A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 5649–5664 of 9481 results
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
?
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.
Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)
If it were necessary to tell someone where I am,
I’d say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles.
I’d say I have loved.
These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. ‘Time’s not the market, it’s the bustle; / not the price but worth,’he muses, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Tierney’s narrators grapple with the gap between what’s seen and what’s experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I’m alone.
What continues to set Matthew Tierney’s poems apart is their uncanny ability to find within the nomenclature of science not mere novelty but a new pathto human frailty, a renewed assertion of individuality, and a genuine awe at existence.
‘It smothers us with normal,’ Matthew Tierney writes in his spangled third collection, ‘though we cleave to standard deviations.’ Deviant, yes; normal and standard, no. These poems are all quantum fluctuation and collapse, language folding in on itself in the gorgeous vacuum of contemporary culture. ‘Every p-brane sweeps out a (p+1)-dimensional world volume as it propagates through spacetime,’ says Wikipedia. I have no idea what that means, but Matthew Tierney does. Let him school you.’ – Michael Robbins