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Showing 545–560 of 9481 results
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All Things Move
$34.95A deeply personal search for meaning in Michelangelo’s frescoes—and an impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age.
What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context—but in the process, she also found what she didn’t know she was looking for.
All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall’s relationship with one of our most cherished artworks. Interwoven with the history of its making and the Rome of today, it’s an exploration of the past in the present, the street in the museum, and the way a work of art can both terrify and alchemize the soul. An impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look.
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All Things Said & Done
$15.95Marita Dachsel’s debut collection is a visceral exploration of the moments of life that stand out in the pages of a family album and the intervals of memory. She playfully and poignantly documents first crushes, first times, weddings and trips across town, across water, and across continents. Dachsel perceptively sprinkles these moments with the details photographs don’t reveal, as in “Dispatches from an Impending Marriage”: ‘Don’t talk to me about photographers./ Nothing will capture this. A printed paper/ will only mock – / a gaudy misrepresentation/ a plastic jesus on the mantle – / two dimensions of fabric, teeth and skin.’
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All Things Seen and Unseen
$24.95An incisive reflection on identity and wealth, and a refreshing racial queer story of survival
All Things Seen and Unseen follows Alex Nguyen, an isolated, chronically ill university student in her early 20s. After a suicide attempt and subsequent lengthy hospitalization, she finds herself without a job, kicked out of campus housing, unable to afford school, and still struggling in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. Hope comes in the form of a rich high school friend who offers Alex a job housesitting at her family’s empty summer mansion on a gulf island.
Surrounded by dense forest and ocean, in the increasingly oppressive heat of a 2010s summer, Alex must try to survive as an outsider in a remote, insular community; to navigate the awkward, unexpected beginnings of a possible new romance; and to live through the trauma she has repressed to survive, even as the memories — and a series of increasingly unnerving events — threaten to pull her back under the surface.
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All Things That Love the Sun
$24.95Barbara Schott peels back the layers of language to reveal the impact of time and seasonal changes. She also peels back the ideology of relations, the intimacy of self, to find both great longing and loss. The poet identifies how the heart longs for words, shapes itself with words. This collection of new poems offers the reader the rare opportunity to stand still and be enveloped in the greatness of language and verse.
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All This Could Be Yours
$18.95Like the promise of its title, All This Could Be Yours is full of elusive gifts. Joshua Trotter’s debut collection is a metaphysical hall of windows that seem to be mirrors and mirrors presenting themselves as windows. Trotter’s poems – which could be the bastard love-children of Stevens and Frost – refract, reflect and deflect with canny puns and rhymes, the rigour of their forms belying the rogue trickster twists of cockeyed logic they take and the po-faced near-sense in which they speak. Don’t be fooled into thinking these poems glib: Trotter is often most serious precisely at his most blithe; his poems are always thought-full. Full of “intemperate winds / blown thinking from the ledge, through the gap // between the frame and what it haunts for us,” they resist the intelligence, almost successfully, as Stevens said a poem should.
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All This Town Remembers
$27.95A small town in Saskatchewan suffers a tragedy when Joey Fallow, star of the high-school’s hockey team, is killed in a bus crash. Twenty-five years later, when the CBC comes to town to make a movie about the event, it becomes clear that many residents haven’t moved on and that many don’t want to. Mired in the past, and at the same time acutely frustrated by the stagnancy he sees around him, is Adam, Joey’s best friend. Adam has more recently suffered an accident himself, one that has left his memory faulty. In a struggle to master the chronology of his own life, and rise to the new challenges put in his way, he risks alienating just about everyone who frames his past and present, including his wife Ellen and many in their long-time circle of friends.
“The genesis of All This Town Remembers was a sentence overheard in a basement bar in Ottawa,” says Johnston. “It was a man talking to a woman or a woman talking to a manI don’t rememberbut they were leaning over a jukebox at the time, and one of them was sad and the other was trying not to make it worse. They loved each other and I wrote down the snippet I overheard. Even though I didn’t remember the exact line, I kept working on the story it started.
Then one spring day I was in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, with a bunch of relatives. I was standing outside somewhere and wishing I still smoked. It was pretty quiet, because inside was a funeral for my grandmother. My cousin’s boy jumped as far as he could into a puddle and yelled happily. He seemed too young for the gesture to be defiant, and I wished I was that young too, and I could do something that was its own, and not opposing something else. So I wrote this story about a man who wants that too.”
