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Showing 5345–5360 of 9481 results
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Overlays
$22.95In Overlays, Sean Howard employs experimental, magpie strategies that draw fresh poems from the deep wells of two related texts—John Thompson’s influential poetry collection Stilt Jack (1978) and Peter Sanger’s Sea Run (2023), a critical commentary on Thompson’s mesmerically allusive and elusive ghazals. By mixing images and diction from these source texts with his own reserve of memories, dreams and associations, Howard opens a fresh, lucidly turbulent correspondence between literary elements, the shapes, sounds and silences of his poems creating a palimpsest score.
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Overnight Sensation
$19.95Overnight Sensation is the independent and richly entertaining sequel to Colleen Curran’s hilarious first novel, Something Drastic. Lenore Rutland, an unsophisticated but astute singing waitress in a Montreal theme restaurant, is a best friend with her tenant, Heidi Flynn, an English professor. Their neighbour, Reine Ducharme, an expert gardener and maman to a pair of spoiled lap dogs, has poisoned six of her colleagues on a jury that released a murderer. With Reine in prison, Lenore becomes foster-maman to the dogs, Brioche and Montcalm.
As Overnight Sensation opens, Lenore is recruited as a guest on the Neighbours of Neighbours Who Murder segment of Fiona!, a TV talk show with millions of avid followers. Because of her honesty, she accidentally gets the better of the vicious Fiona. Suddenly famous, she wins instant recognition at a Canadiens game, a would-be husband, and a fan club consisting of the nieces of Heidi’s jilted suitor.
Hoping to gain the upper hand occasionally, Lenore and Heidi take Brioche and Montcalm to obedience school. There, a casting director “discovers” the pampered darlings for a made-for-TV movie, Gamon de Pycombe: Dog of the Titanic. The movie behind her, Lenore pursues her sensational amateur acting career as the star of Bells Are Ringing, and at the same time she and her boss, Gaëtan (the lover of Heidi’s fireman brother Daniel), save the restaurant from bankruptcy. Romance advances and recedes for everyone and there are laughs aplenty, plot complications galore, and even a few tears.
Overnight Sensation is a gentle satire that, like Something Drastic, contains more than a kernel of psychological truth in its humorous core.
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Overqualified
$14.95“Overqualified‘s cover letters are like a slap in the face, but the slap is hilarious, and you can’t stop laughing, and as soon as it’s over you want to tell all your friends about the slap. You know the kind?” — Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics
“Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard.…A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity.” — Paul Di Filippo author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia
Cover letters are all the same. They’re useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it’s done.
And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.
You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.
And you send it anyway.
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Overqualifieder
$14.95A collection of bitterly hilarious job application letters.
Applying for a job is stupid. It is a demeaning, humiliating exercise in learning to grovel in front of faceless strangers. Everyone who has ever sent a job application letter has felt the urge, the temptation to say what they really think. To say something completely insane, or to be brutally honest. With 2007’s Overqualified, Joey Comeau acted on those urges and delivered a book collecting his cover letters. “It’s sad and fragmented and, in places, funny,” the L.A. Times said. But even after the dozens of insane, hilarious, and sometimes strangely sad job application letters, he still didn’t get the job. So he’s at it again. A person needs to work, you know? But he’s had to step things up a bit. Were the letters not insane enough? Was he not sad or stupid enough? Did he not threaten to bite as many CEOs as he should have? There’s only one way to find out: OVERQUALIFIEDER.
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Overrun
$22.95Intelligent investigative writing meets experiential journalism in this important look at one of North America’s most voraciously invasive species
Politicians, ecologists, and government wildlife officials are fighting a desperate rearguard action to halt the onward reach of Asian Carp, four troublesome fish now within a handful of miles from entering Lake Michigan. From aquaculture farms in Arkansas to the bayous of Louisiana; from marshlands in Indiana to labs in Minnesota; and from the Illinois River to the streets of Chicago where the last line of defense has been laid to keep Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, Overrun takes us on a firsthand journey into the heart of a crisis. Along the way, environmental journalist Andrew Reeves discovers that saving the Great Lakes is only half the challenge. The other is a radical scientific and political shift to rethink how we can bring back our degraded and ignored rivers and waterways and reconsider how we create equilibrium in a shrinking world.
With writing that is both urgent and wildly entertaining, Andrew Reeves traces the carp’s explosive spread throughout North America from an unknown import meant to tackle invasive water weeds to a continental scourge that bulldozes through everything in its path.
