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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Prerequisites for Sleep

    Prerequisites for Sleep

    $19.95

    Prerequisites for Sleep is a fictional world rich with dilemmas. From the young unwed mother paying the price for both her own mistakes as well as her family’s, to the woman whose unexpected late-in-life pregnancy wreaks havoc on her relationship with her teenaged daughter, to the man who finds a mysterious woman taking over his kitchen and his life, to the elderly woman trying to balance dignity with aggression management in her relationship with her Alzheimer-stricken husband, all the characters in the thirteen stories of this collection must make decisions and compromises that invite insomnia. Although most of these characters are firmly rooted in Stone’s Maritime landscape, their challenges are universal. They are people we recognize. They step off the page alive as family, friends, and neighbours.

  • Pretend to Feel

    Pretend to Feel

    $19.95

    A naïve and unbalanced teenage girl with claims of extraterrestrial origins only wants two things in the whole world–family and fame–but she can’t help getting entangled in the lives of the eccentric and troubled humans she meets along the way: Alisen Eden, a pill-popping, unemployed waitress who finds the girl strangely familiar; Neil Manson, the neurotic psychology grad student Alisen is trying to seduce; a horror film director with delusions of grandeur; the charismatic and libidinous leader of a mysterious UFO-worshipping cult; and the stoic stranger known only as 19. As it turns out that life on Earth isn’t what she thought it would be, does she even care enough to figure out where she really came from and what she’s supposed to do now?

    Funny, experimental, and philosophically vicious, Pretend to Feel is a book you should definitely pay money for. . . . er, for which you should definitely pay money. Whatever. Please, just buy it. It took me years to write and my children are hungry. Fine, I don’t have any children, but coffee and videogames are expensive too.

  • Pretty Goblins

    Pretty Goblins

    $17.95

    From holding hands in the womb to holding each other’s hair back when they puked, twins Laura and Lizzie grew up only having each other. They couldn’t count on their practically feral mom, absent dad, or even the boys they liked. They’re polar opposites—Laura’s reserved while Lizzie’s reckless—but their shared mischievous giggles and dreams for the future kept them going. One day, Laura finds a familiar book of poems in Lizzie’s apartment and is dragged through their turbulent past. Together, the sisters relive their complicated history in an effort to make sense of the present. Framed by the beauty of a well-loved poem, this story of ferocious sisterhood, addiction, and the aftermath of trauma will leave howls echoing in your ears.

  • Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good

    Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good

    $22.95

    Readers can’t curb their enthusiasm for Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good.

    As a comedian, then producer of Seinfeld, and subsequently the creator and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David cultivated a fanatical following. In his early stand-up days, if he walked on stage and didn’t like the crowd, he would walk off. Together with Jerry Seinfeld, he pitched NBC on a sitcom where nothing happens. A whole show could be about waiting in line at a Chinese restaurant. And somehow Seinfeld became the most successful comedy show of all time.

    After nine years of writing and producing Seinfeld, and after making a huge amount of money, Larry David began to create a new show for HBO. Without much separation between himself and the character he played, Curb Your Enthusiasm followed the daily routines of Larry David. Being politically correct was far from Larry’s mind, and the audience cringed as he berated, tormented, and blustered his way into the hearts of TV watchers.

    Follow the early exploits of Larry’s stand-up career, his days writing for Seinfeld, and learn how Curb was conceived and developed. Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good — titled after Larry’s key catchphrase — also explores Larry’s on- and off-screen relationships with famous pals like Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, and the cast of Seinfeld, and contains an in-depth episode guide to the first seven seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  • Previously Feared Darkness

    Previously Feared Darkness

    $18.95

    Daring new verse from one of Canada’s most-established poets

    Previously Feared Darkness picks up and pulls at the vibrant threads of Robert Priest’s last collection, Reading the Bible Backwards. One strand leads, with unabashed candour and elegance, through the author’s love life; another, through fields of praise; a third experiments with automated metaphors and delivers a challenging new selection of mashups that Priest calls meme splices. A fourth thread rekindles the author’s love of the prose poem to produce a suite of strange tales, bizarre playlets, and phonetic modifications. And, for those whose cry is “brevity forever,” the micro-poems Priest collects are numerous and brilliant. Previously Feared Darkness consorts with forms and subject matter to present the work of a master getting deep and nasty and hilarious with the best of them.

  • Primrose Street

    Primrose Street

    $19.99

    Welcome to Primrose Street, where neighbours share close interactions but know very little of each other. Only the maple trees that have lined the road for decades know their decisions, indiscretions, secrets, joys, and pains.

    From fifty-year residents Charlie and Cora and their grandson Ronald, to newcomer Sofia and her son Nicolas, to best friends Tabitha and Dayna, the residents of Primrose Street go about their daily lives–shopping, attending school, meeting at cafés, smiling as they pass on the sidewalk–all the while remaining invisible to one another.

