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All Books in this Collection
Showing 5777–5792 of 9489 results
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Ralph Gustafson and His Works
$9.95This volume explores the life and works of Ralph Gustafson. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.
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Ralph, Flying Hound
$12.95In the tradition of Robert Service’s poetic tall tales, Dave Paddon’s Ralph, Flying Hound brings readers a hilarious recitation about a dog that just won’t give up. Along with his canine comrades, Ralph chases anything that moves, and usually catches it too. But when his aspirations go skyward, even his four furry friends?Nance, Lucky, Spot 1 and Spot 2?wonder if Ralph’s aiming too high. Will Ralph catch that big orange duck? Will pilot Greg ever get those crazy dogs out of his hair? And how did those mutts end up in the drink?
An accomplished reciter and storyteller, Dave Paddon has crafted a fabulous “dog-bites-helicopter” tale, told with his signature warm and quirky wit and inspired by a true story. He may be new to children’s literature circles, but Dave Paddon is an old hand at recitations; he’s been called “the Rock Star of Newfoundland recitation writers” and this wonderful book will show readers why. Newcomer alex kolano has created delightfully playful illustrations that bring Ralph, his friends and their adventures to life.
Ralph, Flying Hound will catch the hearts of readers young and old.
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Ramya’s Treasure
$25.00Ramya immigrated to Canada from India with her husband about fifteen years ago. She typifies the first generation immigrant – a person who straddles two cultures, two countries, two continents, even perhaps two different worlds altogether.The novel has two intertwined threads of narration simultaneously unspooling. The one set in the present is about Ramya’s battle to rebuild her life. The other, a series of sorties into the past, examines Ramya’s sundry relationships. One narrative skein is Canadian, modern and multicultural, while the other is Indian, steeped in myth and mysticism. They are the two sides of the same coin, the obverse and the reverse – the world as seen through the bi-focal lens of immigrant reality.
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Random Acts of Vandalism
$19.95A rookie novelist faces infamy and fortune when a young boy mimics the suicidal protagonist in his book. After close to five years covering trials, a court reporter suddenly finds his life entangled with the outcome of a manslaughter case. A fourth-year English major and rugby star wrestles with a growing disdain for academia as his mother succumbs to cancer. And rocked by the death of his best friend, a high school student stumbles into apathy and addiction while trying to make his way in the real world. Four stories. Four lives. One path. One end. This is the story of Random Acts of Vandalism.
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Random Illuminations
$19.95A great conversation can offer insight into the hearts and minds of its participants. In this intimate, wide-ranging collection of conversations (and some correspondence), writer-broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel and her friend, author Carol Shields, touch on both the personal and the professional.
Eleanor Wachtel first met Carol Shields in 1980; her first interview with Carol occurred in 1987, following the publication of Swann: A Mystery. They soon became friends, embarking on a correspondence and conversations that would last her almost two decades.
In this illuminating book, Eleanor Wachtel brings together her rich collection of interviews with Carol from that first occasion to Shields’s death in 2003. Disarmingly direct, Carol Shields talks about her writing, language and consciousness, and her interest in “redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women,” all the while touching on topics as diverse as feminism, raising children, the metaphorical search for a home, and the joys and griefs of everyday life.
Carol Shields is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. She also won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the Orange Prize, and numerous other awards. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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Random Passage
$19.95A new edition of Bernice Morgan’s classic, best-selling family saga. Forced to flee England, the Andrews family books passage from Weymouth, England to unknown prospects, only to discover a barren, inhospitable land at the end of their crossing: a fresh start in a distant country, New Found Land. There, on the island of Cape Random, the Vincent family introduces them to their way of life. To the pensive, seventeen-year-old Lavinia Andrews, uprooted from everything familiar, it seems a fate worse than the one they left behind. Driven by loneliness she begins a journal. Random Passage satisfies the craving for those details that headstones and history books can never give: the real story of our Newfoundland ancestors, of how time and chance brought them to the forbidding shores of a new found land. It is a saga of families and of individuals; of acquisitive Mary Bundle; of charming Ned Andrews, whose thievery has turned his family into exiles; of mad Ida; of Thomas Hutchings, who might be an aristocrat, a holy man, or a murderer; and of Lavinia – who wrote down the truth and lies about them all. Random Passage has been adapted into a CBC miniseries and is now a national bestseller.