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Ox Lost, Snow Deep
$20.00“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. The 14 long poems in Ox Lost, Snow Deep range from confessional narrative to collage to surrealism, exploring representations of history, both public and personal, and within that, they probe what is considered important and what is considered not important. These poems include takes on semi-rural existence, raising a family, and living in poverty. They also veer toward popular culture: using movies, music, social media language as jumping-off points or simply by taking those media’s forms. Burdick confronts the very embarrassment of simply being alive: excruciation, apology, loss, humour, mistakes, and grief – and the freedom achieved by acknowledging these things.
Burdick’s first collection of new poems since 2018, Ox Lost, Snow Deep will alter your ways of thinking and reading.
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Pacific Avenue
$28.00On June 13th 1886 Lauchlin Hamilton the CPR surveyor assigned to lay out the city took a crew out to cut the first line from the inlet to the creek. One of the crew, his brother in law, became lost in the heavy forest among the gigantic cedars. Pacific Avenue is his story.
The language of Pacific Avenue—sightings, soundings and surveys of what is constructed along the lines that make the city and between the lines of the poem—is a peninsula at once covered with trees and cleared of those same trees. This unnamed city, let us call it Vancouver—why not? becomes a plantation at once industrial but also social. Lay down yr tools pick up this book and build this city in yr mind, being careful to include plant fibre, genetic strands, animal habits and of course etcetera.
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Pacific Rim Letters
$34.95Pacific Rim Letters is a never-before-seen collection of letters Roy Kiyooka wrote between 1975 and 1985. It presents a fascinating and highly valuable picture of the artistic and literary communities Kiyooka was actively involved with, as well as Kiyooka as a man with an extraordinary intellect and passion for life and the arts. Kiyooka takes the epistolary form into new and radical directions. At once tenderly estranged and confessional, attentive as much to the minutiae of daily life as to the complexities of artistic and literary creation, and embedded in the politics of culture-making and those of racialized identities, these letters are a literary achievement in their own right.
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Pacific Windows
$29.95Roy Kiyooka’s reputation as an artist has long been recognized. Such is not the case with his writing and poetry, even though his engagement with language as a medium of artistic consciousness had been a preoccupation all along. For Kiyooka the poet, the poetic text was not a supplement to his visual art, but a medium that he explored in the same spirit and imagination as that of his other work. His poetry reflects his life-long intellectual engagement with the aesthetics of experience and his artistry in transforming the elements of language into poetic texts striking for their care with words, syntax, and the multiform spaces of the imagination.
This publication makes evident his collective poetic achievements by bringing together all of his most important poetic works, including many that have only been available in very limited editions. Preparation of this publication had begun in the year preceding Kiyooka’s death. Editor Roy Miki and Kiyooka had planned a collaborative form for determining its design and content. With the Kiyooka Estate’s permission, Miki has continued with the editorial responsibility of seeing it through to completion. Included are editorial and bibliographic notes on each of the titles as well as an essay on Kiyooka’s life as a poet. The title, Pacific Windows, is Kiyooka’s own.
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Pacifique
$23.95LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER’S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE
49th SHELF TOP 22 BOOKS OF 2022
Is love real if the beloved isn’t? Girl, Interrupted meets Rebecca in this taut tale of love and madness
When Tia meets Pacifique, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in an ambulance with a collarbone broken in a bike accident — and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? The medical establishment and her fellow patients? Or her frail human memory? And if Pacifique truly is a figment, is life in the “real world” with Andrew enough?
“In concise and vibrant prose, Sarah L. Taggart illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo. Lucid and destabilizing, graceful and raw, this novel asks: is losing one’s sanity so different from falling in love?” – Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories
“Pacifique turns the psychological thriller on its head, allowing madness to be a meaningful lens through which to see the world instead of a cheap plot twist. Taggart has created a stunning, smart and revolutionary novel here – one that forces its readers to see clearly what so often remains hidden. This book means so much to me. One of the best I’ve read in years.” – Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground
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Paddling in Paradise
$19.95A kayak may seem an unlikely place for adventure, but that’s exactly what you’ll find in Paddling in Paradise. Author Alison Hughes has created the definitive guide to sea kayaking in Atlantic Canada. Whether she is describing the exhilaration of experiencing the world’s highest tides in the Bay of Fundy, or the pure beauty of the coast of Cape Breton, Hughes shares her deep and genuine conviction that life is only truly lived with paddle in hand.
