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Showing 593–608 of 9248 results
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An Unbalanced Force
$16.95Ethan Granger isn’t sure what his father does for work, just that it’s lucrative enough to support their family’s privileged lifestyle, and that it often requires him to go out of town for business.
When Ethan catches his dad in a lie, it raises unsettling questions he can’t ignore. Before long, this seemingly small fib reveals a clandestine and potentially illegal operation he’s been keeping from the family. To catch a liar, Ethan must become a liar, using every trick his father taught him to evade suspicion while investigating leads.
Hiring a private eye, sneaking into his father’s office, following him on his “business trips” — how far will Ethan go to expose his dad’s lies? What if the truth forces Ethan to make a choice that could throw his whole world off balance?
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An Unruly Little Animal
$21.95An Unruly Little Animal unfolds on the most stressful of February days for young worrier Darby Tamm. In the morning, the fifth grader must deliver a pair-presentation with classmate Jennie Phelps-Christianson, and in the afternoon, he must endure a class visit and career-talk on mechanical engineering from his recently estranged father. Additionally, other stressors complicate his day: a) Darby’s original fifth grade teacher Mr. Henderson, who had a car-accident-of-unknown-origins back in November, has died that night before, b) the class’s substitute teacher Monsieur Substitute has been having an affair with his classmate Jennie’s mother Vice Principal Phelps-Christianson, a secret Darby shares with former-friends-turned-dangers Alexander and Them and a secret he must hide from Jennie, and c) throughout the day, Alexander and Them threaten to beat the snot-stuffing-piss-puke out of him and threaten to expose the fact that Darby has stolen from his father’s collection of vintage pornography magazines. The complications confounding Darby intensify throughout his day, culminate in a classroom scuffle, and result in a better understanding of his mom, mechanical engineering, sex, and violence.
Comic, circadian, and literary, the novel’s structure alternates between chapter and composition sections: single-day chapters that trace the increasing complications of Darby’s day are interspersed with composition sections that reflect and riff on Darby’s worried state of mind. Taken altogether, An Unruly Little Animal offers readers a poignant and humorous coming-of-age story.
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Anarcho-Modernism
$29.95This volume is a collection of thirty-eight pieces unified by a combination of the playful, primitive aesthetic of literary modernism with the anti-authoritarian, anarchist praxis of radical democratic politics. This bipolar sensibility permeates the work of Jerry Zaslove, to whom the book is dedicated.
Yet even if this sensibility pervades the book, the ideas presented here are all animated by highly conflicting attempts to articulate rigorously the anarcho-modernist stance, its literary forms and its political implications and values. In particular, all the contributors explore the fundamental tension that defines our new century—between bureaucratization and industrialization on the one hand, and the critical and autonomous individual on the other.
The five sections of the work are The Industrialization of Culture; Literature and Aesthetics; Public Education and Literacy; Human Rights and Politics; and Anarchism and Friendship.
Whatever holds together the anarchist solidarity represented in this collection, it isn’t a “principle,” a generality that is made to apply equally to all comers. It’s a particular relation, an affinity, that perhaps can be approached through thinking about friendship as a utopia of the near, the particular, and the concrete—not as a system of generalities for all. This guiding orientation is vital for the reconstruction of a critical theory adequate for our own time.
The contributors are all friends, colleagues and collaborators of Jerry Zaslove, many of whom, such as Russell Jacoby, Robin Blaser, Wayne Burns, Harvey Graff, David Kettler, Wolf-Dieter Narr, Jeff Wall and Heribert Adam, are well established and widely recognized in their fields. There are also many newer authors included here whose work is sure to become equally well known over time.
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Anarchy of Light
$16.95“Anarchy of Light” is a collection of poems written in an intricate and remarkable language. José Acquelin’s poetry is meditative and lucid, with luminous insights into our lives. The author reflects on contemporary society and the role that poetry played in his career. He invites us to go back to the essentials, to natural elements, innocence and light, in order to magnify the beauty of the universe. The French-language edition of this book won the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.
