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Showing 529–544 of 9481 results
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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
$22.95Winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction
In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She’s come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefèvre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He’s a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she’s the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist. Valerie’s thinking about Gerard on assignment in her native New York City, where their son Andre works. In New York City, an airplane has plunged into a skyscraper, and in the short time before anyone understands the significance of this event, Valerie’s mind begins to spiral in and out of the present moment, circling around her intense memories of her father’s death, her youthful relationship with troubled Matthew, and her pregnancy with his child, the crisis that led to her marriage to Gerard, and her fears for the safety of her son Andre and his partner James. Unable to reach her loved ones, Valerie finds memory intruding on a surreal and dreamlike present until at last she connects with Gerard and the final horror of that day.
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All That Monk Business
$19.95Meet Buddy Monk, a barber, recently dropped by his social activist wife who has, for the last time, been deceived by her hypercompetitive husband’s attempts to win anything, anyhow, all rules be damned. She’s now trying her hand at waitressing, in a restaurant run by Buddy’s mother, which ought to go well. As for Buddy’s father, he’s been dead for 25 years, but when a retired fisherman finds his will the past comes roaring back into Buddy’s life, exposing a previously unknown family connection and turning on its head our barber’s relationship with most everyone in his ambit. All That Monk Business is a gritty, comic, emotional charge through Vancouver’s Commercial Drive and Downtown Eastside, a story of people coming to grips with the past while nourishing themselves through interconnections on streets ablaze with contrasts and eccentricities.
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All That’s Left
$24.95Darby Swank’s entire life changed when her Aunt Bea was brutally murdered one summer in their rural Saskatchewan community.
Following her gripping debut Friendly Fire, Lisa Guenther skillfully picks up Darby’s story a few weeks after the dramatic finale. Building her life anew, Darby makes new and lasting friendships and connections with recently found family members, including her charismatic cousin Brynny, a young woman leading an exciting and inclusive church in rural Alberta. Darby begins to make a name for herself on the Canadian music scene. Landing a sought after gig with an established Toronto band, Darby is thrust into the life of a working musician on the road. Still haunted by the violence hidden in her past, Darby must find a way to live at least partially in the public eye, as her music career takes off, and her Aunt Bea’s art and story become more and more well known.
Guenther’s second novel is a pressing account of a life wrecked by trauma, and rebuilt brick by brick with joy, love, and friendship. Guenther asks important questions of privacy, safety, and the vulnerability of artists in the public eye, while meditating on the importance of art and community.
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All the Birds of Nova Scotia
$47.95All the Birds of Nova Scotia aims to help observers evaluate bird sightings in Nova Scotia by focusing on the finer details of occurrence and identification. Compiling and evaluating a broad range of historical and contemporary data gathered by both ornithologists and amateur observers, Ian McLaren provides brief accounts of the status and key identification issues for all bird species, distinctive subspecies, and variations believed to have occurred in Nova Scotia up to 2010. In these accounts, readers can find answers to questions such as: Where does the bird normally occur? Is it common or rare, or becoming more, or less, common? Is it unusually late or early for the season? This book is required reading for any serious observer of Nova Scotia birds.
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All the Broken Things
$18.00Geoff Inverarity writes poems for people who don’t like poetry (and
those who do).In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that
have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do
dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents,
hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself. But it’s not all shattered
dreams and sad-luck stories here, there is hope and optimism too – in
the future, in the Now, and in the heat and power of the coming
generations. And there are poems of memory, poems for grandfathers and
aging aunts, children and lost loves. Inverarity also probes the the
multitude of possibilities “in this fallen world of compromises,” gently
reminding us that “we’re stockpiling for the short term / the long term
we don’t know. / No matter how much you prepare / there’s always
something new looming / like the Unexploded Grief Bomb.” It is a world
where we struggle to give back the past, to finally get to the point
“where the past does not exist” and “where all history is now.”The penultimate entry is “Mars Variations,” a wonderfully extended suite
of complementary poems, a time-traveling fractal narrative: a sci-fi
horror movie for the ears, referencing works as disparate as Julius
Caesar’s Gallic Wars and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Wordsworth’s
“Prelude,” and horror films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man along with
nods towards the various iterations of Godzilla; and of course the
classic 1962 “Mars Attacks” Topp’s Bubble Gum cards – which form a
framing device. The sequence explores the relationship between time,
fiction, and facts; between public history and private experience.The book concludes with a short Epilogue, assuring us that “one day, all
the broken things will be mended.” -
All the Daylight Hours
$18.00All the Daylight Hours, Amanda Jernigan’s second poetry collection, took shape over the course of twelve years, through many changes of setting and amid a changing cast of characters encountered both face to face and in the pages of books long lived-with and loved. The poems themselves ring changes on nature and artifice, love and loss, the power of language and the limitations of language, returning to these themes in a wide variety of registers. No less moving for being meticulously crafted, these elegies, epithalamiums, dramatic monologues, and meditations trace a human journey in which the mythological, the philosophical, the literary, and the personal interweave and converse.
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All the Gold Hurts My Mouth
$19.95Winner, 2017 ReLit Award
Katherine Leyton’s fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions.
Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface.
And yet, for all its unflinching and raw lyricism, the poetry of All the Gold Hurts My Mouth is warm and searching, full of humour and hope. Engaging her readers with lush vocabulary and spare, tightly controlled forms, Leyton’s poems become a rich quest for identity, authenticity, and nature uncorrupted. Reaching gloriously from isolation and pain to connection with love, Leyton channels the wit of past feminists to create a manifesto for our time, an affirmation of what might be possible.
