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Showing 5297–5312 of 9489 results
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Orwell in Cuba
$24.95Orwell 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.
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Oscar of Between
$21.95In 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.
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Other Everest, The
$29.95What David Irvine posits is that Everest is not unattainable. Integrity, sensitivity and discipline are some of the qualities that lead us to the peak.
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Other Losses
$24.95Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949.
An attempted book-length disputation of Other Losses, was published in 1992, featuring essays by British, American and German revisionist historians (Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, edited by Ambrose & Günter). However, that same year Bacque flew to Moscow to examine the newly-opened KGB archives, where he found meticulously and exhaustively documented new proof that almost one million German POWs had indeed died in those Western camps.
One of the historians who supports Bacque’s work is Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, 101st Airborne Division, who in 1945 took part in investigations into allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and later became a senior historian with the United States Army. In the foreword to the book he states: “Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million [German] men, most of them in American camps … Eisenhower’s hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequalled by anything in American military history … How did this enormous war crime come to light? The first clues were uncovered in 1986 by the author James Bacque and his assistant.”
This updated third edition of Other Losses exists not to accuse, but to remind us that no country can claim an inherent innocence of or exemption from the cruelties of war.
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Other People
$15.95Fast Walker. Red Crocs. The Regurgitator. These are a few of the nicknames Daniel assigns to the other meditators during a ten-day silent retreat in Montebello, Quebec. Participants are not supposed to talk to anyone, not supposed to look anyone in the eye, and not supposed to gesture or communicate in any way. Recently diagnosed with a disease deemed terminal, and faced with this unusual situation, Daniel becomes acutely aware of the need for community and human interaction. In this funny, poignant, and insightful solo play, Brooks invites us to eavesdrop on the anxieties, joys, obsessions, and fantasies that lurk in the corners of our minds, while bearing witness to our shared need to be heard and understood.
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Other People’s Lives
$19.00Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness.
With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imaginationthose supposedly incompatible room-matesinto electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.
Each day’s a notch on the oven dial
the sadistic hand of summer turns. The locals here
wear mirrored glasses with the mirrors reversed!
Was I ever filled with sweetness and courage?
For miles and miles the asphalt unwinds, the river’s
evil twin. So is desire your enemy’s friend,
goes the jazz of imagined footstepsslapping the city’s impervious skin. So each day
lapses, un-spools each night as I go scheming
ways to continue, safe within and darkly through
an immaterial sublime. But the walls are sweating
and the windows here peer in towards this sheltered
corner of the universe — where I’m in trouble again
with words, and other people’s lives.— from “Cross-Sections”
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Other Poems
$17.95“I have to wonder why poets are always expected to write exactly what they wrote the last time they wrote a poem. So I wrote the poems a little differently this time. That’s okay too.”- MillAr, interview published in The Danforth ReviewJay MillAr’s poetry resists classification. This book, being a collection of Other Poems, is an assemblage of seemingly disparate materials–the poems are of various lengths, subjects and origins and were composed over the past ten years of this prolific author’s life. Reading this book is likened to finding a box of photographs in a thrift store; here lies a miscellany of meaning that offers an intimate view of MillAr’s “direct manner of spoken mind.”
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Other Schools of Thought
$17.95Other Schools of Thought is a collection of three unique plays that allow adult audiences to reflect on their past and young audiences to reflect on their future. With stark sets and minimalist presentational styles, they leave no room for condescension—for dismissal of “adult concerns” by the young. In their treatment of sexuality, substance abuse, AIDS and identity crises, these plays open up the common ground between young adults and old children, mapping the personal uncertainties unleashed by everyone’s contemplation of life’s “big questions.” They are ruthlessly honest enough to permit us to see that adult responses of young people to the questions of their future. If these plays are “plays for young adults,” they are so only in the sense that Romeo and Julietis a play for young adults.
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Other Sister, The
$22.95Julia Brannon, an elderly woman who has moved into a retirement home is the protagonist of the novel, The Other Sister. Physically but mentally alert and acutely observant and intelligent, she is a feisty and at times cantankerous protagonist. Her daughter, Rachel, and her grand-daughter, Thea, have given her, as a move-in present into the retirement home, a laptop computer on which they ask Julia to record events from her past. Julia’s recorded anecdotes cover many major historical events that affected Julia over the last century. \ Born into a well-to-do family, Julia, unlike her identical twin sister, Jane, aspired to a life other than marriage and children. She rejected a suitor, whom her sister subsequently married, and chose to study philosophy in a era when there were few female philosophy students and graduates. After her graduate studies she remains at the university as an associate professor although she is never promoted to a full professor. She remains at her job until an event concerning her twin sister compels her to reexamine her choices and take another path. There is, at the heart of the novel, a startling mystery and revelation on which the plot depends, which is crucial to how Julia learns to apprehend “the other.”
