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Showing 6081–6096 of 9481 results
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Sad Old Faggot
$19.95A daring foray into the groundbreaking genre of autobiographical fiction
Sad Old Faggot is the absorbing, sometimes embarrassing, always entertaining story of a lonely, self-obsessed, selfish, deluded, impotent 62-year-old gay man named Sky Gilbert who — despite his best intentions — cannot help but become a stereotype.
Sky’s main claim to fame is founding Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 1979. But since leaving Buddies, he’s fallen on hard times. Sky Gilbert is no longer even remotely famous. He has to fight off his own bitterness as audiences for his plays steadily dwindle. Theatre people dismiss his work as old news and point to the fact that he teaches at the University of Guelph as proof: his descent into academia clearly signals his failure as an artist.
All along the way, the book questions our truths and celebrates their mutability. What is really true about each of us? What do we actually know about ourselves? And how much, it asks, of our own personal truth is based on fact — and how much is rooted in fiction?
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Sad Truth
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Sadi’s Dragons
$16.95A middle-grade novel about Sadi, an unhoused eleven-year-old girl, and Marguerite, an old woman losing her memory, and the sparks that fly when their lives collide.
The story opens on eleven-year-old Sadi, hungry and anxious as she waits for her mother, Fleur, to return to their tent on the riverbank. Not far away, an old woman, Marguerite, an artist struggling with memory loss, throws the subject of an attempted still life, a fruit bowl, into her yard, which Sadi finds and steals. Marguerite, frustrated at her attempts to paint, keeps throwing things into her yard and Sadi keeps taking them, until Sadi returns one of the items — a big canvas — but not before painting a dragon on it.
Sadi is recovering from an acquired brain injury and struggling with memories of the boating accident in which her brother and father died. Marguerite can’t remember her dog’s name . . . or how to make paintings as she used to. Then Marguerite passes off Sadi’s painting as her own. This lie — along with her dementia — becomes the dragon she must tame through the course of the story, while Sadi is haunted by the accident she is trying to forget, and the by fact that her mother and a potential insurance settlement rely on what she has forgotten.
Each character has a truth and a lie, and as the story unfolds, we see how these play out. Each lie wards off a dragon — the thing each character fears most of all.
Sadi’s Dragons features a portrait of an older woman in a context for younger readers, in which the girl and the elderly woman are shown working together to resolve each other’s problems. The book spotlights the unhoused experience, brain injuries, dementia, intergenerational bonds and the forging of an unconventional family structure.
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Sadie X
$23.00Having followed the brilliant virologist Régnier from Montreal to Marseille many years ago, Sadie now works as a researcher in a lab, spending most of her time among microscopic creatures who teach her about life as a parasite. By day, she pushes the limits of her understanding alongside Régnier, who taught her that to study viruses, she must think infectiously, allow herself to be contaminated by dangerous ideas. By night, Sadie loses herself in bars, music, drugs, sensuality. Until she gets a call from the past that lures her back across the Atlantic.
When her estranged father tells her that a bizarre virus has been found in his hospital, Sadie returns to Montreal and her family, and all the unexpected changes time has wrought, to solve this new puzzle. Soon she realizes that the person she thought she was—someone who can leave everything behind—no longer exists. What is left for her instead is sinking into the unknown to find out what happens when ideas come to life.
This is a deeply inventive and singular novel about the power of metamorphosis and symbiosis. Combining the cerebral and the sensual, Sadie X explores humanity’s relationship to the rest of the world, and the role of rationale—and its limits in our multilayered, regenerative existences.
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Safe and Sound
$9.95Safe and Sound has two purposes: to help people avoid getting lost in the woods in the first place and to enable those who are lost to emerge unscathed. The book tells what to take in a ready pack and why, how to read a map and compass, how hunters can separate yet keep in touch, and how not to be disabled by a change in the weather or a minor accident. It also tells how to remain safe and sound until help arrives.
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Safe as Houses
$20.00Liz Ryerson believes that Hillcrest Village, her Toronto neighbourhood, is quaint and quiet, but stumbling over a corpse while walking her dog dissolves that illusion for good. When she realizes that she actually knew the dead man, a real estate broker who appraised the building she coowns with her philandering ex-husband, she becomes obsessed with solving the crime. The more instability is revealed in her life, the more she needs to find out who killed James Scott — and why.
