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Showing 5473–5488 of 9481 results
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Permanent Tourists
$19.95The stories in Permanent Tourists feature displaced characters loosely connected through a support group, all of them dealing with loss precipitated by an elusive father, husband or lover, by a wife’s death, a lost child, sibling rivalries. Tourists in their own lives, these characters are often paralysed by emotional inertia and are fleeing to evade their responsibilities, their failed relationships, their own shortcomings. Within the unfamiliar, their problems resurface and they’re forced to confront and re-examine them. Permanent Tourists presents physical, emotional and psychological tourists, all striving to delve more deeply into themselves, their friendships, their families, their love relationships, and ultimately, to spur themselves to action.
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Permission to Land
$24.95When Judy LeBlanc’s mother died in 2015, she embarked on a personal journey of discovery and reconciliation with her known but unacknowledged Coast Salish ancestry on her mother’s side. She was to discover that both maternal great-grandparents had Scottish fathers and Coast Salish mothers. Her great-grandmother was from the W̱SÁNEĆ people in what is now known as Saanich on Vancouver Island, and her great-grandfather was the son of a woman from either the Suquamish in Washington state or the Tsleil-Waututh in Burrard Inlet, North Vancouver. Finally, LeBlanc discovers that her great aunt attended Chemawa, an American Indian boarding school where, at the age of fourteen, she contracted tuberculosis and was sent home to die.
In this intimate and moving memoir-in-essays, LeBlanc reflects on the impact of erasure in her family, particularly on the women through four generations. Marked by grief for the loss of her mother and the discovery of buried family secrets, LeBlanc sets out on a journey, both literary and cultural, in the form of a voyage by canoe to the home of her ancestors. Permission to Land is a powerful and vulnerable exploration of the complexities of family, heritage and identity, courageously questioning whether it is possible to seek renewal after irrevocable loss.
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Permission to Settle
$20.00Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration – the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy – all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.
The poems investigate the implicit biases in the forms and the gaps between the messy reality of life lived and the structured and colonial system of boxes and check marks that still seek to categorize “the other” and to harness it in the face of reconciliation. The reader is drawn in through the guise of the familiar, while the playfulness and self-revealing tone of the work reveals a poignancy of meaning and language.
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Permissions: TISH Poetics 1963 Thereafter –
$10.95The year 2013 being the fiftieth anniversary of the Vancouver Poetry Conference at UBC, Wah uses the occasion to outline how a group of young poets at UBC (and this included George Bowering, Jamie Read, and himself among others) were discovering, through their publication of poetry in the newsletter TISH, that it was possible to write in new forms. The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference brought home to them that they had “permission” to shatter the poem’s strict line patterns. Wah notes that there was never a TISH manifesto but that the conference confirmed the group’s sense that the 1960s would bring into being a new kind of poetry, that he now had permission to “disturb the words,” as in jazz, to play around with the music, to move into a poetry beyond the restrictions and weight of tradition and authority. It was also, according to Wah, to be a turn away from the stubborn persistence of the lyric “I,” what Charles Olson in “Projective Verse” called “the private-soul-at-any-public-wall.” In reflecting on the arc of his own publishing career, Wah notes that a new importance was given to place, but place was not seen as static, for poetry now could be used as a “tool” in a larger investigation of “process” in the creation of the individual within time and place. Wah also realized that he continued to want a sense of collectivity, and he went on to create and publish a number of small literary magazines. In his more recent writing there has been a new fusion of identity with the concept of process along with race, and the resulting concept of hybridity.