    Only when an invitation arrives in their mailboxes must the residents of Primrose Street decide whether to allow authenticity into their lives and neighbourhood or remain limited in their relationships and thereby to themselves.

    Drawing comparisons to Maeve Binchy and Elizabeth Strout for its clear-eyed characterizations of everyday people, Marina L. Reed’s writing sheds light on questions that haunt us and exposes the poison of secrets. Primrose Street is everyone’s street, where the ebb and flow of daily experiences can bring people together and miracles are still possible.

  • Prince Faggot

    Prince Faggot

    $18.95

    In this metatheatrical tragicomedy, an ensemble of queer, trans, and nonbinary performers reckon with how the forces of power, privilege, and colonization play upon their lives as the playwright offers a central provocation: what if queer people dared to imagine a future monarch having a life that resembled their own?

  • Princess of Aminabad

    Princess of Aminabad

    $17.95

    Set in early 20th century India, a story of the struggles of a woman of extraordinary strength and character living in a conservative society during a period of cultural and political change.

  • Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

    Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

    $19.95

    A collection of short stories, this book features a narrative that, while unified by a dark theme, is diverse and surprisingly optimistic. The voices that recount the stories differ significantly, yet all resonate with the clarity of unmistakable truth. Avoiding the kind of graphic violence inherent in dealing with a topic like bullying, this compilation favors qualities such as courage and fortitude, sometimes displayed in the face of intimidating odds. Detailed and compassionate, it even manages to find humor as it tackles this otherwise sinister topic.

  • Prismatic Publics

    Prismatic Publics

    $29.95

    Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf.

    These fifteen women are some of the best writers currently engaged in avant-garde literary production, defining the contours of new movements and schools of writing. By showcasing their work alongside extensive interviews, Prismatic Publics stages intimate encounters with these key figures as they work in and against feminist, Language, conceptual, investigative and other poetic traditions – often across, between and at the interstices of genres.

    The writers in this anthology do not represent a single movement or tradition, although they all recognize language as inherently problematic and a perpetual subject of inquiry. Theirs is writing that demands a heightened level of attentiveness and attunement to what language can do on the page and in the social worlds of its making.

    Gathered in a single volume, these selections – some dating back to the early 1970s and others appearing in print for the first time – provide an opportunity to trace the diverse networks, influences, dialogues, dialectics and interventions that continue to make Canada’s innovative women writers a powerful force in avant-garde writing around the world.

    ‘This is a brilliantly orchestrated, important anthology … How stunning to see exemplified in every moment of writing an unsettling of outworn premises and a manifestation of new thought.’ – Carla Harryman

    ‘The editors have assembled a polyphonic chorus of texts and interviews by some of Canada’s most lauded writers that highlights the continuing prominence of women as theorists and cultural activists in avant-garde poetic movements. The borders of gender and genre shift as these poets explore the potentials of the porous subject in their work upon systems – linguistic, textual and social. Innovative poetics, stimulating dialogues, inviting active readers.’ – Barbara Godard

  • Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

    Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

    $17.95

    Combining text from government questionnaires and reports, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to then Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples’ attempts to protect their traditional and unceded territories from ecological destruction by classifying their actions as acts of terrorism, at the same time that it criminalizes refugees, who as victims of colonization and globalization, attempt to flee genocide and poverty yet are targeted as suspected terrorists. Simultaneously, the incarceration of Indigenous people, refugees, and people of colour is rapidly increasing and corporations eagerly court the government for private-public partnerships to fund the building of new prisons and detention centres.

    Eng’s father was an addict who supported his habit by breaking the law. As a result, she spent her formative years acquiring intimate knowledge of the Canadian prison system through visitation rights. The impetus for Prison Industrial Complex Explodes was the discovery of a cache of her father’s prison correspondence: letters from the federal government stating their intention to deport him because of his criminal record; letters from prison justice advocate Michael Jackson advising her father on deportation; letters from the RCMP regarding the theft of her father’s property, a gold necklace, while in transport to prison; letters from family members and friends; letters from Eng and her brother. The cold formality of the government letters in accidental juxtaposition with the emotion of the personal letters struck a creative spark that led to the writing of poems in this collection.

  • Prisoner and the Chaplain, The

    Prisoner and the Chaplain, The

    $20.00

    What if prison was the only world that existed for you now and everything else was a story? What if you weren’t sure if you were guilty but wanted forgiveness in any form? The Prisoner and the Chaplain is about two men; one man awaiting execution, the other man listening to his story. As the hours drain away, the chaplain must decide if the prisoner’s story is an off-the-cuff confession or a last bid for salvation. As the chaplain listens he realizes a life has many stories, and he has his own story to tell?a last-ditch plea for forgiveness told to someone who will never be able to repeat it. Each man is guilty in his own way, and their stories have led them to the same room, a room that only one of them will leave alive. If you had only twelve hours left to live, what would you have to say?

