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All Books in this Collection
Showing 5921–5936 of 9481 results
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Return Stroke
$20.00These graceful, probing personal essays by award-winning fiction writer Dora Dueck engage with a diverse range of ideas (becoming a writer, motherhood, mortality, the ethics of biography, a child’s coming-out) because in non-fiction, she writes, “the quest for meaning bows to the experience as it was.” Yet within Return Stroke, one theme in particular does resonate—change. “How wonderful,” the author writes, that our “bits of existence, no matter how ordinary, are available for further consideration—seeing patterns, facing into inevitable death, enjoying the playful circularity of then and now.”
The book’s title, Return Stroke—the title of one essay, where it literally refers to lightning—suggests such a dynamic: “When I send inquiry into my past, it sends something back to me.” The topic of memory, in all its malleability, impermanence, and surprising power, is especially central to the collection’s concluding piece, an absorbing memoir of the author’s 1980s life in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether she is discovering the more meaningful part that imagination holds within her religious faith or relating with astonishing clarity and honesty the experience of giving birth away from her home country, Dora Dueck’s beautifully written essays and memoir make her an insightful and generous companion.
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Return To Bone Tree Hill
$12.95Did Jessica murder one of her playmates, a troubled boy named Charlie, when she was twelve years old? Disturbed by a recurring dream and needing to clear her conscience, Jessica returns to Victoria, British Columbia, her hometown and the site of the possible crime. There she catches up with her longtime best friend, Jilly, who confirms that Charlie did in fact go missing the week that Jessica?s family relocated to Australia. But a memory?erasing bout of meningitis at the time of the incident means Jessica doesn?t recall the questioning police officers, the extensive ground search, or being the last person to see Charlie alive.
Jilly keeps Jessica from tackling the dangerous dilemma alone and summons the police when the two become neck deep in trouble. Will Jessica be able to acquit herself of murder before entering college in Calgary, or will her memory of Charlie?s death remain a fear she must learn to live with?
In Return to Bone Tree Hill, experienced YA writer Kristin Butcher chronicles a mystery that has the reader piecing together the evidence alongside Jessica and Jilly. From life and love conversations under the Bone Tree and the feverish nightmare that continues to offer nebulous clues, to midnight sleuthing and a few life or death confrontations, even the most reluctant readers will be caught up by the minute?to?minute action of these furtive, accidental detectives.
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Return to Glory
$19.95Remember the glory days of the Maple Leafs? Imlach, Keon, Mahovlich, Bower? But after their Stanley Cup victories in the 1960s, the Leafs fell quickly and became a laughing-stock for hockey fans. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Leafs were an awful hockey team. But then Harold Ballard died, Cliff Fletcher became the new president, and with the addition of Pat Burns and Doug Gilmour the 1990s Leafs re-emerged to their former glory. The fall and rise of the Toronto Maple Leafs is chronicled by Andrew Podnieks, supported by rarely seen photos and unusual statistical data. A great book for every Leaf fan.
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Return to Paueru Gai
$32.95Essays about the remarkable history of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival and the proud Japanese Canadian community behind it
Paueru Gai, the Powell Street neighbourhood in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, was a place of early settlement and forced removal for Japanese Canadians during the shameful years of internment in World War II. But Paueru Gai is also a site of regeneration: Since 1977, a diverse array of people gathers every August in Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park and the surrounding neighbourhood to honour and celebrate Japanese Canadian history, art, and culture. Powell Street Festival is an act of empowerment that defines and redefines Japanese Canadian identity.
In Return to Paueru Gai: Fifty Years of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival, essays, photographs, archival images, and a chronology articulate the festival’s crucial role in uplifting Vancouver’s Japanese Canadian community and affirming its place in the history of the city (and our country). From taiko drumming and sumo wrestling to community food vendors and human rights advocacy, the festival and the people who make it happen come brilliantly alive in this wide-ranging, vibrant book.
Essay writers include Musqueam Elder Mary Point, the seniors of Tonari Gumi (the Japanese Community Volunteers Association), cultural worker Julia Aoki, journalist Charlie Smith, writer Angela May, and members of the Japanese Canadian Art and Activism Project.
Full colour throughout.
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Return to the Drum
$24.95Return to the Drum is a story about survival—the survival of a people and their way of life. Focusing on the history of the Sahtuot’ine of Great Bear Lake and the struggles that follow their first encounters with Euro-Canadians in the 1800s, Miggs Wynne Morris weaves together their story with her own.
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Reunion
$20.00Poems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint.
Reunion is a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. It is a tale of the impossible quest for the original, unhurt self. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self.
Young’s writerly range extends through language both candid and stylized, and to forms from ballads to prayer to Biblical sermons. The voice is often interior, but at times it gains a public character–often through the use of religious language and song forms–and we sense that the child’s suffering is in many ways a community failure. The emotional and psychological landscape of these poems seems at once near and far, familiar and strange, uncanny in Freud’s sense. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader.
As I lay there on the couch
I bargained feebly,
weighing each thing I thought I loved
against the ache.
(from “Lamb”)“Each of Deanna Young’s spare, pitch-perfect poems seems to contain a novel. Young weaves in and out of time, playing with perspective, to illuminate experience…. This is a poetry that makes memory sharper, consciousness larger, life longer in all directions.” –Jury, Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
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Revelations
$15.95Anecdotes, interviews and extensive research. Fuse magazine called it “. . . one of the most provocative and playful feminist texts to have emerged in recent years.”
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Revelator
$20.00Revelator is the opening poem in a major sequence entitled Universe. It’s the jumping off point for a work that, were Ron Silliman to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete. We are hopeful.