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Rank 6
$15.95The terror of fire is known to all but when fire erupts into its most terrifying form, Rank 6, mayhem and death are often not far behind. So the question is: Why would someone willingly approach an inferno that swirls with fireballs and whirls with temperatures that can reach 1000 degrees Celsius?
For Emily who makes such a decision, there is no quick, easy answer. She already knows something about destructive power. Her struggles with depression and her own suicidal thoughts had recently brought her face to face with destruction and death. As she rashly races into that danger to rescue a panic-stricken dog, she can’t say if she is seduced by the fire’s powers or if it is just her identification with the dog’s vulnerability and helplessness that makes her scorn the deadly risk.
Her actions are spontaneous, thoughtlessly bold at the beginning, but once cut off from the safety of the firefighters, and alone in a fiery inferno, Emily begins to realize that her reckless actions could kill her. When the thought takes hold, she knows that she really does want to live and scrambles to kick her survival instincts into gear. Instinctively, she begins to realize that the dark struggles and personal battles of her life may be part of the solution to save he life. Maybe adapting the negative qualities of her life into forces of survival, will give her the chance to stay alive. Maybe the experience that made her feel so lost can save her. Time is short and, as the terror of the fire compounds with her panic, self-doubt, injury, and exhaustion, she finally reaches deep within herself to see what is there. -
Rank Songbirds
$16.95Leon Rooke’s Rank Songbirds delves into dramatic and intense relationships, politics and the quirks of society, celebrating humanity’s resilience in spite of-or perhaps because of-its flaws.
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Ransacking Troy
$18.95After nearly a decade of the Trojan War, the women of Greece are growing restless. Led by the indomitable Penelope and the fierce Clytemnestra, a band of Grecian women defy the odds and bravely set sail for the shores of Troy, determined to end the conflict themselves. The journey is fraught with danger—bloodthirsty warriors, mythical beasts, and the capricious will of the gods. But these women are no mere bystanders in the tales of men. Get ready to embark on the greatest adventure that Homer and Virgil never told.
A radical retelling of the ancient Greco-Roman epics, Ransacking Troy is a bold and brilliant reimagining of the most famous war story of all time, where women take centre stage as the rightful heroes. In her signature revisionist style, award-winning playwright Erin Shields brings a refreshing feminist twist to this thrilling odyssey, confronting the habitual violence and disregard for women’s lives that persist during times of war. A mythical tale for modern times, Ransacking Troy envisions what happens when women band together to build a better world.
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Rat Romeo
$19.95Several murders, a stolen and returned guitar, the hardscrabble street-life stories of his students, a complex father/son relationship, and some talk of love and death form the framework of Rat Romeo. Gerald Arthur Moore’s latest collection of high explosive poetry takes us on a motorcycle ride, with sleeves rolled up so you can see old scars.
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Rational Geomancy
$34.95The Toronto Research Group was an eighteen-year collaboration and friendship between the late bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.
In addition to reports on translation; the book-as-machine; and the search for non-narrative prose; this collection includes an informative introduction by McCaffery; a report on performance; ‘Reading and Writing: The Toronto Research Game’; and much hitherto unpublished material. From scholasticism to pop-up books, the Book of Nature to comic strips, these frequently witty, often irreverent and methodically mischievous reports document a vital era, not only in the intellectual growth of two individuals, but in the history of critical collaboration in North America.
With a revised format, additional bibliography and profuse illustrations, this book will prove to be of inestimable value to anyone tracing the poetic archeology of the seventies in Anglophone Canada.
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RATS NEST
$18.00Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, RATS NEST is a collection of short stories builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century.
This first full-length book by Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self-reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.