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Anatolia Junction
$18.95This book stands at the point where actuality and legend converge in a land as old as time. From it extends an arid landscape upon which are inscribed the stories of peoples, civilizations, ideas that enslave and beliefs that liberate. Anatolia Junction weaves together three narratives: that of Fred A. Reed’s early winter journey through high Anatolia following in the footsteps of Said Nursi, the Kurdish mystic; that of the life and times of this enigmatic holy man who served in the Ottoman intelligence service, and paid for his refusal to bow to Ataturk with a lifetime of imprisonment; and that of hidden Turkey, of an Islamic community torn between political involvement with an all-powerful military regime, and flight from the political arena.
From an empty grave in Urfa, Fred A. Reed guides us eastward, to Erzurum and to Van, to the Kurdish mountain village where Said Nursi was born, then on to Diyarbakir, the city of black basalt and to Mardin, city of ochre and saffron, doubling back between stages to Istanbul. The journey ends where it began, in Urfa, city of prophets.
Anatolia Junction is the third volume in Fred A. Reed’s travels through the past and present of the Middle East, the Balkans and now, Asia Minor. Today, he concludes, Turkey’s Islamists are reappropriating the culture and beliefs that 70 years of secular fundamentalism have been unable to eradicate. Picking up where his prophetic Salonica Terminus left off, Reed proves once again that the violent turmoil of this region is an enactment of the Ottoman wars of succession, and is to be seen from a Southern and Eastern perspective, not from the West which continues to deny that these wars actually exist.
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Anatomic
$20.95The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author’s body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our “petroculture” has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities.
Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author’s biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we’re doing to our world — and to our own bodies.
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Anatomical Venus
$20.00Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love.
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Anatomy of an Injury
$18.95Bringing together the themes of death, of gender and sexuality, the poet creates a speaker whose language and experience, linked from poem to poem, reflects the true complexity of a woman’s perspective. Death is a prevalent theme; anxiety, fear and paranoia simmer throughout the poems. Regret, too, is a recurrent theme, as previous experience defines us even by its absence. The societal construct of womanhood, questions of aging, and female stereotypes are opportunities for an analysis of women’s roles and the speaker’s need to subvert modern ideals of femininity and sexuality. The poems often employ satire or self-parody and wry humour to suggest that a woman’s understanding of her options in the twenty-first century, in light of the many waves of feminism, is always in flux and always challenging.
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Ancient Fall
$16.99Vengeful Mother Earth has finally decided to fight back against the humans who, under the power of a dark curse, have been abusing her for centuries. /
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And Bella Sang With Us
$15.95An action-packed drama with heart, dark humour, and song, And Bella Sang with Us is inspired by Canada’s first women police officers, Constables Minnie Miller and Lurancy Harris, and a remarkable story in Ladies of the Night, a career memoire by Calgary police officer, Margaret Gildes. Hired in Vancouver in 1912 to deal with ‘the female morality question’, Miller and Harris battle prejudice and condescension; a child-prostitute and her hulking, brain-damaged female champion; one another, and their own limitations and demons.
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And I Alone Escaped to Tell You
$19.95The settlement of African peoples in Nova Scotia is a richly layered story encompassing many waves of settlement and diverse circumstancesfrom captives to ‘freedom runners’ who sailed north from the United States with hopes of establishing a new life. The poems in And I Alone Escaped to Tell You endeavour to give these historical events a human voice, blending documentary material, memory, experience and imagination to evoke the lives of these early Black Nova Scotians and of the generations that followed. This collection is a moving meditation on the place of African-descended people in the Canadian story and on the threads connecting all of us to the African diaspora.
Finalist for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry.
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And Miles To Go Before I Sleep
$21.95Away From Her meets Strangers on a Train in this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained Down
After And The Birds Rained Down, a stunning meditation on aging and freedom, Jocelyne Saucier is back with her unique outlook on self-determination in this unsettling story about a woman’s disappearance.
Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms. And so, one September morning, she leaves Swastika, her home of the past fifty years, and hops on the Northlander train, eager to put thousands of miles of northern Quebec between her and the improbably named village, and leaving behind her perennially tormented daughter, Lisana.
Our mysterious narrator, who is documenting these disappearing northern trains, is eager to uncover the truth of Gladys’s voyage, tracking down fellow passengers and train employees for years to learn what happened to Gladys and her daughter, and why.
