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Showing 5281–5296 of 9481 results

  • Ordinary Paradise

    Ordinary Paradise

    $25.95

    The essays in Ordinary Paradise muse on what it means to be engaged with literature, music, film and the visual arts, and celebrate the extraordinary power that creative accomplishment can have on our daily lives.

  • Ordinary Places, Sacred Spaces

    Ordinary Places, Sacred Spaces

    $24.95

    Ordinary Places, Sacred Spaces

  • Ordinary Time

    Ordinary Time

    $17.95

    The poems in this collection examine how our experience of movement through space is what lends time its dimensionality, from childhood memories of the Cold War to the Julian calendar, making manifest the arc of a complete year-long cycle of both “sacred” and “ordinary” time, returning to our ongoing attempts to guarantee the security of our place in the world.

  • orient

    orient

    $20.00

    Orient is the third collection from one of Western Canada’s most accomplished poets. Composed mainly of three long poems–an extended meditation on the connection between man and fish, the lament of a big-souled cowboy poet looking up from rock bottom, and a historical envisioning of an intimate relationship between a pioneer and a powerful crone–Orient leaps, sings, burrows down, and orients the reader within its rich ecosystem. The appeal of these poems lies partly in their blend of humility (the open-minded approach), in their force (the taut style, the original vision) and in an astonishing boldness. Wigmore is a “poet of place” in the best sense: “about the big picture.”

    I had a job and then I didn’t

    but once I spoke a tavern sermon
    that came to me in darkness
    and men I knew who crossed the street

    who shunned me in daylight
    they wept
    and that’s something

    — from “tavern”

  • Original Prin

    Original Prin

    $19.95

    A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR’S CHOICE

    A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

    Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family.

    Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He’s going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature.

    But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over—including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school—Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too.

    The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It’s a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda’s place as one of Canada’s funniest and most provocative writers.

  • Original Six Dynasties

    Original Six Dynasties

    $29.95

    Original Six Dynasties

  • Origins

    Origins

    $18.00

    Entombed within a thirty-kilometre-deep seam of rock, the fossils of Joggins, Nova Scotia are pried from a cliff-face by a version of the ocean out of which their creatures evolved?for the first time on Earth?more than three-hundred-million years ago. With probing metaphors and a keen eye on science, the poems in Origins create a multi-faceted portrait of evolution, extinction and climate change. Centered on the powerful Bay of Fundy, Origins compares the displaced, prehistoric marks of fossils with cultural marks like art and books. These varied poems observe eternal traces and lingering residues, from fossilized footprints to landscape sculpture to pollution and industrialization. With only one bone in a billion fossilized and a perpetually changing planetary surface, these celebratory yet cautionary poems also investigate chance, loss and ruin. The intersection of forces, which both create and destroy, are echoed by poems devoted to transitory art, the human addiction to energy, and an evolving media history (from nineteenth-century field drawings to twenty-first-century digital libraries). Origins is a nuanced ledger for a troubled world.

  • Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens

    Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens

    $19.99

    Orchid Lovell is a young Romany woman haunted by a fear of being found out. Her family has been chased out of town before. After settling in a seemingly idyllic northern mining town that she soon understands as rife with unseen cruelty, Orchid finds solace in a lush orchid fen where she doesn’t fear the town’s judgement. Amid the green beauty of the fen, Orchid meets her beloved Jack, and marries him in a secret blackfly-infested ceremony.

    But the town’s waters don’t only harbor life. In the nearby creek, dead girls take revenge on the men who murdered them, luring them into murky waters. Despite the unyielding nature of the water spirits, one man evades their violence. After a devastating attack linked to the expansion of the mine, Orchid’s fate is entwined with the panni raklies’ ruthless justice.

    Written in over 100 dreamy mini-chapters, this novella explores the tenuous reality of the Romany diaspora living in troubled times on troubled lands.

  • Orion Sweeping

    Orion Sweeping

    $21.95

    Anne Marie Todkill’s debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

    The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are we to make of a radioactive souvenir, a shape-shifting dog, landscapes made strange by time? The speakers gathered here seek to set the record straight: a mink gives advice; a wolf disputes a rumour; a photographer zooms in on a kill; a military strategist gives lessons in peace. But the sum of the evidence is not bleak. A baby arrives as robustly as a whale; the solidarity of marriage is enacted in surprising ways; father and daughter share a gift for reprieve. Under the penetrating gaze of these poems, beauty and tenderness come quietly into view.

  • Orphan Song

    Orphan Song

    $15.95

    In 40,027 BCE (a time when the average human could only count to five), a grief-stricken Homo sapiens couple adopts a Neanderthal child. But language separates parents and child, only to then separate mother and father–and how do we love when we can’t communicate? With that, a mythic journey of danger and sacrifice ensues, to connect to the Neanderthals and to protect the child at all costs. Orphan Song is a heroic tale of clashing cultures and an examination of how the bonds of family are truly formed.

