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All Books in this Collection
Showing 577–592 of 9481 results
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Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons
$22.95Winner of the 2018 American Bookfest Best Book Award for Historical Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2018 GOETHE Book Awards for Post-1750s Historic Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; Finalist for the 2018 International Book Awardfor Historical Fiction
Prior to 1857, the year it was engulfed by tragic historical conflict, the cosmopolitan city of Lucknow thrived on open-mindedness, great prosperity and pride, the city a magnet for musicians, poets, painters and chefs, drawing the finest cultural talent from other parts of India and the wider world. It proved too tempting a prize for the English East India Company not to attempt a takeover of the Kingdom of Awadh with its capital city, Lucknow. The devastation and disaster that came to be known as “the Red Year” was a turning point in the history of Indian colonialism. It gave birth to the self-conscious, anti-colonial nationalism that would define the next ninety years, eventually leading to Gandhi’s nonviolent measures to oust the British from India once and for all.
Synthesizing a wealth of meticulous historical research, Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons plunges the reader into the complex drama and historical dilemmas faced by both ordinary and extraordinary Lakhnavis (people of Lucknow) at the time. The story is centered on a group of strong, independent women who take action to defend their world and way of life. The novel’s protagonist, Amah, is a member of the Rose Platoon, an elite corps of female military guards of African descent who have protected Lucknow’s royalty for generations. Appalled by the mounting affronts and threats to her absent ex-husband’s kingdom, Begam Hazrat Mahal, one of Lucknow’s former queens and also of African descent, enlists Amah to be her eyes and ears and help coordinate resistance to the British takeover.
When the women decide to take on the English colonists who declare rule, what will be the ultimate price of the women’s loyalty to the royal family and to the place they’ve grown to love?
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Amapiano Eyes
$24.95Accompanied by the deep beats of Amapiano music, D. Nandi Odhiambo’s gritty, high-stakes new novel Amapiano Eyes is a masterful blend of literary fiction and noir—an existential thriller where the past and present collide.
When the pandemic abruptly arrives, Daliso Okoth, a DJ and existential philosopher living in Waikiki, loses his job as a construction labourer. At a crossroads, he joins his girlfriend and fellow DJ, Norrie Vee, in her side hustle selling prescription and designer drugs on Oahu. After her business partner steals their stash, Norrie and Daliso are left in a lurch. With travel bans causing supply shortages on the island, they scramble to mitigate the damage by selling dope for a corrupt former detective.
Daliso struggles to stay afloat in a world that seems to be crumbling around him. While he contends with a deteriorating heart condition and worries about his aging parents and Norrie, Daliso is plagued with painful memories of his grandfather, who was an exhibit in a Human Zoo. Meanwhile, Norrie is facing her own crisis of her mother’s addiction to opiates. Ultimately, the couple must decide whether to continue down a path of violence to resolve the crisis or to choose kindness, as Daliso’s grandfather taught him.
Daliso’s charged present, set against the hyperreal beauty and poverty of Hawai’i, is shot through with the past: adolescent reckonings in Kenya and Winnipeg and dehumanizing ancestral legacies in Germany. For him, the present is not an effect of the past, but the past lives unsettled with the present.
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Amaryllis & Little Witch
$19.95In these dark fairy tales, two girls face danger while grieving loved ones, and learn some hard truths about growing up along the way. Imaginative and curious, these fables illustrate adventures for children who have to make big choices.
In Amaryllis, a preteen goes missing on her birthday. Amaryllis heads out with her sister Fey’s ashes, determined to scatter the remains and set Fey free. But when she discovers that Fey is stuck between life and death, she realizes she has to join Fey on a trek to the Land of the Dead.
In Little Witch, a sickly mother and her daughter live in the deep, dark wood. One day, Big Witch finds an ogre caught in a trap. They make a deal: in return for saving him, the ogre agrees to take care of Little Witch once Big Witch has passed. Soon, the little girl finds herself in the ogre’s home, frightened and alone except for her pet cat. But when a Hunter Boy gets caught by the ogre, Little Witch must make a choice: save herself, save the boy, or choose another path . . .
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Amateurs at Love
$19.95Love is a boxcar going off the rails. For anyone who has experienced the highs and lows of love and wants to know they are not alone.