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And Neither Have I Wings to Fly:
$24.95The shocking true story of the institutionalization and abuse of children and adults with intellectual and physical handicaps in Canada’s oldest provincial institution in Orillia, Ontario. Daisy Lumsden and her family were such victims, along with over ten thousand children, including infants, and adults with intellectual disabilities committed over the last century to the institution now known as Huronia Regional Centre, formerly the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-Minded. The time frame of the book, 1900-1966, covers the most controversial decades in its history, a time of over-crowding and abuses that reached a crux in the 1950s and 1960s when the inmate population was nearly 3000. Victims of the rising eugenic ideology of the early 1900s that infiltrated Canada from United States and Britain, advocating segregation and involuntary sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” Daisy’s family – uneducated, ignorant, unemployed, incestuous, poor – were easily identifiable as “feeble-minded” and “unfit,” unwittingly caught up in a genetic “survival of the fittest.” But who are the “unfit” in our society? And who decides?
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And Other Stories
$24.95About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bowering has put together a new collection of Canadian short fiction that takes the theme of postmodernity one step further. And Other Stories offers not just more stories of difference, of other-ness and the race, gender, class, and politics of the other, but stories where our most talented writers become, and reflect on being, other(s).
And so, in spite of postmodern theorists trying to hammer home to us that there is no universal self, no universal truth, this collection brings into question whether or not there might actually be something universal after all—even if it is only our (temporary) experience of being an other. There is always only Our Story, And Other Stories, in this case by:
Gail Scott, Matt Cohen, Suzette Mayr, M.A.C. Farrant, Timothy Findley, Dionne Brand, Candas Jane Dorsey, Audrey Thomas, Sheila Watson, Dany Laferrière, George Bowering, Leon Rooke, David Arnason, Clint Burnham, Hiromi Goto, Guillermo Verdecchia, André Alexis, George Elliot, Diane Schoemperlen, Brian Fawcett, Thomas King, Keath Fraser, Margaret Atwood, and Clark Blaise.
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And Slowly Beauty
$17.95Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle-management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.
And Slowly Beauty, first performed in French in 2003, was created collaboratively by Michel Nadeau and colleagues from his Quebec troupe, Théâtre Niveau Parking. With the intensity of an electric current striking a reflecting pool, Nadeau shows us how Chekhov’s century-old drama about the yearning of three sisters in a dreary provincial town directly addresses Mann’s own stifled existence and liberates him from his self-imposed “gulag.”Mann returns to see Three Sisters a second time, finding that its themes of beauty and poetry lost to the monotony of everyday existence mirror many aspects of his own existence. At the same time, Mann’s dying friend realizes that he is for the first time able to appreciate the astonishing beauty of trees outside his window. The irony of such a deathbed admission is not lost on Mr. Mann.
With Chekhov’s characters and themes coming to inhabit the protagonist’s mind and life, emphasized by the repeated image of geese flying overhead – these birds do not question the purpose of their journey but find it sufficient to fly in unison – And Slowly Beauty speaks eloquently to the power of art to transform lives.
Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
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And So It Goes
$17.95Newly unemployed baby boomers Gwen and Ned appear to be completely different people: Gwen, a practical, down-to-earth Latin teacher; Ned, an impractical investment advisor constantly dreaming up new ventures for making money. But appearances can be deceiving, as their son Alex, who left home years ago, and their daughter Karen, recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, can attest. Unable to maintain the façade of their former middle-class lifestyle, Gwen and Ned search for a new life in vain, not realizing that they have become redundant—they speak dead languages. Both seek solace from the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, but he can’t help them in a world where the former universals of language and commerce no longer exist as foils for his sardonic humanism.
Of all the voices she hears, those of her parents have become least relevant to Karen, because they seem to her to be concerned only with what they feel about their daughter’s “condition,” and not with what she is experiencing within that condition. “I’m scared,” we hear Karen say as the play opens, and her fear is both justified and infectious. As the play progresses her parents discover to their horror that Karen has been living the life of a drug-addicted prostitute during her illness, lashing out at threats that aren’t there, but unable to defend herself against those that ultimately result in her brutal murder.
And So It Goes, a title derived from Vonnegut’s signature observation on the vagaries of life, is not only an allegory of our post-literate, post-9/11 lives, in which social order has collapsed, random violence is ubiquitous, “the authorities” have become hypocritically indifferent if not downright irrelevant to our security, and we have all become “scared,” but also a paean to the human will that carries each of us through our darkest hours.