  • Orphans for the Czar

    Orphans for the Czar

    $15.95

    Orphans for the Czar ruefully exposes the duplicity, revenge, and self-interest at the core of a culture about to go up in flames. Suggested by Gorsky’s novel The Life of a Useless Man and set shortly before Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, the play focuses on a hapless double agent as he tries to stay on the right side of both the revolutionaries and the czarists. The orphaned fool Vasley leaves his impoverished village to work in his uncle’s bookstore in the city, and becomes engrossed by the women, the intelligentsia, the spies, and all their conflicting ideologies. A comedy of pathos about the fragility of people in unstable times, Orphans for the Czar is also a plea for the possibility of decency.

  • Orphans of Empire

    Orphans of Empire

    $22.00

    Finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
    Finalist for the 2021 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

    “Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, Orphans of Empire brings to life the half-forgotten world of early British Columbia. This is an immersive, shimmering novel.” —Steven Price, author of #1 nationally bestselling By Gaslight and Giller-shortlisted Lampedusa

    In Grant Buday’s new novel, three captivating stories intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on the shores of Burrard Inlet. In 1858 the serious and devoted Sir Richard Clement Moody receives the commission of a lifetime when he is sent to help establish “a second England”—what is now British Columbia. In 1865 Frisadie, an eighteen-year-old Kanaka housemaid, who is more entrepreneur than ingénue, arrives in New Brighton from Hawaii. She convinces Maxie Michaud to purchase the hotel with her, and it soon becomes the toast of the inlet. In 1885 Henry Fannin, a young, curious embalmer and magnetism devotee, having struck out in London and San Francisco, arrives in New Brighton and promptly falls in love with a tragic woman he hears crying on his first night at the hotel.

    Endearing, funny, and highly evocative of time and place, Orphans of Empire celebrates those living in the shadow of history’s supposed heroes, their private struggles and personal agendas. Readers who loved Michael Crummey’s Galore and Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World, will love this vivid novel of arrivals that prods at the ethics of settlement.

  • Orpheus in Winter: Morley Callaghan’s the Loved and the Lost

    Orpheus in Winter: Morley Callaghan’s the Loved and the Lost

    $14.95

    Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian’s, student’s, and teacher’s wishes. Each book contains clear information on a major Canadian novel. Attractively produced, they contain a chronology of the author’s life, information on the importance of the book and its critical reception, an in-depth reading of the text, and a selected list of works cited. This volume examines The Loved and the Lost by Morley Callaghan.

  • Orwell in Cuba

    Orwell in Cuba

    $24.95

    Orwell in Cuba chronicles journalist Frédérick Lavoie’s attempts to unravel the motives behind the mysterious appearance of a new translation of George Orwell’s 1984, formerly taboo in Cuba, just ahead of the country’s twenty-fifth International Book Fair. Lavoie works to make sense of how Cubans feel about the past, present, and future of their island – and how the political regime is adapting, or not, to life in the twenty-first century. His intertwined quests give readers the unique experience of following a suspenseful trail while at the same time becoming increasingly familiar with Cubans’ relationship to the regime and their strategies for coping with the island’s often challenging living conditions.

  • Oscar of Between

    Oscar of Between

    $21.95

    In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberrant reveals its source: she had never learned the art of camouflage.

    This marked the beginning of Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas. Taking the name Oscar, she embarks on an intimate, nine-year quest by telling her story as “a person of between.” As Oscar, she is able to make sense of her self and the culture that shaped her. She traces this experience of in-betweenness from her childhood in the rural Midwest, through to her first queer kiss in 1978, divorce, coming out, writing life. In 1984, she and her lover wrote lesbian erotic love poetry collections in dialogue with one another, the first and only tandem collections on this subject in English Canada. After the two split, she experienced years of unacknowledged exclusion from a community in which she thought she belonged.

    In the process of writing Oscar’s story, Warland considers our culture’s rigid, even violent demarcations as she becomes at ease with never knowing what gender she will be addressed as: “In Oscar’s daily life, when encountering someone, it goes like this: some address her as a male; some address her as a female; some begin with one and then switch (sometimes apologetically) to the other; some identify Oscar as lesbian and their faces harden, or open into a momentary glance of arousal; some know they don’t know and openly scrutinize; some decide female but stare perplexedly at her now-sans-breast chest; some are bemused by or drawn to or relate to her androgyny; and for some none of this matters.”

    A contemporary Orlando, Oscar of Between extends beyond the author’s personal narrative, pushing the boundaries of form, and by doing so, invents new ways to see ourselves.

  • Other Everest, The

    Other Everest, The

    $29.95

    What David Irvine posits is that Everest is not unattainable. Integrity, sensitivity and discipline are some of the qualities that lead us to the peak.