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Showing 5153–5168 of 9481 results
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Of Water and Rock
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Off the Record
$26.95Editor John Metcalf has inspired, challenged, and championed countless writers over his long career. In Off the Record, he encourages six to reveal what one rarely discusses in polite society: how they became writers instead of radio announcers or cabinet makers. The essays collected here, each accompanied by a short story, offer fascinating insight into the relationships between writers, their editors, and their fiction.
Off the Record brings together work by six noted Canadian writers, among them the winners of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Butler Book Prize, and the Marian Engel Award: Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page. Their essays are candid, moving, and surprisingly relatable—providing plenty of inspiration for those among us who want to write.
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Off The Ropes
$22.95Having been sexually abused by a boxing coach as a teen, and not knowing who to trust or tell, Roland Vandal found solace in drugs and alcohol. His battle with addiction, and his unwillingness to speak of his demons, lead to failed relationships, bad choices, crime, trouble with the law, and PTSD. After a night of partying with friends in 2001, Roland found himself alone in a Winnipeg hotel and attempted suicide. When he woke plagued by guilt and shame at what he had done, he knew he had hit bottom. He dialled the phone and sought help. Clean and sober for over a decade, Roland is now living a life he never dreamed possible. Filled with moments of humour, sorrow, despair, and triumph over adversity, Off the Ropes tells his story in the raw, from the abuse, to his addictions, to his successes in business and as a motivational speaker and advocate.
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Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?
$12.00An experiment in hybrid and versatility of voice, these texts stutter around the slipperiness of language and the transience of desire.The first section is an exercise in paradox wherein language as medium breaks free of signification and desire, knowing very well that language is inextricable from desire. The second section concedes that language may be inescapable yet its borders and meanings must and can be moveable, so that through the decomposition of what has been said or written the new may sustain itself on the dregs of the past. The third section is a burlesque reflection on the kaleidoscopic incarnations of Eros as it passes through assorted personalities and neuroses, that is, a chorus of anonymous men, all in various states of confusion about love. Each man is but a different face on the ten-thousand-sided-dice of the same drive wherein gender stereotypes are inflated to show their contours, exposing romantic desire as it is: essential, absurd, random, hideous, and blind.
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Ohmhole
$20.00Imagine a not-so-distant future in which everyone is HIV positive and, sooner or later, ends up in a state-operated hospice dying of AIDS. In a broken socio-economic order, governments have been reduced to a single function: extending the lives of their citizens with anti-retroviral treatment (ART) drugs. Meanwhile, rumours have coalesced into a widespread belief in the existence of a cure for HIV that is also exchanged through bodily fluids. Sex, casual, friendly or indifferent in all its forms offers a possible cure. Consequently, genders, sexuality and relationships have been altered drastically. Elliott lies in the hospice among the dying, his only remaining purpose: to serve as a subject for sociological and psychological research, research that is conducted via a nano-tech device to which the patient is wired. The device, called a Spade has a twofold purpose: to read and manifest Elliott’s thoughts along with bits of cultural detritus into his room, and to produce a tranquilizing effect on the patient. But Elliott has diverted the device’s purposes, turning it into a writing machine with which he can resurface and reshuffle fractured memories of his past RAVE street life. Ohmhole is a sludge novel, grafting literary genres, imploded narratives, and recycled texts to probe the relationship between illness, technology, and language.
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Oil and Water
$17.95In 1942 the USS Truxtun, a ship carrying over a hundred sailors, ran aground on the Burin Peninsula in Newfoundland, killing most of its men. Oil and Water is the incredible true story of the sole African American survivor of the wreck, Lanier Phillips, the first black man to be seen by some of the residents of the town of St. Lawrence. A haunting and hopeful tale of two cultures, Oil and Water is an honest legend that still resonates with power seventy years later.
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Oil Change at Rath’s Garage
$20.00After the move to Delwood, Matt Humphreys, sixteen, comes to understand that his father, Jack, is a broken man not looking to heal after the death of his wife. It has left him angry, bitter, and a drinker. Matt knows it falls on his shoulders to provide care and attention for his younger brother Ben; he wishes he could give Ben another life other than the upheaval he’s known.
Matt has once again reestablished himself — new friends, a spot on the basketball team, a girlfriend — and if he was given a chance to stay, he might just do something meaningful with his life. All it takes is a collision between the nomadic Humphreys men and the town-born-and-bred Rutger family to set their erratic lives in motion once again.
This is a story of quiet, desperate hope, the fulfillment of which depends upon altering fate, adjusting to change, and transforming one’s spirit. If Matt can be the catalyst, Ben and Jack might change as well. Are a brother’s love and sacrifice Matt’s only pathways out of the adversity that threatens to wreck his family once again, or is it time for him to take control of his life, put his needs first, and leave those tough challenges behind?
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Okanagan Women’s Voices
$34.95The writing and relations between Syilx women and settler women, largely of European descent, who came to inhabit the British Columbia southern interior from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Okanagan Women?s Voices features the writing and stories of seven women: Susan Moir Allison (1845-1937), Josephine Shuttleworth (1866-1950), Eliza Jane Swalwell (1868-1944), Marie Houghton Brent (1870-1968), Hester Emily White (1877-1963), Mourning Dove (1886-1936) and Isabel Christie MacNaughton (1915-2003).
