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Showing 5217–5232 of 9481 results
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One
$16.95Winner, Governor General’s Award for Poetry
Shortlisted, Governor General’s Award for Translation
An elegant testimony to the beautiful and the good, Serge Patrice Thibodeau’s One pays homage to the vibrancy and vigor of life, backdropped against the precarious immediacy of the everyday.
From the tiny trunk of opening lines taken from Paul Valéry, Thibodeau unpacks a vision of human consciousness that exists in a state of singular wonder, creating a universe that is at once faithful and ever-changing like the tidal bore — the landscape of mascaret. Thibodeau boldly blends anecdotes, pop-ups, leitmotifs, ecological awareness, and the inner world in variations on the theme of wholeness.
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One and The Many, The
$24.95One and The Many, The
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One Arrow Left
$26.00Born in 1935 in the village of Esket, Cecilia DeRose was welcomed into a loving, supportive Secwepemc family. Growing up in an isolated meadow, Cecilia was the fourth of ten children, spending much of her early years caring for younger siblings. Ranch life was in their blood; Cecilia’s mother, Amelia Joe, was the progeny of a white ranch hand, Joe Smith, and her Secwepemc mother, Martha Williams; her father, Matthew Dick, was well-known in the Williams Lake rodeo circuit and played for the famous Alkali Braves hockey team. Navigating the complexities of being a mixed-race family, both within and outside of the Secwepemc community, would be a lifelong source of tension, which Cecilia handles with grace, tenacity and humour.
Like their parents before them, Cecilia and her siblings were sent to St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near Williams Lake. At seven years old she eagerly awaited her turn to join her older sister and brother at the mission, where she could escape the drudgery of washing diapers and caring for her younger siblings at home. Nothing could have prepared her for the cruelty of institutionalized life. Dreams of an education that might lead to a career as a teacher, lawyer, or journalist were dashed. Residential school was hell, and Cecilia was left with the scars to prove it.
In 1956, Cecilia married non-Indigenous ranch hand Lenny DeRose and lost her Indigenous status. Nevertheless, on the insistence of her father Matthew Dick, Cecilia remained true to her Secwepemc roots and traditions. She eventually regained her status and became an ambassador of Secwepemc language and cultural practices. As she raised her own six children, she took great care to bestow in them the cultural teachings of the Secwepemc identity. She eventually taught the Secwepemcstin language in the public-school system, fulfilling her dream of teaching and reinforcing her belief that “we have one arrow left in our quiver and that’s education—we must use it wisely.”
Today, Cecilia is recognized nationally as an Indigenous knowledge keeper. She has provided cross-cultural training for hospitals, courts, and law enforcement institutions, and shared her knowledge on projects ranging from ethnobotany research to culturally safe elder care. In 2018, she received the Indspire Award for Culture, Heritage and Spirituality. In 2024, she was honoured by Thompson Rivers University with a Doctor of Letter, honoris causa, for her indispensable contributions to language revitalization.
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One Bloody Thing After Another
$18.95Jackie has a map of the city on the wall of her bedroom, with a green pin for each of her trees. She has a first-kiss tree and a broken-arm tree. She has a car-accident tree. There is a tree at the hospital where Jackie’s mother passed away into the long good night. When one of them gets cut down, Jackie doesn’t know what to do but she doesn’t let that stop her. She picks up the biggest rock she can carry and puts it through the window of a car. Smash. She intends to leave before the police arrive, but they’re early.
Ann is Jackie’s best friend, but she’s got problems of her own. Her mother is chained up in the basement. How do you bring that up in casual conversation? “Oh, sorry I’ve been so distant, Jackie. My mother has more teeth than she’s supposed to, and she won’t eat anything that’s already dead.” Ann and her sister Margaret don’t have much of a choice here. Their mother needs to be fed. It isn’t easy but this is family. It’s not supposed to be easy. It’ll be okay as long as Margaret and Ann still have each other.
Add in a cantankerous old man, his powerfully stupid dog, a headless ghost, a lesbian crush and a few unsettling visits from Jackie’s own dead mother, and you’ll find that One Bloody Thing After Another is a different sort of horror novel from the ones you’re used to. It’s as sad and funny as it is frightening, and it is as much about the way families rely on each other as it is about blood being drooled on the carpet. Though, to be honest, there is a lot of blood being drooled on the carpet.
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One Building in the Earth
$16.95With generous selections from earlier, critically acclaimed full-length collections like Talking Prophet Blues and Eating Glass, as well as work from landmark underground chapbooks like Because the Gunman and Graffiti for JJ Harper, this collection presents, for the first time, the range and scope of Maggie Helwig’s unique and inspiring poetry. Spanning two decades, and including new and never-before collected material, One Building In The Earth presents Helwig’s thematic and poetic trajectory in ways that make her stunning political and spiritual insight a cornerstone of contemporary Canadian literature.
One Building In The Earth includes “Hunger and the Watchmen” — a celebrated poetic reconsideration of Simone Weil — in its entirety. It, like many of Helwig’s best- known works, while recently out-of-print, take on a vital new life in this collection.