As the Kid descends the layers of a seemingly never-ending pit, its nightmares and hallucinations–recorded in stunning detail–unfold in twelve chilling sci-fi stories of unreality that will make readers think twice about what it means to be a human (or humanoid) on the planet we call home.
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Rattlesnake Plantain
$10.00Whether considering the simplicity of a butterfly in flight or the terror of a cancer diagnosis, Heidi Greco confronts the world head-on, yet always with the fresh eyes of the stranger in our midst. The issues she addresses belong to the world; the settings she employs are international. At times funny and irreverent, these are pieces that dissect relationships, poems that delve as easily into the mysteries of nature as they do into the intricacies of daily living-encounters we immediately recognize. But whether serious or fun in their approach, her penetrating and unsentimental eye is always there, steadfast on the goods.
“In the beauty of the language and the striking images, there is a pervasive sadness, a sub-text of depression. …’Rattlesnake Plantain’ is a collection of poems about loving, not being loved. Baudelaire understood.” – Prairie Fire
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Ravage of Life
$22.95For three years, Evelyne de la Chenelière wrote on the long entrance wall in Montreal’s Espace GO as part of an artistic residency that would profoundly shake her outlook on words, theatre practice, and writing. The culmination of this is Ravage of Life, a bold departure from prevailing norms where the playwright breaks with written and performative conventions in her dramatization of an endless and multi-faceted instant between life and death.
In this experimental text, bits and pieces of a family’s realities unfold in a non-linear simultaneity that reflects with captivating irony the difficulties encountered when language is expected to facilitate communication.
Ravage of Life is a challenging invitation to eviscerate theatre and create a space where thought finds its body, freeing theatrical languages from grammatical constraints, logic, and structure in order to promise new theatrical experiences.
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Ravenna Gets
$16.00Winner, 2011 ReLit Award
From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse fiction.”
In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living rooms, cooking in their kitchens, and playing in their yards, are simply checked off by hunting rifles or crossed out by farmers’ tools.
There is one thing missing, however, as the bodies fall from what might have been better stories, better novels, and it’s this: everything.
Praise for Ravenna Gets:
“Tony Burgess sits in infinite judgement on rural Ontario life, insisting with infuriating calmness that not even one fine red curly hair separates the poetry of mundane existence from sudden, inexplicable violence. Ravenna Gets belongs on the same shelf as Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip and Springsteen’s Nebraska.” (Darren Wershler, author of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and, with Bill Kennedy, Update)
“… out on the edge and experimental to the point of reader-confusion, but surprisingly alluring. When taking a reader to the cliff edge, then the writing must be as enticing as chocolate even if the story smells bad. I don’t get it and I didn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t look away: This poetic, fast-flying nihilistic narrative of carnage is well done.” (The Globe & Mail)
“The world of Tony Burgess is savage and blackly funny. After all, he wrote the CanLit zombie classic Pontypoool Changes Everything. It’s a place where you shouldn’t trust anybody, not even your narrator. This is not Alice Munro’s small-town Canada.
“Burgess rips open the guts of Canadian literature, thankfully: someone’s got to do it. (Uptown Magazine)
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Ravenous
$24.00Breigh is a hot elder millennial who is obsessed with the brands she is ambassading for. Her policy is YES, and her livestreams are viral. But she’s pregnant now, and her body’s changing. It’s not that she’s hungry. She’s definitely not depressed. She just sometimes eats boxes of makeup before passing out.
Daddy’s bought a brand-new home for Breigh and Baby, complete with a Greenguard Gold-certified, twice-imported velvet infant chaise — but is he cheating on her with a hotter, younger coworker? Breigh has to get Baby out before it ruins her. She has to create more and better content than the other Momfluencers. She has to unbox something new. She has to unbox … Baby! Baby approves of her seven-step marketing plan. Welcome to #LiveBirth.
Breigh’s increasingly unhinged life reflects her generation’s anxieties around psychological manipulation through social media platforms. Multi-award-winning author Sara Cooper presents a wild debut novel in this incisive satire of consumerism, performative femininity, and social media.