In Paddling in Paradise, Alison Hughes describes eight multi-day trips off the coasts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, ranging from beautiful nature paddles that neophytes will dream about for the rest of their lives to adventures that will test the mettle of experienced sea kayakers and their guides. Photos and a map enhance each description, and each ends with a Fact File that includes contact information for outfitters, a list of special preparations or equipment, advice for travelling to nearby cities, detailed directions to put-in points, and suggestions for whale watching, cycling, and other activities that visiting kayakers would enjoy. Paddling in Paradise also includes an introduction to the region and the unique appeal of sea kayaking as well as a chapter on trip planning, safety, and all aspects of camping along the shore.
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Paddling South
$19.95In the Fall of 1969, Rick Ranson and John Van Landeghem, both barely out of high school, took on the might of the Red and Mississippi Rivers to paddle a canoe from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Combining high drama with hilarity, Ranson tells how the duo, ducked bullets in St. Louis, avoided a whirlpool, worked on a Mississippi tow boat, sailed a yacht through a barge congested Cairo, IL, and spent a few days in the Fargo City Jail, while meeting an eclectic array of unforgettable characters. Paddling South tells the incredible tale of how they survived the three month trip on the often treacherous rivers, beset by snow storms, hurricanes, monstrous waves, and unseen dams.
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Pain and Passion
$29.95Calgary’s Stampede Wrestling spawned some of the biggest wrestling stars in history, from mat kings of the past like Gene Kiniski and Superstar Billy Graham to modern idols like Bret “Hitman” Hart, the British Bulldogs, and Chris Benoit. Pain and Passion tells how a small, family-run wrestling business profoundly influenced the world of professional wrestling as we know it today.
Pain and Passion takes readers on a rowdy ride through the evolution of Stu Hart’s Calgary promotion, from its meagre beginnings in the 1940s, its peak in the 1980s, and its fall as Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment changed the face of wrestling forever.
But this is more than a wrestling story — it’s a tale of family and of human tragedy. The Hart family lived for the wrestling business and, like Starbucks mowing down a mom-and-pop coffee shop, the emergence of McMahon’s media colossus ran Stampede into the ground. The wrestling game lost its innocence and western Canada lost a staple of its pop culture. As for the Hart family, the once-mighty clan was nearly destroyed by the business it loved.
The Stampede Wrestling story is a wild blood-on-the-mat saga over fifty years in the making. It’s sure to captivate not only wrestling fans, but anyone who appreciates a powerful drama.
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Pain, Porn and Complicity
$19.00Why does Bella lie so much in the Twilight series? Why was Catwoman such a bad movie? What was the reason Dark Angel was so short-lived? Poet and scholar Kathleen McConnell tackles these, and other, subjects in this collection of essays. Drawing on analysis from Freud to chaos theory, and a large body of research, McConnell starts with Pygmalion, and unravels the cultural threads that bind the way women protagonists are characterized in popular culture. This careful, and at times wry, examination considers not only why women are portrayed in these ways, but discusses the effect of those characterizations on the culture that consumes them.
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Paint the Town Pink
$12.95Lori Doody is back with another charming and quirky picture book?this time about a flamingo, blown off course. The town where she’s so unexpectedly landed looks very nice, and might be a good place to settle down, but she isn’t quite sure she’ll fit in. She tries to find a flock of her own; unfortunately, all her looking comes to nothing. But the people in the town are keen to keep their flamingo friend. What better way to make her feel at home than to paint the town pink.
Inspired by the story of two flamingos that were sighted in Newfoundland years ago, Lori Doody has crafted a charming and gentle tale about being a stranger in a new place, needing to belong, and ultimately being welcomed in the warmest of ways. Young readers and listeners will have great fun looking for flamingos tucked into the illustrations, and watching as the town and the townsfolk gradually make their feathered friend one of the family. The book includes a brief list of flamingo facts, as well.
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Painting Over Sketches of Anatolia
$14.95Painting Over Sketches of Anatolia is Leonard Neufeldt’s seventh book of poetry. In it, we find wars, revolutions, the holocaust, obsolete belief systems, Alzheimer’s and ever-present potentialities of the autistic as well as the illusory in the spoken or written word. A dying Plato tries to fight off intrusions of reality. Neufeldt questions whether one can find rootedness in an ethos quite unlike one’s own. The realities of discovering and settling in Turkey are uppermost, with “Gulls of the Bosporus/ screaming behind you,/ a city’s minarets floating free.” But the poems offer deepening lenses as the narrator enters a place of beauty, mystery, legend, painful history, irksome tourists, welcome and joy — the joy of olive picking, for example, with Mamut’s stunning wife: “The rake/ [she] gives me with a Yes/No shake/ of her head is smooth in my hands/ like skin tingling with details as I climb/ the ladder’s rungs.” As for the snake in the stone wall that does no harm, “May it live for a thousand years.”