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perpetual
$18.95The power of water is the power of blood, flood and drought. Water keeps it real, keeps us real. Forgetting this, we turn the earth into a toxic dump. Remembering this, we unfurl the future as perpetual possibility.Water is also the strength of subtlety, quietly making its way through your body. perpetual is both a gift and a warning from water. Through drawings and graphic essays by artist Cindy Mochizuki and writer Rita Wong, the book visits some key sites where people have sabotaged themselves by desecrating water: the Pacific Ocean, the tar sands leaking into the Athabasca River, the historical salmon streams buried in sewers under Vancouver’s streets, pressing to be daylighted… perpetual draws strength from the rivers that still flow wild, like the Fraser River, and from friendships made along the way in journeys with and for water. The book is a response to Dorothy Christian’s call to protect sacred waters. Humble and holy, water shows us a way to make peace and ethics, if we have the heart and spirit to learn.
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Persian Postcards
$24.95In an age when visual images have become infinitely manipulable, and have thus forfeited their credibility, words alone can convey the multifaceted, fleeting, elastic yet intractable truth of memory and events. Persian Postcards, the fruit of ten years of travel to the Islamic Republic as both journalist and impassioned observer, is an attempt to suggest the depth and the complexity, the tragedy and raw beauty of this truth.
Fred Reed went to Iran driven by discontent with the official Western view that country as a den of fundamentalist fanatics and terrorists. Not surprisingly, he found that the Iranians had reasons – excellent reasons – for acting as they did. The Iran-Iraq war, cynically prolonged by the Western powers who armed Saddam Hussein against Khomeini’s poorly armed but highly motivated revolutionary guards and volunteers, furnished the most conclusive example. Iranian history, in its meeting with the peculiar traditions of Shi’ite Islam, provided a wealth of others.
In Persian Postcards, Iranians of many persuasions speak on the issues of their society, on regional politics, on the role of religion in life, on public and private morality. We meet artists and filmmakers, philosophers and mollahs, establishment men and dissidents, women speaking on women’s issues and on life, members of parliament and “terrorists.”
Chronologically discontinuous, Persian Postcards draws a deeper thematic unity from places and events: the funeral of Imam Khomeini at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, the Assassin castle of Alamut, the great mosques of Isfahan, the shady sidewalks of Vali-ye Asr Avenue in downtown Tehran, rural reconstruction projects in the mountains of Rudbar.
Persian Postcards is more than a journalistic report, an academic treatise, or a travel book, although it enfolds elements of all three. It explores an unknown quarter, a territory inhabited by people of culture, dignity and poetic genius, moved by forces which defy the impoverished classification theology of Reason and Technique. Persian Postcards is not only about Iran; it is about us.
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Personal Account
$34.95After nearly four decades at Bank of Montreal, former President and CEO Tony Comper shares leadership lessons from his experience at the helm of one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Anthony “Tony” Comper likes to say that he can sum up his remarkable career in Canadian banking in 25 stories. In a business often filled with big personalities and memorable characters, Tony’s motto is Festina Lente — make haste slowly.
In Personal Account: 25 Tales about Leadership, Learning, and Legacy from a Lifetime at Bank of Montreal, Comper chronicles how he guided the bank’s software evolution on real-time banking and the introduction of ABMs. He also saw BMO evolve from traditional lender to facilitator in the market, partnering with businesses to create a more vibrant source of capital. That innovation included Tony’s role in integrating women and new Canadians into BMO while fighting anti-Semitism in the community. He was also critical in creating new banking models for the Indigenous community.
A first-person analysis of the major transitions in his almost four decades at the bank. A memoir of turbulent, challenging times. An examination of surviving the most severe financial shocks without jeopardizing the nation’s financial stability.
Personal Account is equal parts warm memoir, teaching lesson, and a reminder of the value of legacy.
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Pervatory
$21.95LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER’S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023
A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness.
When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love.
Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire …
RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us.
“Pervatory is RM Vaughan’s perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating.” – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays
“RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn’t know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront.” – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
“Brilliant, funny, propulsive.” – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People
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Pet, Pet, Slap
$23.95Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue.
Boxer ‘Pillow Fist’ Pete Wilson should be preparing for his big comeback fight. But, having recently undergone an ethical awakening, the new vegan is busy trying to find humane new homes for his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark). His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, who faked his own death by waterfall, is now Pillow’s in-house doping expert.