Johnston’s debut novel gives distinction to the unassumingthe everyday dialogue of married life, the muffled hum of local goings-on and the quiet frustrations of winter. Adam worries at the misconceptions surrounding people’s places in the world, watching as dreams are downplayed in the wake of the reality that replaces them. Torn between wanting more and wanting what he has to be enough, he resents both inclinations as somehow inauthentic. Around him he sees a community of people struggling to articulate what they mean and to shake the old adages, all the while comforted by their persistence.
All This Town Remembers is about recollection, the way some things fade and then jump back fresh; the way others are recalled so often they get ground down. Johnston’s narrative hinges on the gentle wearing away that turns these memories into adages themselves, part of a mythology that both houses and jails its believers. With sharp observations about small-town insecurities, condescension, authenticity and the subtleties of social interactions, Johnston’s novel is an understated, startlingly resonant portrait of a man and a town.
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All Those Drawn to Me
$18.95The junction of Highways 20 and 97 forms a rough right angle around which lies the city of Williams Lake. These are the coordinates by which Christian Petersen’s fiction can be charted. From the building of the Gaol at Soda Creek to ruminations on the origins of the Barkerville fire, All Those Drawn to Me explores the unpredictable, romantic and spiritual qualities of life in rural BC. The harshness of the wild west permeates Petersen’s second collection of short fiction. In the story “Horse from Persia,” a condemned man contemplates the injustice of life at his hanging speech: “I wished mightily that I could climb up on that horse and escape the sorrowful puzzle my days had become. For if it’s true time is a gift, mine was not altogether pleasant.” But Petersen is just as comfortable extrapolating truths from present-day life, as in “Laketown Breakdown” where a young man struggles to stay on the right side of the law while coping with the death of his parents. And in the title story, “All Those Drawn to Me,” Petersen creates a masterful blend, shifting from the gold rush to the contemporary with three motives, three lives and three battles with death on the treacherous waters of the Upper Quesnel River. Whether in the past or present, Petersen’s characters explore romance, poverty and spiritual quandaries as they wander amid the landscape and back streets of the dusty little cities of BC’s Central Interior.
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All We Want is Everything
$16.95All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses–places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark.
Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.
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All You Can Kill
$24.95White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreat.
Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the intrepid imposters eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings of self-help guru Brad Beard, and Professor Sayer’s uncomfortably erotic couples counselling.
But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial.
In All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire.
“Smart, hilarious, original, All You Can Kill is a feverish, one-of-a-kind, unhinged journey into the absurd shams of modern life. No one writes satire, or anything else, like Pasha Malla.” – Iain Reid, author of We Spread
“Malla is a fabulously gifted writer.” – Publishers Weekly
“I don’t really know how Malla gets away with what he does … but it is astounding to watch him do it.” – The Rumpus
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Allegheny, BC
$18.95In this unsettling collection, Vancouver singer/songwriter Rodney DeCroo delivers raw footage of a childhood marred by violence, sudden uprootings, and abuse. Allegheny, BC is a candid, gritty tour through DeCroo’s troubled past in a small coal town outside of Pittsburgh, PA, the bush of northern BC, and his young adult years in Vancouver. Scenes of boys growing up along the banks of the filthy Allegheny River cut to hunting trips with an unpredictable father haunted by the Vietnam War to snapshots of seedy bars and strip clubs as the narrator struggles to come of age despite his circumstances.DeCroo searches out available meaning and transcendence in fierce attentiveness to the often painful realities of life. Allegheny, BC is a reclamation project, an imaginative remembering through the savaged places of the human heart into beauty and acceptance. It is the river that flows through DeCroo’s life, at times lazily meandering, at times whitecapped and raging, but constantly working its way around moments that shaped a life and inevitably led to the man who stands before us.This collection follows Rodney DeCroo’s recently released album, Allegheny, which has received critical acclaim in the Canadian music industry.