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Okinum
$15.95In Anishnaabemowin, Okinum means dam. In deciphering a recurring dream about beavers, Émilie Monnet discovers how to break down interior barriers, to trust in the power of intuition, and to deconstruct cultural walls. A circular and immersive experience that interweaves three languages — English, French and Anishnaabemowin — Okinum is an ode to reclaiming language and reconnecting to one’s ancestors.
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Old Gods
$19.95Métis Ukrainian writer Conor Kerr’s sharp and incisive poems move restlessly across landscapes and time.Conor Kerr’s poetry is in constant motion. 4Runners streak through the night, racing with coyotes and roving across the land. Buses travel from town to town, from one memory to another, from past to present. Friends and lovers search for each other on Instagram and find nothing. And always the natural world travels alongside: the watching magpies, woodpeckers and cedar waxwings, the coyotes and porcupines. Family is the crisp wings of mallard ducks flying at dawn, just as it is a game of crib, a Mario Kart race, a dance party.Old Gods defies colonialism on the Prairies. Kerr situates his reader in the Métis mindset: the old gods of the land are alive within the rivers, the birds, the hills and the prairies that surround us, and they’ll always be here.
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Old Hat
$18.95Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge’s Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book’s transitional sections – “Set,” “Re/Set,” and “Lect” – all intertwine and overlap, thematically and intuitively linked by the extensive range and depth of Winger’s poetics.
While each section is discrete, each is also in harmony with its neighbours. The “Re/set” sections revive clichés of Canadian lyricism–landscape and maple syrup, Icarus falling and human-rights rhetoric, war and ancestral migration, death, love, and disease–not only to critique but also to validate the experiential urgency of poetic reflection, while the “Set” sections harness Winger’s vernacular voice in a struggle for self-definition against powerfully pedestrian political and economic systems. “They signed Yu Darvish without seeing his fork,” Winger writes in one poem. “They signed their books without looking up at us./ They gave you fries with that without even asking.” Such a balance of agency and inaction is also central in Old Hat‘s final section, “Lect,” a simmering simulation of grad-school jargon, sailor slang, plumbing terminology, and GPS directives that exposes the limitations of esoteric linguistic ontologies by moving from general observations to those of increasingly expert understanding.
While rich with advice to “Keep your personal longings with you at all times,” Old Hat is also generous, incisive, boisterous, and funny, a book about place, but also about understanding and situation. Spoken through clichés, vernacular, and jargon, Old Hat is just as familiar as it is odd, just as comforting as disquieting, an exceptional meditation on what it means to think about writing.
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Old Lost Land of Newfoundland, The
$8.95In 2008 Wayne Johnston became the second prominent Canadian writer to enlighten and entertain audiences as a speaker in the Canadian Literature Centre’s Henry Kreisel Lecture Series. He spoke to an enthusiastic audience at the University of Alberta about the myths and realities surrounding his native Newfoundland. A master storyteller, Johnston peppered the lecture with impromptu asides, delighting his listeners with true tales and well-spun yarns.
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Old Romantics
$24.95Shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award • Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year
Like Dubliners, if Dubliners were “Cat Person” as a feminist mock-epic about a writer’s coming of age—and every Dubliner was named Margaret.
A woman pursues a man who cut ahead of her in a line. Two nice people report that a child is being left unsupervised at a local beach. Romances, old and new, shift and sour. Following Maggie Armstrong’s intrepid hero, Margaret, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date, and on into midlife and its attendant disillusionment—and surprising revelations—Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Slippery, flawed, and acute, Armstrong’s narrator navigates a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility with piercing insight into the trials and tribulations of attempting to be human while female.
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Old Souls
$25.00Amarante lives in the woods with her talking plants. Every night, when it’s so dark she can barely see, she takes herself out for a long hike. Hours pass. The splendid shadows of the old souls consume all. The lone hiker is sucked into the forest’s depths.
She hopes to find beauty there.
Instead, she finds a corpse full of holes.
Disgusted and delighted, her unyielding curiosity pulls her back to the corpse’s resting place the following
night, and many nights thereafter…
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Old Winter
$18.00The pieces that make up Anne Le Dressay’s second poetry collection, Old Winter, are urban poems grounded in the rural past. Understated, direct, ironic, quietly humorous, they reveal a love of the particular, of small daily things which feel more and more fragile in a world overshadowed by big threats. Descriptive or narrative, focussing on the inner world of mind and spirit or the real world outside the narrator, these poems celebrate in close and vivid detail the small moments of ordinary life. They are poems of wonder, transformation, and resurrection.
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Oldman’s River
$44.95Sid Mary is a voice to be reckoned with.
Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty’s depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.
This first-ever collected works, featuring forward written by Kit Dobson and Owen Percy, and interview conducted by Pamela Banting, brings together old and new poems, published and unpublished works, in a celebration of the career and artistry of a Western Canadian icon.