Patricia Young’s new collection confirms her status as one of Canada’s great and most versatile contemporary poets. In Amateurs at Love, she explores the dynamic, liminal space between lovers, taking precise aim at the silent climacteric moments of the heart: the interrogating, persuading, confiding, reflecting moments that help us feel and understand that distance.
Her response is unexpected, unsettling and emotionally pungent. To the question of what is love, her interlocutor answers,
I think it means a boxcar going off the rails, grain spilling down a gully, fermenting over summer, a bear gorging on that grain, passing out in a field, a bear that could wake any moment, hung-over and thirsty and ready to kill for a drop of water
In forms ranging wildly from pangramic love songs to prose poems, Young guides her readers through the many layers of human relationship with unappeasable joy. Her poetic voice, her bold and unconventional metaphors, her rich incantatory rhythms and linguistic dexterity, lure us into a pulsing universe that leaves no aspect of human nature unblemished.
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Amazing Medical Stories
$14.95The twenty true tales in Amazing Medical Stories give a rich and entertaining picture of the ways in which medical workers (both real and fake) have used the keys to the mysterious kingdom of life: health, disease, and physical anomaly, birth, death, and post-mortem diagnosis. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to hilarity, from satisfaction of curiosity to evocation of terrible pity. Amazing Medical Stories deals with quacks and charlatans, the giants Angus McAskill and Anna Swan, the first case of antisocial personality disorder, as well as wonderous inventions and achievements by physicians.
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American Notebooks
$19.95It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical account of the intellectual flowering of a great writer. An album of exquisitely drawn literary portraits of companions, intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists and social activists of the period—Edmund and Elena Wilson; Mary Meigs; Maud Maugan; Barbara Deming; Truman Capote; Jacques Hébert, her first Quebec publisher, then senator; and many others—it also introduces many of the real life personalities who have inspired her fictional characters.
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American Standard/Canada Dry
$15.95With Canada/US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain’s third book blenderizes ‘pop’ culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border.
From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical ‘History of Canada,’ this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong:poetry can make things happen.
American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Québécois lyrics.
Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they’re your passport to the land of a new political poetry.
About Cain’s Torontology:
‘One of the most interesting and engaged of Toronto’s young avants, [Cain] places himself carefully and deliberately in his surroundings and readings, and slips in and out of context as he goes.’
– PrairieFire
‘Chaotic Eisenstein-like montages of words, phrases, implications, and Adbusters-esque commentary.’
– subTerrain
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Âmî Osâwâpikones (Dear Dandelion)
$23.99A debut picture book that celebrates self-love, care, and resilience with one of the most widespread plants—the dandelion.
Both a love letter to the dandelion and a call to love ourselves in a difficult world, Âmî Osâwâpikones reminds us that we are not defined as others see us. Following our young protagonist and the dandelions through the seasons, we are reminded that we are resilient, we are healers, we are funny, and we are loved.
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Amigo’s Blue Guitar
$15.95A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humour of the characters invite us to embrace the situation—be at once moved and threatened by it—and to consider how we ourselves would react.
Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
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Amity
$22.95Amity provides a window to the wreckage caused by wars–the destruction and displacement that leave pain and life-long psychological disorders, here specifically within the contexts of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and Iran’s revolution.Payvand, an Iranian refugee and activist, still plagued with nightmares, meets a Ragusa, a Yugoslavian refugee whose pockets are loaded with stones as she prepares to walk into the water and end her life, a life that has become intolerable since the loss of those most dear to her.Payvand listens to Ragusa’s story and Ragusa promises to postpone her suicide at least until she hears Payvand’s story in turn. In a novel that strives to raise awareness about the extent to which elites manipulate nations into wars, with total disregard for the lives of millions like Payvand and Ragusa, it is the warmth of personal relationships and friendships forged that are key to healing.
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among men
$18.951959, Ameliasburgh, Prince Edward County, Canada. On the edge of spring, two men are finishing an A-frame cabin on Roblin Lake. In the coming decade all three of them—Al, Milt, and the A-frame—will become famous and change the face of Canadian poetry. But for now all they have is the stench of sweat, whiskey, and words. From Governor General’s Literary Award–winner David Yee, among men is a poetic and charged portrait of male friendship in uncertain times, and a story of how Canadian literature was changed forever.