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Other Tongues
$24.95This anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. The anthology also serves as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today.
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Ottawa’s Streetcars:
$59.95Ottawa’s Streetcars was authored by Ottawa native Bill McKeown, after over fifty years of research. It details the history of the Ottawa Electric Railway, its predecessors, and the Ottawa Transportation Commission, all forerunners of today’s OC Transpo. The book contains 256 pages, with over 300 historical photographs in large size-larger than post-card size, for more interesting detail-with more than 40 photos in full colour. The photos were carefully selected to feature not only fascinating transportation vehicles of the era, operating in their environment, but to also show street scenes in the Ottawa area, with people utilizing the transit system of the time, against the stores, buildings, and open fields of the time.Thus, the book is truly a magnificent historical record of Ottawa as it was over a century ago, and for the first half of the twentieth century.
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Otter
$17.95His body, like yours, would lie
mute as a plum
until a vigilant limb came
to a decision. As you might have guessed
I’ve come to one myself.Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know ‘you’ is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.
‘Ladouceur writes with an awareness of queer history, documenting it faithfully, but with his own twist … This is poetry motivated by an honest wit.’
— John Barton, Arc Poetry Magazine -
Our Backs Warmed by the Sun
$24.95For many, the Doukhobor story is a sensational one: arson, nudity and civil disobedience once made headlines. But it isn’t the whole story. Our Backs Warmed by the Sun: Memories of a Doukhobor Life is an intricately woven, richly textured memoir of a family’s determination to live in peace and community in the face of controversy and unrest.
When author Vera Maloff set out to find the truth about her family’s history, she knew something of the struggles of living a pacifist, agrarian life in a world with opposing values. To find the bones of that history she turned to her mother Elizabeth, who, in her nineties, had forgotten nothing.
In Our Backs Warmed by the Sun, the author, through the stories of her mother, describes a wholly activist life. The Doukhobors–both the Sons of Freedom and moderate sects–led anti-military protests throughout the early 1900s, harboured draft dodgers in the 60s, and stood up for their beliefs. In response, they were hosed down, arrested, and jailed.
Vera learns of the confusion and fear when, as a child, Elizabeth and her family were interned in an abandoned logging camp while their father served time in Oakalla prison for charges related to a peaceful protest, and of her loneliness when, later, she was institutionalized–one of a series of Canadian government efforts in assimilation. By removing the children, it was believed, the cycle of protest and resistance could be broken.
Tracing the Doukhobor movement from Russia, the author explores the spiritual influence of its leaders. She does not shy away from the controversial actions of the Sons of Freedom in the darkest days of bombings and arson, or the toll on families and communities, probing with a historian’s curiosity and a daughter’s tenderness.
Elizabeth’s story is also one of a small but thriving Kootenay community, and of the experiences of a family who stood by their beliefs. Laughter, ingenuity and tenacity are offered up in the pages of Our Backs Warmed by the Sun, an important and engaging window into our collective history.
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Our Days In Vaudeville
$17.00Cobourg poet Stuart Ross believes collaboration allows him to be part of poems Ñ and the kinds of poems Ñ he would never write on his own. He also believes the best poems are ones that explode the author’s own intentions. In this book, Ross takes the stage in the vaudeville act that is collaborative poetry with writers from across Canada. The results are sometimes beautifully harmonic, sometimes chaotically slapstick Ñ but they are always as unpredictable as a live performance. And with the occasional exquisite pratfall. Ross’s collaborators include Kasey Ball, Gary Barwin, Alice Burdick, Sarah Burgoyne, Jason Camlot, Michael Dennis, Clarice Eckford, Tanya Finestone, Verne Good, Mark Laba, Jay MillAr, Leigh Nash, Peter Norman, Jim Smith, Gillian Sze, Paul Vermeersch, Tom Walmsley and others.
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Our Extraordinary Monsters
$14.95Our Extraordinary Monsters is Vanessa Moeller’s debut poetry collection which uses language(s) to build a written architecture where meaning(s) reside(s). The work resembles M.C. Escher’s lithographs of impossible spaces but ones created from language and memories where investigations of self, identity and voice occur, where dichotomies exist and where correspondences are created, sent, delivered and read. Within this imaginary space Moeller explores her constantly shifting identity as a poet, as a woman, as a second-generation German-Canadian immigrant to Atlantic Canada. There is constant negotiation where the “I” becomes a filter through which experiences are sifted, molded, changed, archived, restructured and re-imagined onto the page with language(s).
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Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers
$18.95Slimm, a seventeen-year-old Black boy in a hoodie suddenly finds himself in the first moments of his afterlife. He calls out for God. God does not respond. What happens next is a sacred journey through the unknown, as Slimm grapples with the truth of the life he lived and the death he didn’t choose.
Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers is a protest for all Black life beyond headlines and hashtags, a prayer for all families left behind, and a promise to the community that all Black lives matter.