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Showing 5361–5376 of 9481 results
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Painting Time
$19.95Maylis de Kerangal’s _Painting Time_ plunges readers into the world of Paula Karst, a young woman who discovers a passion for trompe l’oeil painting techniques. After beginning her studies at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels, Paula meets two new lifelong friends – both enigmatic, resourceful, impulsive, and gifted. Together the three weave a complex relationship that mirrors the interconnectedness of their artistic materials. Replicating the grain of wood, the wear of marble, or the protrusion on a tortoiseshell requires method, technique, talent … but also something else. Paula strives to understand what she’s painting, both the “micro” that she is and the complex “macro” of the world and its history.
Paula’s apprenticeship is punctuated by hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and saturnalian evenings. After completing her studies, she continues to practise her art in Paris, in Moscow, and then in Italy at Cinécittà, on the sets of great films – dream factories! – as if rehearsing for her grand finale: Lascaux IV, a life-sized replica of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and a zenith of human cultural expression.
In this exquisite and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, expertly translated by Jessica Moore, Kerangal mirrors the enchanted materialism of her protagonist’s artistic journey in her rich, lyrical prose.
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Palace of the End
$16.95A searing triptych of three monologues all exposing the ugly truth behind the headlines of the Iraq War.
Based around the lives of three distinct characters—a young soldier imprisoned for her misconduct at a prison camp in Iraq, a microbiologist-cum-weapons inspector who exposes the false justifications for war, and a mother/political opponent of Saddam Hussein—Palace of the End details the reality of the war in Iraq from three unique perspectives. With its emphasis on the human voice and power of the soul in the midst of a destructive war, each account is a riveting and brilliantly portrayed indictment of one of the contemporary world’s worst conflicts.
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Palace Trash
$22.95Cyprian Ghezo, crown prince of Dahomey (now Benin), is a student at Sorbonne University. Passionate about history and art, he participates as a worker in the renovation of a historical monument in Paris. This descent into the rubble leads him to the traces of a horrible crime once committed by the Kingdom of France under the Old Regime, and which continues to be kept secret today by the French Republic. The victim was a prince kidnapped from the Kingdom of Dahomey and brought to the court of Louis XIV as a slave. Cyprian’s discovery alarms the secret services of the Republic. At first, they try to use discreet methods to prevent the student from reaching the truth. But Cyprian’s obsession soon leads him to become a target of a real manhunt in Paris.
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Pale Blue Hope
$22.00In 1998 Ron Poulton traveled to Tajikistan as a legal adviser to the UN Mission. It was his job to ensure the men on trial for killing members of a UN observer force–Team Garm–received a fair trial. Poulton vividly captures life in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, a city full of fear and nightly curfews, where political murders are common and suspicion haunts the streets.
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Pale Grace
$8.50"Johnson can touch you deeply, anger you, make you squirm. She’s a genuine weaver of words and emotions…and her strong voice and poetic talent are undeniable." Canadian Book Review Annual.
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Pale Grey Dot
$23.95Three members of an elite team of operatives-once so close they were like family-are living in disgraced exile after a mission gone horribly wrong. But when the solar system’s Jupiter Station is attacked from within, they are thrown back into action, whether they like it or not. It will take all the tricks and tech they have to sort out the truth behind the official reports, and no small amount of courage to fight back against the system’s totalitarian government, in this exciting sci-fi debut.
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Pale Shadows: A Novel of Emily Dickinson
$23.95FEATURED ON LITHUB
CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEWDickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows
When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother’s ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.
From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson’s poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.
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Palm Leaf Fan, The
$20.95From crumbling shops in Chinatown to decaying tanneries in Tangra, Kwai-yun Li’s collection of linked short stories expose us to the life of a marginalized community in postcolonial Calcutta.
We meander into Wong’s Shoe Shop, where a mother arranges a marriage for her six-year-old daughter. We stop at a school for girls, where the principal singles out students who have large breasts for punishment. We pause by a temple guarded by a billy goat where family drama rages. We rally with politicians while the monsoon rain drenches us. We relax under waving palms while the setting sun shimmers over the surface of the Tangra fish ponds.
Kwai-yun Li’s sensitivity and quirky sense of humour will keep us wanting to return to the ghetto again and again.
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Palookaville
$16.95Tom Smart’s Palookaville: Seth and the Art of Graphic Autobiography examines the construction self-identity and the wafer-thin distinction between fiction and autobiography in Canadian cartoonist Seth’s Palookaville series of graphic novels.
