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Showing 5393–5408 of 9489 results
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Paradise Engine, The
$19.95While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras, an apocalyptic strain of mysticism threatens their existence: Anthea contends with a nascent New Age movement in the heart of the city while Liam encounters a radical theosophical commune along the coast of British Columbia, who appear to be building … something.
The Paradise Engine unfolds across a colourful backdrop of labour organizers, immaculately-attired cultists, ambitious socialites, basement offices and coffee shops. Its cast of characters and historical setting recalls Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business or Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, while its approach to memory and community is reminiscent of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
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Paradise Garden
$17.95In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this “wilderness” into an English country garden complete with vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and an elegant gazebo. After six generations, times and circumstances have changed, the family estate has been subdivided, the flowers have gone wild, the pear-tree has rotted and the heritage house has been carved up into a duplex, the property now divided in two by an ugly hedge.
The McKinnons now live in one side of the property, while the other has been sold to an immigrant family recently arrived from Turkey. The heirs apparent to both families, Day McKinnon and Leyla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, tolerating with thinly disguised amusement their ancestors’ “outdated” formalities and rituals. So alienated are they that they spend much of their time only half-jokingly speaking of themselves in the third person. Yet Leyla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old garden: its tumbled and overgrown ruins remind her of the Paradise Garden of Judeo-Christian/Islamic tradition—its layout in the four cardinal directions, its allusions to the seasons and the elements, and its walls that surround a place of secret love. For Day, however, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he has discovered a long-buried family secret, “The problem with being born into paradise is: eventually you inherit it. There’s something to be said for the bedlam of hell. Heaven is a lot of upkeep.” Abandoning their families for their careers, they are reunited years later having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but something that we must build by hand in the wilderness of our lives.
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Paradise Lost
$17.95“The biggest mistake any of us could make would be to underestimate Satan.”
The seventeenth century and present day are seamlessly intertwined as Satan vents to an audience about her frustration at being cast out of Heaven and her thoughts on oppression. When she finds out that God has created delicate new creatures called “humans,” she crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty.
Erin Shields turns Heaven and Hell upside down in this witty, modern, feminist retelling of John Milton’s epic poem about the first battle between good and evil. Shields’s wickedly smart and funny script questions the reasons of the universe, the slow process of evolution and the freedom of knowledge. The debate over right and wrong has never been so satisfying.
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Paradise Preserved
$29.95Paradise Preserved
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Paradise, Later Years
$18.00Marion Quednau’s collection Paradise, Later Years plays with the language of juxtaposition, nothing is straight on; if there’s quiet beauty by the sea, there’s a passing warship. Quednau’s lyricism, whether of river or lover, bears witness to relationships transformed by the tension–and surprise–of setting one thing against another. The verse is often irreverent, the humour touching on the pain of recognition, making us shift our boundaries. This book is a brave road trip where no one comes out with the same skin of escape, or want, but rather with new forms of redemption.
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Paradox of Meaning
$18.95The essays and rhetorical imaginings that Moss calls critical fiction challenge convention, subverting the notions of genre we use to distinguish between prose and poetry, fiction and exposition, creative writing and critical commentary. Moss looks at such authors as Atwood, Wiebe, Bowering, Avison, Gunnars, Arnason, Cooley and Kroetsch.
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Parallel Rivers
$18.95Parallel Rivers is a collection of stories that were coaxed into existence from Kenyon’s interest in seeing what fiction might learn from film, particularly the German, French, Italian, and Japanese cinema of the 70s. While Kenyon’s fictions are often immersed in postmodern sensibilities, adding the rituals and techniques and experiments of film to the process changes some of the ground rules.
The collection has two sections that run stylistically parallel to each other. The first section consists of short, often surreal or uncomfortable fictions; the second contains longer stories of larger, more realistic worlds. In the shorter fictions, each story creates its own world order, and presents hyper-utilizations of point of view, time shifts, and disconnected physical detail. Here you will find stories about construction buddies who are violently transformed by their marriages; a cold war incident that causes a Canadian circus in Russia to fragment and disintegrate; a political runner at a Ravi Shankar concert who must cope with death and detachment; and a surreal train that derails the purpose of a man dying.
In the longer pieces considerably more tradition and familiarity are used. There’s the story “Jane Hart’s Airband” where the Tom Waitsian energy sweeps the reader along in a tale of music, quirky adventure, and character conjecture. Or in the memory lament “That Time in Palm Springs”, that closes out the collection. Gone is the anarchy and randomness that purpose the earlier shorter pieces. Here the speaker, a man caring for his ancient father, efficiently gathers his memories around him and recounts in a controlled reliability those moments that may have shaped him. In Kenyon’s fictions, the concept of memory as in our narrator’s case may not be reliable nor may his life have been lived as he suggests, and his immersion in movies and television might create enough distrust that the reader can easily be left unsure. These fictions exist as dreams exist, yet within this framework truth is revealed and the full play of language exercised.