Universe is a poem of globalization and post-global poetics (which Silliman feels is an important reason for publishing this key section outside of the USA). At its core, it addresses the problem that there are only two global systems: the biosphere and capital, while every response to these global systems is invariably local.
The first appearance of Revelator in a journal won Poetry’s Levinson prize, previously given to poets such as Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens.
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Reverberations
$19.95Most people think Alzheimer’s Disease is the same as memory loss, if they think about it at all. But most people prefer to ignore it, hoping that if they ignore it hard enough, it will go away. That was certainly Marion Agnew’s hope, even after she knew her mother’s diagnosis. Yet, with her mother’s diagnosis, Marion’s world changed. Her mother ? a Queens and Harvard/Radcliffe-educated mathematician, a nuclear weapons researcher in Montreal during Word War II, an award-winning professor and researcher for five decades, wife of a history professor, and mother of five ? began drifting away from her. To keep hold of her, to remember her, she began paying attention, and began writing what she saw. She wrote as her mother became suspicious on outings, as she lost even the simplest of words, as she hallucinated, as she became frightened and agitated. But after her mother’s death, Marion wanted to honour the time of her mother’s life in which she had the disease, but she didn’t want the illness to dominate the relationship she’d had with her mother. This moving memoir looks at grief and family, at love and music. It is a coming-to-terms reflection on the endurance of love and family.
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Reveries of a Solitary Biker
$16.95In 1776, at the age of sixty-four, an embittered Jean-Jacques Rousseau took to rambling. Feeling rejected, neglected, and condemned, he turned his back on the society in which he had never managed to feel at ease, and found peace in wandering the fields outside Paris, noting interesting flora and fauna, and ruminating on his life and career. Rousseau jotted down his musings on playing cards he carried in his pocket; these notes would form the basis for his last book, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, translated as Reveries of the Solitary Walker (or a Solitary Walker). Unfinished at his death and published posthumously in 1782, the Reveries reiterate and meditate upon many of Rousseau’s central themes: the joys of solitude, the corrupting influence of society, the fragility of happiness and of human relations, and the great, healing solace of nature (not to mention his obsession with enemies and persecution).
Like Rousseau, Strang too has taken to wandering, although on her bicycle, finding cycling particularly conducive to a slow, non-deliberate thinking, an almost sub-conscious contemplation. Biking around Vancouver, she returned to several issues of lifelong interest, her own version of Rousseau’s obsessions: the difficulties of living an anti-capitalist life, the continued invisibility of much of women’s labour, the paradoxes of daily life, the nature and implications of calculations of value, and the complexities of sustainability. What is to be done, she wonders?
In homage to the playing-card origins of Rousseau’s Reveries, Strang’s Reveries of a Solitary Biker is divided into four suites.
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Reverse Cowgirl, The
$21.95Keen, intense, darkly comic, and accident-prone, the short fictions of David Whitton are full of sullen underdogs: his characters clean up real nice, but can’t help but unravel back to their original fallen and fascinating selves. Their mistakes and misdeeds, temptations and transgressions trample through these stories, twisting out intricate surprises at each turn.
Whitton navigates contemporary and future, real life and fantasy worlds, continually setting up, if only to send up, modern romantic scenarios. Ultimately, if the boy does get the girl—or vise versa—whether they meet online or on acid, at a wedding or in battle, the object of affection always topples from the pedestal in radical and delightfully refreshing ways.
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Reversing Time
$25.00A fast-paced fantasy YA novel that explores vital themes in today’s society – such as climate change and the environment – within the context of an exciting page-turner. This timely adventure story will empower and excite young people at the same time
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Revolution Songs
$24.95Annie Jalmer stands uneasily between opposing Communists and Fascist forces in her 1930s Rocky Mountain town. As the radical politics of her family inflame tensions throughout the town, Annie becomes an unwilling double agent until a violent strike forces her to take a stand. Revolution Songs is the electrifying debut novel by award-winning writer Carissa Halton, inspired by the little-known story of a Communist union, the rise of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan, and the women who fought on both sides. Set against the charged backdrop of Depression-era politics, Halton weaves a thrilling and timely story that echoes the rising polarization of our own era.
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Revolutionary Traveller
$26.95In this book Saul draws on a series of his own occasional articles written over a span of forty years which, together with a linking narrative, serve to trace not only his own career as an anti-apartheid and liberation support movement activist in both Canada and southern Africa but also help recount the history of the various struggles in both venues in which he has been directly involved. He thus shapes a unique memoir, capped by some longer summary pieces on the global processes of empire and decolonization that he has witnessed and on the reading, listening, playing and family pleasures that have enlivened his life’s passage.
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Revolutions
$19.95Revolutions is the first book-length critical survey of twenty-first-century Canadian fiction, with in-depth essays examining subjects such as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effects of the digital revolution, and the dark legacy of what has come to be known as the Canadian literary establishment. Throughout, close reading is given to many contemporary authors, with particular attention paid to such central figures as Douglas Coupland and David Adams Richards. Alex Good explains and contextualizes this period in Canadian fiction for the general reader, providing a much-needed critical re-assessment of Canadian writing in the new millennium.
By offering a contrary yet thoughtful position to that taken by our nation’s most prominent literary tastemakers, Good offers a vigorous commentary on the state of Canadian literature—where we are and how we got here.
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Revved
$12.95Once again R.P. MacIntyre ups the speed limit with a collection of stories that are journeys into the delight and terror of emerging self-consciousness. From a strange party in honour of a dying hamster to a young man’s quest to find his missing sister, Revved resonates with the authentic experiences of today’s youth and the reverberations of their extraordinary imaginations.