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All the Lifters
$14.95All the Lifters is a searing exploration of female sexuality told in a new hyper-charged poetic language. Spanning from childhood to adulthood, Esther Mazakian captures the intensity of obsession and desire in a distinctive voice that singes across the page as quickly as thought, following its strange and electrifying associative leaps from memory to reflection to immediate sense experience, synapse by synapse. This unforgettable debut collection encodes private cruelties, seduction, and the nightmarish reaches of psychic pain in a language so visceral and fresh that Mazakian’s readers cannot help but to take note of the arrival of a remarkable new voice.
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All the Names Between
$20.00Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of “the warp and weft of being and nonbeing.”
All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy’s meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of “long-horned beetles… rearranging the landscape” to an apperception of “part of me /…seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids,” McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the “Singing Emptiness” that informs and quickens the crow’s flight, the stones’ weight, and our own being as we move in “the defined world both elegant / and maimed.” Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field.
Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where “a language without a name / remembers us” and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn’t, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where
every elegy has an ode at its centre
every ode has an elegy around its edges.
(from “Ode with an Elegy around its Edges”)Praise for All the Names Between:
“It is Julia McCarthy’s incomparable eloquence as a poet to, as an experienced photographer might, wield darkness as an ever more powerful lens to reveal the intricate beauty of the world as she finds it. And it is with this extraordinary vision, that McCarthy ushers us into her newest collection, All the Names Between, ‘where the dead gather like trees in their white coats’ and bats hover overhead, ‘lucifugal as ashes from invisible fires.’ These are poems scintillate with vision and stunningly intimate–showing us page after page the full, and exquisite measure of ‘night’s worth.’” –Clarise Foster, Editor, Contemporary Verse 2
“Here is a book of meditations for even those immune to poetry, a poetry with no comfort zones. McCarthy takes readers to a world where the marriage between solitude and nature gives birth to memorable, haunting lines, where the mystery of poetry lies just between the words. I have no doubt readers will embrace this book as their own.” –Goran Simić, author of Immigrant Blues and From Sarajevo, with Sorrow
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All the People Are Pregnant
$19.95“So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphor’s a raft,” declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present — from “slummy memories of streets” to a “a charnelhouse (?) of possible clowns” — defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer.
Yet, as “lives at time degenerate into victory competitions,” and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that “merely being there together is a dull catastrophe,” we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in language’s web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element.
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All the Things We Leave Behind
$19.95Shortlisted for the New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction
A novel of absence and adolescence by the author of the award-winning The Town That Drowned.
It’s 1977. Seventeen-year-old Violet is left behind by her parents to manage their busy roadside antique stand for the summer. Her restless older brother, Bliss, has disappeared, leaving home without warning, and her parents are off searching for clues. Violet is haunted by her brother’s absence while trying to cope with her new responsibilities. Between visiting a local hermit, who makes twig furniture for the shop, and finding a way to land the contents of the mysterious Vaughan estate, Violet acts out with her summer boyfriend, Dean, and wonders about the mysterious boneyard. But what really keeps her up at night are thoughts of Bliss’s departure and the white deer, which only she has seen.
All the Things We Leave Behind is about remembrance and attachment, about what we collect and what we leave behind. In this highly affecting novel, Nason explores the permeability of memory and the sometimes confusing bonds of human emotion.
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All the Verdis of Venice
$16.95All great art has the ability to move people collectively, to create within it some essential, participatory expression of their humanity, their culture, their heritage. But who creates this art? What is it that gives some individuals the power or the gift to create such works? Who are these works written for? Does the composer have a particular muse, or are they inspired by an abstraction, a composite muse? Who owns this great art? Is it illegitimate for either the author, the muse, or the people to claim it as their own? Do they all have a moral right to its power, its imagination, its authenticity? Can great artists be forced to create utilitarian works specifically designed for some great or even banal purpose, to forge a nation or to pay one’s creditors, or does such an exercise always and necessarily create an empty shell? Can a lover of Verdi ever, in any sense, become Verdi? If so, what happens to the person they left behind, no matter how briefly? Who is the “real” Verdi? Can he ever be found, and loved, by anyone?
Normand Chaurette addresses all of these questions in his farce on the most ritualized, contrived and yet the most powerful of all art forms: the opera. But his answers remain as ineffable as the questions that seek them. In the end, who we are—composer, performer, or audience—is a collaboration of our illusions on a stage from which we remain forever absent.
Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.
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All the Voices Cry
$19.95All the Voices Cry
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All the World’s a Wonder
$25.00A playwright possessed by her muses, an actress desperate to succeed, and a doctor hauntedby a lost love. Three people cross time and space to meet through the playwright’s bizarrecreative process: to create, the playwright must become her characters; to tell her tragic story,the actress must speak from the grave; to heal his harrowing past, the doctor must surrender tohis patient – the playwright.
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All the Years Combine
$24.95A Grateful Dead concert, Ray Robertson argues, is life.
Like life, it can be alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the day Jerry Garcia’s heart did, what the band left behind is the next best thing to being there in the third row, courtesy of the group’s unorthodox decision to record all of their concerts. Meaning that it’s possible to follow the band’s evolution (and devolution) through their shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering monolith of their decline.
In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes ecstatically about fifty of the band’s most important and memorable concerts in order to better understand who the Grateful Dead were, what they became, and what they meant—and what they continue to mean.
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All These StarsÉ And Me With No Bucket
$12.95Holly Nelson’s skill as a storyteller is presented clearly and unmistakably in her poetry. Travelling through her manuscript, we encounter old women, young mothers, dogs and dragonflies, as her verse invites us to rediscover the preciousness of our humanity. A prairie blizzard of perfections.