Pillow just can’t get motivated to train, and he’s further distracted from his push-ups when both his car and Rigoberto mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of neozoological surrealism, and part existential mystery novel.
“Reckless, desperate, and achingly human, Battershill remains funnier than anyone else on your shelf.” – Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold
“The adventures of Battershill’s returning protagonist Pillow are witty and occasionally absurd, but the story never trips on ironies. Battershill twines the humanity of pulp noir with the unsettling play of surrealism to build a world in which pet sloths, Sherlock Holmes, and skilled drug pushers all seem to have found their ideal home.” – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time
“Pillow Wilson is one of my favourite characters in CanLit, and he is in fine form in Pet, Pet, Slap, a deeply funny, inventive, bizarre, heartbreaker of a book. Andrew Battershill not only writes with that magical alchemy of humour and pathos that most writers only wish they could pull off, but he somehow also balances surrealism and profound humanity in a way I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out. I haven’t had this much fun reading in a long, long time.” – Amy Jones, author of Pebble & Dove
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peter among th towring boxes / text bites
$17.95bissett’s latest book marks some significant boundaries, draws some sharp, clear lines for this veteran of the evolving phonetic alphabet, and of sound, concrete and performance poetry. While the work remains overwhelmingly playful, subtly layered, and full of the astonishment and sheer delight at seeing and hearing things one has never quite thought of the way the poet/performer imagines them before, there is a new edginess to this work that will shake up both old fans and new readers of what can only be called the unique bill bissett experience in language.
These new sharper edges come, quite generously, from the poet’s own re-assesment of where the self ends, and the other begins, and a growing recognition that those boundaries often need to be imposed, and defended, if destructive relationships of co-dependency are to be avoided.
bissett’s usual biting, acute, often deliciously comic interrogation of the socio-political events towering around us like so many boxes we need constantly to think, feel and imagine our way out of, is counterposed in this collection by a recurring dream of a future wherein 20 billion people are locked in a global war on the poisoned surface of the planet while a small minority of peace-loving libertarians have garrisoned themselves into a scanner-protected, completely virtualized underground. While the Bill Gates compound reference of this recurring nightmare is inescapable, the text remains profoundly ambivalent about where one might be better off. There’s just a touch of scariness here in bissett’s latest exuberant rage through the urban wilderness of our time.
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Peter Gzowski
$15.95Peter Gzowski — Canada’s best-known and most-adored radio personality. Marco Adria traces Gzowski’s childhood in Galt, his unusual family history, and his early days at Maclean’s, ultimately focusing on Gzowski’s radio career. How does Morningside choose its guests? What’s the secret behind Gzowski’s interview technique? What are his deep-held beliefs about Canada? This first biography will be welcomed by his many fans and admirers.
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Peter MacCallum
$45.00In this his newest book, Peter MacCallum has assembled collections of his documentary photographs of the last decade that examine the particularities of the vernacular spaces of human labour, commerce, and habitation.
Conceived as series, these documentary photographs juxtapose the miscellany of the commercial architecture of Toronto’s Yonge Street with the uniform elegance of rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris; an aging zinc foundry in Montreal with a venerable independent garage in Toronto; the functional Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto with the tiny, lushly decorated Théâtre du Tambour Royal in Paris.
Shifting from the industrial to the moumental to the domestic, MacCallum’s roving eye lands upon the gritty morphology of the coal-fired Lakeview Generating Station, the restoration of Walter Alward’s great limestone monument at Vimy Ridge, and the classical Greek spirit expressed in the front porches of ordinary Toronto houses dating from the early decades of the 20th century.
The result is an engrossing collection of photographs that reveal a disarming beauty in sites that both embody and encompass a rich history of industry, commerce, and human habitation.
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Peter Powning
$45.00A CBC New Brunswick Book List Selection
“I start with an original object, break it, and transform parts of the piece into other materials. These pieces gather meaning and explanation as I work with them.”