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Pardon Our Monsters
$17.95Andrew Hood’s debut collection heralds a young talent with an irresistible style and merciless eye. These unapologetic stories deal with an assortment of foolish self-destructive small town anti-heroes. They are unlikely odes and elegies for human shabbiness.A newly-wed conjures a ghost in an attempt to contact her absent husband. A seventeen year old is blackmailed into buying drugs for his English teacher. A tumescent young Blue Jay’s fan and his tumor-addled sister are swept up in the tempest of the Blue Jay’s 1989 run for the World Series. An estranged stepmother and stepson embark on a pilgrimage to the Michael Jackson trial.Hood’s cleverly wrought lyrical prose is the perfect foil for a prevailing lack of forgiveness, which becomes the overriding monstrosity of each story. Every character wants only to be pardoned, but will not, themselves, grant it.
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Parkour and the Art du déplacement
$16.95Parkour, the art of displacement, or freerunning—whatever the name, this new discipline born in the Paris suburbs is rapidly being adopted by people throughout the world. Not satisfied to suffer through urban life, these athletic artists or artistic athletes want to thrive in it, all the while earning dignity by daringly reappropriating three fundamental motor skills: running, jumping, and climbing. Vincent Thibault explores the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the art of movement and offers ideas on health, sports, urban living, and the relationship between the body and the environment. Reflecting on the culture of effort, he also avoids the misguided notion that depicts parkour as just another of those elitist extreme sports, instead providing a thoughtful, lyrical adventure into martial arts and chivalry in an urban setting.
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Parlance
$16.95The poems in Parlance thrash against the matrix of their own referential nature using a series of linguistic echoes that reference writers like the ‘maternal’ Virginia Woolf or the ‘paternal’ Leonard Cohen. The rebellious child of Zelazo’s text splinters its Modernist and Canadian parentage to occupy an uncharted linguistic space somewhere between excess and void.
These poems are painterly, splintered, majestic. An accomplished first book of poetry, Parlance is an act of becoming, and of coming home.
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Participation
$23.00When environmental disaster strikes, binaries and certainties dissolve as members of two virtual reading groups reshape their lives, romances, and reality itself.
In the latest novel from Anna Moschovakis, two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love, convene digitally amidst political upheaval and undefined environmental catastrophe. Participation offers a prescient look at remote communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—the syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor in mediation disappears, a colleague known as “the capitalist” becomes a point of fixation, and “The News Reports” filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.
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Pas de Deux
$15.95Set against the backdrop of a ballet, Pas de Deux, is the story of one dancer’s descent into madness and the catastrophic consequences it has on her relationship with the photographer assigned to the troupe.While dancing two roles in a new version of Camelot, the dancer suffers a break with reality and becmes convinced her lover is having an affair with the ballerina performing the Lady Guinevere role. Driven to jealousy, she immerses herself in a fantasy of escape.Filled with striking images and rich language, Pas de Deux leads the reader through a sad, lovely story; akin to watching a tragic ballet unfold on paper.
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Pascal’s Fire
$19.95An unnamed speaker navigates a world where God comes in the shape of a cardinal, speaks in the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe, and paints the desert with bones.
Driven by sound, heartbreak, and the baffling limits and possibilities of language, a nameless speaker sets out into a dream-like wilderness where lyric and narrative meet, time dissolves, and figures as various as Moses, the apostle Paul, Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal, and Zora Neale Hurston gather in a colloquy. Born from a region of preachers and stuttering prophets, from the gift of tongues and psalms of lament and praise, Pascal’s Fire negotiates the wonder of the unknown and the tension of belief and confronts the vulnerability of speech where it brushes up against death and grief, wind and desert heat, unquenchable thirst and the steady sound of an IV drip.
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Pasquale Verdicchio
$20.00The ten essays included in this volume address the themes of immigration, migration, and history in Pasquale Verdicchio’s poetry and scholarship. Giuliana Gardellini, Joseph Pivato, Anna Zampieri Pan, Diego Bastianutti, Carmelo Militano, Leonardo Buonomo, Kenneth Scambray, Laura E. Ruberto, and Antonio D’Alfonso discuss Verdicchio’s unconventional forms and contents that reveal the difficulties of being considered a marginalized ethnic voice in North American culture. Not conforming to conventional poetic models, Verdicchio writes poetry that presents itself as a puzzle in which for decades he demonstrates the role that politics, history, and culture play in self-analytical writing. The immigrant (or defined as such by conventional terminology) offers as his central theme a “moving” cultural landscape that he must personally inhabit from the moment he leaves his native home. The ever-changing persona in Verdicchio’s texts defies linguistic and literary constraints. Verdicchio challenges the conventional role that nostalgia plays in ethnic poetry and contributes in a daring manner to how view immigrant and post-immigrant studies. Pasquale Verdicchio is one of the few poets today to reposition the post-immigrant identity in our growing pluricultural societies.
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Passages Of Winter
$7.00“Intensely shaped, nearly metaphysical lyrics…he is his own, highly intellectual and speculative maker of images, a poet who sees in all aspects of the surrounding world Blakean sermons on the continuing conflict between light and darkness, lif and death…Adamson’s powerful black and white illustrations provide a satisfying visual counterpart to these often stark expressions of the poet’s encounter with the world.” NeWest Review
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Passenger Flight
$14.95In Passenger Flight, Brian Campbell takes us on a harrowing but exhilarating ride through the heavy turbulence of the twenty-first century. In this collection of free-wheeling, elegantly crafted prose poems, the reader is exposed to scenes of tenderness, random violence and phantasmagorical dreams evocative of the chaos of this post-911 world.