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Allegiance
$20.00Victor makes an ethical commitment. The reverberations of that choice surface in Canada, Egypt and Greece. Moving from a lecture hall in Montreal to a detention centre in Alexandria, from a descent into the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa to a vista high over the ports of Piraeus, from tequila blurred moments of ecstatic dance to the rigours of contemporary musical composition, an overlapping narrative emerges to question current allegiances and the history of rational law.
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Allodynia
$19.95Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Mallis Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body. In Pain Log, a suite of body-horror poems, she explores illness as a haunting or possession: At home, my stitches / undid themselves, fevers pet me // like a dog, my eyes opened / backwards. Sleep ghosted me // more than usual. In Shipss Log, a near-future speculative suite of poems, Malli turns to themes of alienness, artificial intelligence, and the impossibility of translation; danger, intimacy, and war; as well as the worlds we choose to build together. Allodynia is a highly anticipated poetic debut that more than fulfills the promise of its authors bpNichol award winning chapbook Remitting.
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Almost a Great Escape
$19.95Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Award, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, and the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award
Following his mother’s death in 2004, Tyler Trafford discovers an album of old letters and creased photographs that reveal a mother he never knew, a man he’s never heard of, and a love affair doomed by class and circumstance. The letters are from Jens Müller, a Norwegian pilot who trained in Canada during the early days of World War II, one of only three prisoners who would make it home after The Great Escape.
In Almost a Great Escape, Trafford takes us on a journey of emotional discovery and dramatic disclosure as he reconstructs his mother’s life, from her youth as a wealthy Montreal debutante to her final days as a broken but unbent casualty of a loveless marriage. His search for answers takes him across Canada and then across the ocean to Norway, hoping to learn more about the mystery of this secret relationship. Written with a fluidity fueled by heart-wrenching honesty, Trafford’s unconventional memoir confirms that while you can survive your past, you can never escape from it.
Almost a Great Escape includes photographs as well as excerpts and reproductions of telegrams and letters Jens sent from England and Stalag Luft III.
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Almost Beauty
$24.95Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry) and Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Third Prize (Poetry)
Finalist, Derek Walcott Prize for PoetrySue Sinclair has been praised for her “crisp, lyrical poems imbued with subtle, subtextual philosophic musings” (Globe and Mail). She has been described as a poet who “writes her way to a new understanding of the world and carries her readers with her” (Journal of Canadian Poetry). Sinclair’s debut collection, Secrets of Weather and Hope, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, while subsequent collections have earned a place on the Globe Top 100 list (Mortal Arguments), won the IPPY Poetry Award (The Drunken Lovely Bird), and the Pat Lowther Award (Heaven’s Thieves).
This collection includes an introductory essay by editor and poet Ross Leckie, over one hundred selected poems from Sinclair’s twenty-year career, and new poems that consider the poet’s evolving relationships with the idea of beauty and with the more-than-human world in a time of manufactured upheaval. The new poems, many never-before published, exemplify Sinclair’s masterful powers of observation and her precise, arresting language.
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Almost Feral
$24.95***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER******IPPY AWARDS SILVER MEDAL, CANADA-EAST BEST REGIONAL NONFICTION CATEGORY*****BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD WINNER******MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD – NON-FICTION WINNER******CBC BOOKS WRITER TO WATCH LIST***
On July 2, 2015, influential social activist Gemma Hickey began a 908-kilometer walk across the island of Newfoundland to raise awareness and funds for survivors of religious institutional abuse. Almost Feral celebrates the community of support that gathered around this journey and recounts Hickey’s remarkable story of self-discovery which led to the realization that they are transgender. In this thought-provoking and wide-ranging autobiography, Hickey counters memories of sexual assault, bullying, and depression with inspiring reflections on faith, love, family, individual and communal identity, sex, gender, and acceptance. Through complex feelings of empathy and solitude, weakness and strength, suffering and recovery, Gemma Hickey’s Almost Feral chronicles a journey from one side of an island to the other side of personal identity—charting an unknown territory where one’s body becomes the map that leads to home. -
Almost Meeting, The
$18.95As relevant and engaging today as when they were written, Henry Kreisel’s stories make readers hold their breath with anticipation until the finely crafted final sentence. The Almost Meeting and other stories is part of NeWest’s Landmark Editions Series. This masterful collection of Kreisel’s short fiction was written between 1954 and 1980. These stories are intelligent, literary reflections on what it is to be a citizen of a Canada and of the world.