Peter Powning is simultaneously referred to as a sculptor and a ceramist, but his art does not fit easy categorization, incorporating and combining elements from one medium into another. His work challenges the viewer to reconsider the object, its form, and its function. This inventiveness has resulted in numerous exhibitions, awards, and commissions for public art sculptures throughout Canada.
Featuring 175 full-colour images of Powning’s work along with essays by curators and critics, Peter Powning celebrates the career of one of Canada’s finest visual artists and accompanies a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
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Petitot: A Novel
$31.95Fresh out of college and reeling from the failure of a marriage that had barely even begun, Marcus takes a teaching job in a tiny northern-Canadian native community. While struggling to grasp his own predicament, Marcus finds himself entangled in much larger community tragediesthe suicide of an aging priest and the death of two young students from exposure. But it is his discovery of the writings of Émile Petitota controversial nineteenth-century missionary Oblate priest, linguist and ‘explorer’which finally threatens to unhinge Marcus, launching him on an obsessive quest for answers. In this novel, Susan Haley explores the troubled life and dubious claims of Father Petitot, whose fifteen years beneath the Arctic Circle were punctuated by scandal, delusional behaviour and episodes of outright madness and paranoiaproblems which caused him to be shuffled from mission to mission, temporary excommunication and even forcibly hospitalized by the bishop. Haley’s binocular approach ruptures the normal historical perspective as she attempts to depict Petitot in all his complexity, both through the eyes of his Inuit and Cree contemporaries and through those of Marcus, who sifts through the written records of one man’s life in search for the truth about us all.
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Phantom Limb
$15.95In Phantom Limb, Kishkan invites her readers to explore culture and nature by looking at landscape and place through a series of historical lenses, ranging from natural history to family history to the broader notions of regional and human history. In her popular essay “month of wild berries picking” she reveals the extent to which native stories articulate the complexity and importance of rules that govern relationships between species, a profoundly symbiotic world where one respected not just the territory of another species but its dung, its bones, its very spirit as well. In travel essays such as “The One Currach Returning Alone” and “Well” she explores her affinity with Ireland, the weight of its history and geography, the roads that lead to collective memory and the magic of its wishing wells. In other travel essays Kishkan takes us to conservative Utah where the discovery of her first Drunkard’s Path quilt serves as both a talisman and a gentle reminder of tolerance and diversity that unfamiliar cultures elicit from us, while they also teach us how bound we are to the soil and air of our own home.
Whether waking her daughter for early morning Leonid meteor showers to fashion a world that mirrors the topography of their lives, or measuring the emotional connections of her grandmother’s glass paperweight in order to learn the secret life of memories belonging to mothers and daughters, Kishkan’s writing allows us intimate portraits of family. Sometime intense as in the title essay “Phantom Limb” where the prerogative to make a decision to end the life of a beloved family dog becomes both a heavy-hearted deed as well as a difficult privilege; other times her work is light and folksy as in the family rituals revealed in “Laundry”. Resonating throughout this collection, especially when describing the natural world, is a rich lyricism and a distinctive visceral imagery.
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Phases
$17.99Suppose you finally say, I’m my own person.
Suppose you say, No one else is in charge of me.
Suppose you tell yourself, I’m nobody’s bad girl.
Suppose you’re that kind of woman. Just suppose.
In this new revised, expanded edition of her acclaimed debut poetry collection, Phases, Belinda Betker deftly captures what it is like for those who don’t fit within rigid notions of what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl.” She takes readers on a luminous journey of a young girl’s coming-of-age, her burgeoning sexuality, an unhappy marriage, the triumphant release of coming out, and the liberating power of drag.
In these poems, readers will find a celestial and transcendent re-discovering of the self; an unravelling of society’s expectations of gender, love, and desire, and how these falsehoods threaten to eclipse our truth. Phases is mercurial and unpredictable, a celebration of the non-conformist in each of us.