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Among Ruins
$14.95Among Ruins is an intriguing mixture of the fantastic and the frighteningly real. These poems, tinged with the irony of life and politics, convey a dark and powerful mythic undertone that speaks not only to the reader but to the reader’s soul. This is a haunting and memorable first collection.’ -Bruce Meyer
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Amuse Bouche
$19.95Adeena Karasick’s startling and arresting work constantly de-contextualizes and re-contextualizes language: its signs, signifiers, images, ideograms, pictograms, lexicography and syntax. In doing so, it leads us into the subliminal, where it foregrounds memories, associations, archetypes, metaphors and other elements of the subconscious usually well and deeply suppressed in the communications we construct to repress as much as we reveal in our conversations of the everyday. This constant rupture of desire, of language struggling against its bonds and restraints, literally in spite of itself, is what becomes both visceral and palpable in an encounter with Karasick’s images as they turn into texts, and texts into images.
Karasick’s work first encounters, then reveals, and finally resists the growing cornucopia of privatized fear—the increasingly ubiquitous metanarrative of the public space that surrounds us—in the iconography of safety manuals, the illusions of choice represented and delimited by menus in both the digital and the analogue world of “messaging,” the increasingly circumscribed and xenophobic discourse of politics and public policy, and the barbed-wire garrisons we found with our constructs of identity.
Mashing up the lexicon of war with post-industrial consumerism, haute cuisine, couture, language, Eros and desire, Karasick’s sixth book serves up a linguistic onslaught of plastic explosives. Whether exploring commas as the mistresses of language, rules of textual engagement read through systems of courtship, a love song to Osama bin Laden, or a sassy send-up of Hollywood Kabbalah, Amuse Bouche is at once dark and satirical, exuberant and amorously rigourous—it will make your body politic tremble, your head spin and your mouth water. Her Katyusha-garnished, encrusted margins will leave you salivating long after the bomb, that ever-present yet elusive threat of instantaneous deconstruction, has dropped into our moveable feast, and silenced the babble of tongues our global discourse has become.
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Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow
$17.00In Jason Heroux’s disquieting third novel, Owen lives an enjoyable suburban life with his wife, Lila, until a knock at the door brings him face-to-face with a past he didn’t know he had. The sudden revelation forces him to reconsider where he’s from, what he is, and where he’s going. Owen finds himself on a non-stop rollercoaster ride of awareness and doubt, hurtling through the days and nights of an ordinary world with extraordinary highs and lows. Filled with flammable reality, stuffed with a dream-soaked rag, then ignited and tossed at the here and now, Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow is a spirited, thoughtful novel that challenges our relationship with our society, our cosmos, and ourselves.
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An Acadian Odyssey
$23.95It’s 1766 and after years of forced exile Ange Amirault returns to Nova Scotia with his young family. But what kind of life awaits the Acadians?
Brutally forced into exile by the British in 1756, a young seaman, Captain Ange Amirault is torn from his home and his love Nathalie. But when the British decree that the Acadians may return to Acadie (in modern day Nova Scotia) Ange, now reunited with Nathalie, is determined to reclaim his place in the land they love despite it being under the full control of the distrusted English and with a steady influx of New England Planters.
The proud history of the Acadians is embodied in Ange and Nathalie as they build a new life despite the hardships. Acadian lore is weaved with eighteen century historical events as the epic, human drama unfolds in this passionate follow up to Nathalie: An Acadian’s Tale of Tragedy and Triumph . -
An Almost Perfect Thing
$16.95Greg is a once-respected journalist searching for a high-profile story that will help revive his career. Chloe is the missing girl he wrote about six years earlier who has just returned home to a world she no longer recognizes. Instead of leading police to her captor, Chloe turns to Greg to share her story. Unfortunately for him, Chloe won’t provide names or locations, and instead dictates exactly how the story should be told. But Chloe has become an international celebrity—both respected and scrutinized by the public—and they all want to know, who is her kidnapper? Why is she protecting him? When Greg begins to question whether truth and fiction have collided, he takes matters into his own hands, in spite of the drastic consequences. Even if that means coming face to face with Chloe’s abductor. An Almost Perfect Thing is a multi-perspective thriller about possession and desire, the need to own our stories, and our “right” to the truth.