved in everything from her local community hall to seniors housing and her local burial society, while continuing to travel to Minnesota to help her sister and mother. Moir’s journalist’s eye for detail brings sharp clarity to this beautiful and contemplative work, from the almost unbearable story of her sister’s difficult death, to digging in her garden, learning to dance and training her dog, to a day of glory and majesty near her brother’s home on the Bay of Fundy. The movement between urban and rural life creates what award-winning memoirist Patricia Hampl describes as “a kind of musical movement, allegro/andante…beautiful, hard won, finely achieved…it took my breath away.”
In Not of Reason, award-winning writer Rita Moir explores her intense love for her sister with unwavering honesty, and wrestles with the alluring solace of religion when the natural order is knocked out of alignment. As Moir grows stronger, finding her own kind of peace and joy, the natural order, as always, restores itself.
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Not That Bad
$26.95This candid memoir and essays offer an honest conversation about marketing and advertising promises of alcohol versus the realities of drinking. It delves into the mental, emotional and physical costs associated with alcohol consumption, as well as the difficulties of quitting a substance that is highly normalized in society.
In the absence of clear and consistent definitions of alcohol addiction, this essential text posits the idea that a person does not need to identify as an alcoholic in order for alcohol to have a negative impact on quality of life.
This memoir and essays examines the continuum of consumption, and argues that there are a great many people suffering across all walks of life, not sure if they have a problem and not sure what to do.
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Not the First Thing I’ve Missed
$17.95How can we be certain of what we really know? Why does the reverie of reality seem so strange in the recklessness of our everyday lives? Not the First Thing I’ve Missed captures the debris and encumbrances of such questions with a wicked sense of ownership. These poems distill the upheaval that comes when delusion and reality merge, and comment on the resulting residue of self-examination.
“The more I have read of Fionncara’s work, the more I have come to admire her for continuing to make me feel a bit uneasy and alert and humble. She has an edgy, lyrical voice full of disdain, despair, love, and light focused on things and people that matter. She is a writer to watch.” – John Lent
“These poems are as much mini short stories as they are quirky and biting minimalist observations on contemporary living. Offering compassion, unexpected insight and humour, MacEoin transforms sadness and despair into a catalogue of memories of survival. These are stories we didn’t know we wanted, nor needed, to hear.” – Priscila Uppal
“How do you write about despair? Beside Rockwell’s oatmeal and fishing rods, MacEoin’s version of the world doesn’t have a chance. Life inside and outside the institution is one proliferation of the progressive tense . . . that mutated world where present, past, and future are one. “You could call it living,” moving from “bed to chair/bed to chair” where time is a “barrier to be broken” because no one wants the depressives. These poems stagger and drool. Sometimes, they brawl. Nothing like Purdy’s fisticuffs in a northern bar, this landscape is inside the head, the one in the mirror, the hospital bed.” – Susan Stenson -
Notebook of Roses and Civilization
$16.95Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General’s Award for Translation
The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.
Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure and Robert Majzels brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard’s remarkable syntax and sensuality.
‘[Brossard’s] use of elliptical formulations and syntactical hijackings creates tensions between the image and the statement that result in a style that is unmistakably hers.’
– La Presse
‘A new work by Brossard is an event – Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon is not merely experimental. It’s radical.’
– The Globe and Mail
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Notes from a Feminist Killjoy
$23.00Winner of the Atlantic Book Awards 2017 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Winner of the East Coast Literary Awards 2017 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2017 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly WritingErin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too.
Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept “feminist killjoy”), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed’s project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view.
Neither totemic nor complete, the non-fiction essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and -sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life invites the reader into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world.
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Notes from the Ward
$20.00Notes from the Ward is a collection of poetry that explores bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intrevention into a disgnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.
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Notes of a Mediocre Man
$20.00Two brothers come to school and do nothing but tell stories. A young woman works at the Indian Consulate in a major American city. A man goes to a singles dance. An unnamed narrator offers his “notes” on modern-day America. An old Jewish man in a nursing home tells the tale of his daughter. A retired man in India tries to collect his pension. A woman tells the story of her husband’s death in partition India. A man goes from interview to interview, hoping for employment. Some stories are fable-like, others more realistic. However, all stories deal, in one way or another, with small, “mediocre” people—people trying to fit into a world of bigness, applause, success.
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Notes on Leaving
$15.95Notes on Leaving is a debut poetry collection that is every bit as captivating, emotive and razor-sharp as Laisha Rosnau’s bestselling first novel The Sudden Weight of Snow. Rosnau’s poignant poems address life in a startlingly direct and honest voice, employing a robust combination of jaw-dropping forthrightness and delicately crafted verse.The language of Notes on Leaving is brusque, bright and instinctively fluid: lines and words flow and merge as naturally as they collide head-on. In the world-weary persona of someone who has always found herself on the run (“my mind was farther away than farm and field. . . “), and “prone to breakdowns/ of all kinds,” Rosnau energetically conveys sexually charged and angst-ridden desires to urgently abandon a small-town upbringing, among various other lives and identities. She convincingly presents these primal urges as strikingly and sensuously familiar to us all, “tracing a route down your torso, thrumming south,/ the highway swelling with each town, until/ you round the last curve, a crescendo, and cross/ the river to a place where the city meets itself.” Cutting through time zones that encompass the rural and urban, the remembered and the forgotten, Rosnau reminds us to “Pay attention to your surroundings,” to “watch for potential road-kill,” and to “compare scars” along the way.
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Notes Towards Recovery
$20.00Notes Towards Recovery, is a short story collection that explores loss and the spaces around loss. At the centre of these stories are everyday women who must navigate these spaces and their shifting boundaries, often redefining themselves in the process.
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Nothing But Brush Strokes
$24.95This collection chronicles Phyllis Webb’s struggle with the creative process and her intense need to probe beneath the surface of things.
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Nothing Comes Back
$19.95“Quietly absorbing stories with a superlative cast of characters.” ~ Kirkus Reviews
“Quietly absorbing stories with a superlative cast of characters.” – Kirkus Reviews
Age is the great divider. One side fused of fire and lust, the other undetected like fallout. The characters in this collection have been plucked and blown through time like pollen on the wind, often rooting themselves in foreign landscapes both beautiful and adverse, sometimes altered, yet always unyielding, ripe for transformation. Nothing Comes Back is a deeply captivating collection by a major literary talent working at the top of her craft.