Whether exploring the relationship between the city and the body, our collective longing for mercy or grace, or the possibility of our lives being cherished — despite history and war and the damage we sometimes do to one another — Maggie Helwig pushes the limits and sets new poetic standards: these are words that matter.
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One Chrysanthemum
$24.95In One Chrysanthemum, it is 1964 and Misako Imai is a young Tokyo housewife with a secret. When she was a child living in her grandfather’s dark, wartime Buddhist temple in the northern prefecture of Niigata, she became aware of a special sensitivity that allowed her to see visions of things that were currently happening—but in another place—or that had happened in the past. Now, after five years of marriage and no children, Misako is living the life of a full-time maid to her husband’s widowed mother, who blames her for not producing a son to carry on the family name. One evening, she has the very clear vision of her husband making love to another woman and realizes that he has taken a mistress. Her marital problems unresolved, Misako is summoned by her grandfather to Niigata when his temple receives the ashes of a young girl’s bones that were found in a nearby garden pond. The old priest remembers his granddaughter playing in that garden as a child and telling him that she saw a girl fall into the pond. At that time there had been no evidence the sighting was anything more than the child’s over-active imagination. But, after meeting a most unusual Zen priest who tells him about something called clairvoyance, he realizes that his own granddaughter may have had such a gift when she was a child. The old priest becomes obsessed with the possible connection between the bones found in the pond and Misako’s childhood vision. Feeling that he can give into a bit of fool-hardiness in his old age, he plans an unorthodox memorial service in the garden where the bones were found and arranges for both the Zen priest and his granddaughter to attend. What he does not realize is that the combination of the two priests’ limited knowledge and his granddaughter’s powerful sensitivity would be a dangerous combination bound to end in disaster.
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One Crack Out
$15.95Charlie Evans, a pool shark down on his luck in the bedroom as well as in the pool hall, has two days to pay off a $3,000 debt, or have his legs broken by Bulldog, a psychotic debt collector who also happens to be having an affair with Charlie’s wife, Helen. In his desperation to recover both the money and his self-esteem, Charlie gets involved in a series of hustles, pushing the tension to a breathtaking climax.
The complicated narrative of the play allows French to build a convincing case for Charlie’s humanity—how his actions, devious, frantic and perplexed as they are, spring directly from his need to survive his pathetic circumstance and to maintain his dignity as a survivor. Tired, suspicious, despairing, knowing that the game is no good for him and yet knowing no other game, Charlie plunges into a situation which may mean disaster or salvation, because in Charlie’s world of cliché and stereotype, everything comes down to betting on the right thing at the right time.
Cast of two women and eight men.
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One Crow Sorrow
$18.95Lisa Martin-DeMoor’s debut collection of poetry, One Crow Sorrow, is both fearless and vulnerable-an exploration of grief and loss that is rooted in life affirmation, in deep attention to the natural world.
From a tangle of snowflakes in Saskatchewan to cell masses like dislodged icebergs, the earth and body inform one another, their cycles of life entwined. The resulting poems explore grief as an extension of love, and mortality as an extension of living. Pain, she writes, is the opened bloom of beauty.
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One Day It Happens
$22.95One Day It Happens is an eclectic collection of short stories by Mary Lou Dickinson, which deal in myriad forms with communication or lack thereof in the lives of the characters. One of the universal factors in human existence is the need to connect with one another. When these characters fail to do so, it is the result of fear, of loneliness, of violence, of impending death. Sometimes they succeed in spite of everything to reach a place of insight and understanding, usually in unexpected ways and to their own surprise. About some of the stories: Margaret, in “The Empty Chair,” almost 90 and lonely after the death of her husband, has a bizarre sexual encounter with a man living in the same retirement home. In “A Country Weekend,” a visit to the family cottage prompts a terrifying and almost fatal swim across the lake. A writer in “Hello, Angel,” imagines and fears the sexual assault and abduction of a young girl by his next door neighbour. “From the Front” explores the typical day of a telephone crisis counsellor. Eva, in “White Sails on Lake Ontario,” at last takes steps to leave an abusive relationship. In “The Train Ride,” Joe, who rides the train in order to have conversations with people, fails to connect with a fellow passenger. Libby, in “One Day It Happens,” visits a friend whose husband is recovering from a heart attack, making all of them feel vulnerable and close to death in a number of ways.
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One for the Road
$22.95One for the Road is a collection of recent Canadian plays for one actor. Often written and produced for touring and festivals, plays for one performer offer unusual challenges and benefits for both sides of the theatrical event: actor, and audience. The plays in this volume come from writers across the country, and have been road-tested in a variety of venues, from main stage to fringe, and other stops along the way.
What is most exciting about a play for one actor? Often, it’s the wonderfully intense storytelling that takes place, sometimes it’s a bravura performance. Many actors create their own one-person scripts, which are then extremely portable and self-sufficient for touring. Sometimes a one-person play arises from a personal experience?—?a kind of living, breathing memoir?—?one that the artist shapes and hones to express an important discovery or a burning question. In all cases, solo plays draw their audiences deep inside a theatrical expression, an individual vision. Laugh, cry, get angry, be moved by the strong stories in this exciting collection.
