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Showing 5361–5376 of 9489 results
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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.”
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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.