  • Privacy is a Foreign Word in Supino

    Privacy is a Foreign Word in Supino

    $24.95

    The village of Supino looks as sleepy as the opening shot of an old black and white Fellini film. At the newspaper office, Bianca stumbles into a job meant for someone else and a new advice column, Ask Minerva, is born. Soon everyone is engaged in trying to discover the mystery columnist’s identity as well as the identity of her correspondents.

    Seven years have passed since Rosa’s husband’s disappearance and now he’s been declared legally dead. And her secret lover (that all the villagers know about) wants to marry her. Bravo! Except Rosa is uncertain and when she’s uncertain she tends to run away. That’s why she’s taken her son Carlito to Venice for a week. As Rosa’s relationship unravels, Carlito does some unraveling of his own and inches closer to uncovering the mystery of his father’s identity. Back in the village, Rosa’s best friend Assunta is lonely. Perhaps that?s why Assunta falls so quickly and naively for Enzo, the smooth-talking bottle cap salesman.

    Every villager, from the hairdresser to the barman and each one in between, has an opinion on Bianca’s column, Ask Minerva! The young hairdresser’s assistant has trouble with her marriage to a man with a wandering eye, not to mention other body parts, and at the Kennedy Bar, the men gather to laugh over the columnist, Ask Minerva’s advice until they begin to realize that it’s their wives who are requesting the advice.

  • Private Grief, Public Mourning

    Private Grief, Public Mourning

    $20.00

    ‘Private Grief, Public Mourning’ is an historical investigation of mourning sites and practices within the context of the province of British Columbia. The authors are concerned, primarily, with the rise of the roadside death memorial in the late twentieth century. They argue that RDMs are not a marginal, quirky phenomenon but part of a longer and complex story about the meaning of both death and grieving, one more thread in a long tapestry of public exhibitions of grief that serve to announce to the watching world who we are.

    ” ‘Private Grief, Public Mourning’ is an important contribution to the study of vernacular and popular culture in Britich Columbia. It provides an insightful, sensitive, yet rigorous treatment of a delicate topic. Historians, geographers, and anthropologists of British Columbia will want to have this book on their shelves, and its images, accessible prose, and familiar topic also make it of interest to a broader, non-academic audience.” – The British Columbia Quarterly

    “With vivid images of a variety of different shrines and monuments built across BC, this book helps to delve into the human emotion of grief and why taking it in to a public space can provide such comfort to one mourning individual and such discomfort to others.” – Broken Pencil

  • Priya’s World

    Priya’s World

    $22.95

    At twenty-five, Priya a kindergarten teacher must accept the loss of her parents in a plane crash. Her grief plunges her into an eating disorder. While her friends recognize that she is crying out for help, Priya denies it all as she strives to make peace with Renita, her father’s sister–a woman who appears chronically depressed. Unbeknownst to Priya, Renita harbors a disturbing family secret. The story opens with Priya reuniting a lost toddler with his mother during a trip to the mall. A chance meeting with Gabe Johanson, a childhood friend of Priya’s late mother, opens the door to new friendships and even more secrets. While Priya battles her inner demons, she finds herself choosing between two men: Trent Perelli, the handsome young performing arts instructor she meets through a friend and Gabe, compassionate and empowering–but with a past that causes the very mention of his name to rankle the nerves of Priya’s maternal grandparents. The novel deals with the ravages of anorexia and the tyranny of food disorders, as well as the poisonous role that family secrets can play on more than one generation. Throughout her heart-wrenching journey of self-discovery, Priya will lose her health and her family as she knows it, but will ultimately gain self-esteem and the love she has always craved. Through her pain, she will reach out to others in unexpected ways and take bold steps to re-invent her life.

  • Pro Football Halftime Activity Book

    Pro Football Halftime Activity Book

    $9.95

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    It’s time to sharpen your crayons and get ready to have fun with some of pro football’s most famous (and infamous) players, teams, coaches, and outrageous personalities.

    Monday-morning quarterbacks of all ages will be kept busy at halftime as they tackle these irreverent and fan-friendly activities, including trivia, drawing, colouring, secret codes, connect the dots, word searches, football libs, and word scrambles.

    Help Plaxico pick out his next weapon of choice. Find your way through Jim Marshall’s “Wrong-Way” maze. Design your own LA team name and logo. Help rebuild Joe Theismann’s leg, match-up the moustache to its owner, and style Troy Polamalu’s hair. And there’s much more, featuring the likes of Al Davis, Dennis Green, Coach Ditka, the Cowgirls, and even Janet Jackson’s halftime revelation.

    Chips and dip not included.