The anthology will be of particular interest to students and teachers looking for current, challenging scene work for young actors, as well as to actors searching for the perfect solo piece. Included in the volume are interviews with the playwrights, in which they discuss the creative process of writing and of producing the work.
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One For the Rock
$19.95Sebastian Synard doesn’t want any more trouble than he already has. But when he leads a group of tourists along the cliffs of St. John’s harbour, one of them ends up dead. Not only is there a murderer in his tour group, but the cop assigned to the case is sleeping with Sebastian’s ex-wife. It seems like things can’t get any worse, but as he’s enlisted to help flush out the perpetrator, the trail leads deeper than expected, and Sebastian finds himself on the edge.
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One Good and Deadly Deed
$21.95Bodies are piling up in Flagler. For fans of Bones and Preacher comes a sharp supernatural police procedural set in the heart of Texas.
It was not Luke McWhorter’s plan to become a law enforcement officer when he left for Yale Divinity School. But three generations of his family had worn the star, and after graduation, the needs of his community called him home to serve and protect. His theological training and his seventeen-year career as sheriff suddenly collide when bodies start piling up in Flagler, Texas. Two pilots are found brutally murdered in McWhorter’s hometown, torn to pieces by their own plane’s propeller, next to an ominous warning written in blood on the hanger wall.
In this fast-moving whodunit, McWhorter needs all the help he can get. He is joined by his chief deputy, Charles “Chuck” Del Emma; his FBI-agent girlfriend, Angie Steele; a precocious college student; and a 4,000-year-old mummy. Together, they tackle a crime spree that reaches all the way to the Middle East and back to the time of Noah’s Ark.
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One Good Thing
$22.00A novel set in Yellowknife’s historic Old Town in the 70s that explores both abandonment and belonging in the life of a young woman.
In the spring of 1977, Annie, a flighty artist, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Delilah, trade the cherry blossom trees and beaches of Vancouver for rugged and remote Old Town in Yellowknife, surprising Delilah’s father by showing up on his doorstep. As she adapts to her new surroundings, Delilah befriends Will, a local Dene man and her father’s business partner. But Annie’s capricious nature undermines Delilah’s elusive sense of belonging when Annie leaves Old Town for an artists’ colony without saying goodbye. While coping with her family’s instability and changes within herself, Delilah becomes attached to Will as she grows alienated from her increasingly aloof father. When Will vanishes in a blizzard one night, Delilah is devastated and suspects her father is to blame. What happened to Will? Is there anyone she can trust? Where—and with whom—does she belong?
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One Good Thing: A Living Memoir
$19.95One Good Thing is a charming collision of memoir with the living, exuberant, and vulnerable natural world. Written in sixty-four short epistolary chapters, M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society. One Good Thing is also an homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of Victoria’s Times Colonist, each section of the book focusing and expanding on one of her gardening columns.
Using a familiar “Dear Helen” structure, almost every piece in One Good Thing intimately and playfully relates to the gardening article that gave rise to it while simultaneously ranging into myriad other topics, including the author’s creative practice, personal and familial details, and comic riffs on a number of close-to-the-heart themes. With a mindful persistence that’s often hilarious, the book strives to find personal “calm abidance” through the practice of gardening as mediated by the universal and personal practice of writing.
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One Hand Screaming
$24.9920 Years of Haunting Echoes
For centuries, philosophers have pondered the Zen Buddhist koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” What, then, is the sound of one hand screaming?
Silent screams bounce around Mark Leslie’s head like an impending storm, brewing into a force that will escape in a wild dance of chaos and be lost forever if he doesn’t stop to write them down.
Within these pages you will find . . .
A bookstore that keeps more than dusty old tomes on its shelves . . . a phantom limb that can reach into the next world . . . the exquisite taste of a book-aged skull . . . a comic that colors people’s lives with terror . . . graves unable to hold their wares . . . a collector of haunted artifacts who gets more than he bargains for . . . a deserted northern highway that brings back a man’s worst childhood fears . . . bogeymen, anthropomorphic terrors, and more . . .
In 2004, Mark Leslie released his first collection of chilling fiction and disturbing poetry in a volume called One Hand Screaming. Twenty years later, this special anniversary edition includes all the original stories and poems plus new ones published in the past twenty years along with all original pieces crafted specifically for this volume. This collection includes previously published award-nominees alongside all original and never-before published works.
These haunting tales are sure to bring a delicious shiver to any fan of The Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, and Black Mirror. If, that is, you’re interested in opening your imagination to the sound of those silent screams.
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One Hit Wonders
$19.95LIla is dead. And the likely suspects are all men: her flash-in-the-pan literary husband, a washed up golf pro turned criminal with a cocaine habit, and two small-time thugs looking for the perfect score. As a crime novel for a new age, this is sex, drugs, and a story that unfolds as a map of bad intentions. In One Hit Wonders, Patrick Warner weaves an energetic tale that is part caper and partmurdermystery—relentlessly satiric, brutally funny, and obsessively readable