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Palpitations
$22.95There are moments that change the course of a day, a year, or even a life. Palpitations explores the journey through the twists and turns of the human experience. From childhood memories of struggling with dyslexia and what to be when one grows up, reflections on love, to the global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thomas Leduc delves into the shared experiences that have altered the world’s perception of itself. Full of vivid imagery and deep, thoughtful reflections, Palpitations is a tribute to that which makes us human – moments that palpitate with life, longing and change.
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Pandemic Poems
$17.95COVID-19 spread like wildfire around the globe in 2020. Country after country experienced massive shutdowns, introduced measures like masks, social distancing, and quarantines, and found hospitals and health services stretched to the limit as infection rates and deaths soared. In these poems, written for the large part during the first wave of the pandemic, Philip Resnick offers his own take on what was to become a world turned upside down. He writes of the fear which the virus engendered, the angst and shattered illusions many experienced, the overtones of Apocalypse and end of time that hung over the unfolding events. He looks to historical and political analogies or precedents; taps literary sources as disparate as the Greek tragedians, Dante, Matthew Arnold, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca or Borges in writing about our situation; and wrestles with his personal reactions to an event without precedent in his lifetime. The result is a body of work that bears vivid witness to what so many of us have experienced this past year. For what the author presents through these poems are reflections on a pivotal event that none of us living through it are likely to forget.
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Panegyric
$19.95When underachieving writer Larry Mann is granted the lucrative opportunity to ghostwrite the memoirs of the notorious and eccentric businessman-turned-politician Maxime Montblanc, he accepts immediately, tantalized by the financial benefits he’s promised. However, as the two men begin to learn about and confide in one another, hints of their pasts surface to reveal two men both breaking in their own ways and both searching for a brighter future that may not exist. Alternating between the stark and the surreal, the abstract and the lyrical, Panegyric is an exploration and examination into the nature of artistic integrity, creation, and legacy, told in a way that is subversive, allegorical, profane, humorous, harrowing, and at times, unapologetically incomprehensible.
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Pangborn Defense, The
$17.95Norm Sibum’s The Pangborn Defence marks a departure from his previous verse, and will be something of a surprise for those who have followed his career over the last thirty years. A suite of poems as letters to personages both real and imagined, there are political undertones to many rarely seen in Sibum’s ouevre. But there is still the same attention to detail, the same craftsmanship, humour, love and originality.
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Panicle
$18.95“Succulent in its excellence, Sze’s poetry insists that cultural ‘difference’ is what can make a beautiful difference in our apprehension of the ‘beautiful.’” — George Elliott Clarke on Peeling Rambutan
In Panicle, Gillian Sze makes her readers look and, more importantly, look again. It’s a collection that challenges our notion of seeing as a passive or automatic activity by asking us to question the process of looking. The book’s first section, “Underway,” deals with the moving image and includes both poetic responses to film theory and lyrical long poems while also reimagining fairy tales. The next section, “Stagings,” takes its inspiration from the still image and explores a wide range of periods, movements, and media. Sze’s focus on the process of looking anticipates “Guillemets,” a creative translation of Roland Giguère’s 1966 chapbook, Pouvoir du Noir, which contains a series of poems accompanied by his own paintings. Sze’s approach to Giguère is two-fold: she “translates” his text, and artist Jessica Hiemstra provides a visual response to her translation. The final section, “Panicle,” continues the meditative quality of “Guillemets” in a suite of poems that ruminate on nature, desire, and history.
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Panopticon
$18.00Announcing the long-awaited reprint of Steve McCaffery’s rare 1984 intervention into fiction (if “fiction” indeed this be). Taking its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon Papers” McCaffery’s Panopticon shatters all omnivison in a tour de force of formal innovation, theoretical comment and narrative critique. In Panopticon narrative stutters, repeats itself, sequence is deranged and complicated by a multi-media presence on the page of grids, film bands and acoustic channels. On its first appearance Charles Bernstein hailed the book as “as perhaps the exemplary �antiabsorptive work’” and William McPheron claimed its first appearance as “an extraordinary act of revolution and charity. Out of print for over twenty-five years, this new edition is enhanced by the inclusion of a revised CD recording of the book, its three voices, one male, two female teasing out the gender complexities of Panopticon. McCaffery has also added an Introduction to the book and has revised the text entirely.
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Paper City
$16.95In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author’s two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the characters n and b, and the narrator’s attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history’s relationship to the body’s fictions – what n and b term ‘art lost to numbers.’