Retired Classics professor Maxime Bertrand is delighted to play Watson to her Holmes. For Liz, the investigation is a way of asserting control in a world she no longer recognizes. It is also a means of proving to herself and her children she is not in retreat from life but can grow and change. For Maxime, it’s a way of becoming re-engaged in life after his wife’s death. Neither of them anticipates the possibility of real danger, despite police warning them to stop meddling in criminal matters.
In Safe as Houses, novelist Susan Glickman explores her own Toronto neighbourhood, imagining how a confrontation with murder might peel away its veneer of security and civility. She also shows, through her warm, witty, and wise depiction of everyday life, what is worth saving.
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Safely Home Pacific Western
$19.95In his second collection of poems, Jeff Latosik looks to those provisional moments of arrival and anchoring in what Canadian poet Don Coles has called “the catastrophe of time.”
Safely Home Pacific Western is a combination of words common to travel-package tour buses, and, as the title implies, there will be journeys to be had: into ruined stretches of the rural US and Ontario mine country, across the English Channel in a hot air balloon, into the flight paths of fish hurled across Northern Territory Australia by a water spout, and even the far blinking orbit of a Navstar satellite. But unlike that modern promise of a brief, comfortable excursion, these poems often end up in strange, uncomfortable places that shore up the always prevalent chaotic impulses of civilization, finding not reconciliation but charged moments of witness, of coming to terms with the very act of looking. Moving through alternate histories, cutting edge and antiquated technology, and the wily language of patent and invention, Safely Home Pacific Western peers deep into the notion of personal and communal progress to reckon with the only seeming certainty: that in a poem, as in our lives, we are done and undone by the emergent element we cannot control.
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Safety in Bear Country
$19.95By turns funny, savage, poetic and heartbreaking, Safety in Bear Country follows Serena, a recent graduate from art school who thought she’d have it all figured out and be making a comfortable living as an artist, but instead finds herself dumped by her boyfriend and back in her parents’ basement in the backwater town she couldn’t wait to leave. The year is 1994: miserable and lost in the dark forest of her early twenties, Serena takes a job with her small town’s main employer, an institution for people with developmental disabilities. When one of the residents dies in her care, Serena flees the trauma, ultimately embarking on a journey that pushes and pulls her between constraint and freedom, despair and hope. Set in small-town Ontario, Australia, northern British Columbia and Miami, Safety in Bear Country pulls the reader with gorgeous and inventive prose though a world of inequity, spirituality, activism and psychedelics as Serena labours to make sense of her place in the world.
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Safety of War
$22.95David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father’s suicide.
His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives’ imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David’s deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in the movie Patton, or d) all, or any, of the aforementioned. Carnage ensues, leading David through a woozy landscape of churning highways, deserted shopping malls and small towns, lured backward through the chasms of memory and nostalgia by the monster’s coaxing squeals and forward toward an uncertain, hallucinatory future.
Here, Lolita meets Maldoror meets 50s pulp horror comics. Safety of War is a hellride of exploded symbolism and beery misadventures, murders and tragedies, laughs, puzzles and meditations on valour and sacrifice in a world short on true heroes.
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Safety Razor
$20.00Safety Razor combines personal lyrics with translations from Old Norse, its taut poems running like high-wires between the poles of terror and joy, danger and safety, erudition and naivety. Mingling subjects as diverse as dinosaur bones and diacritical markers, Vikings and mothering, Safety Razor pits cultural and historical flotsam against the intimate and the academic. Be prepared for a voice that is both vulnerable and scientific as it explores the exploitation of Jumbo the Elephant, how a baby experiences a tornado, or a Viking demonstration of poetic prowess through vomit and blood. Every line in Osborne’s sharp verse is like a “pin dipped in tobacco spit,” something inked with precision and grit.
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Saga of the Wet Hens
$17.95One night in the Promised Land of the North of the Americas, at the centre of a fabulous vortex, four women—Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hèbert—meet, and perform six tableaux. Onstage, the women talk and gallop, they sit and rock; they descend from the heavens like angels, they menstruate, they sing; they bake bread, they eat, they say Mass; they trade secrets, recite poetry, share their hopes and fears, their dreams and private terrors; they look into history, decide to collaborate, they write; they become hens, they support and give birth to each other—and to all women everywhere. Saga of the Wet Hens is Jovette Marchessault’s first full-length play and a major poetic dramatic literary work.
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Sage Island
$19.95It’s the mid-1920s and New York is shimmering with the hope and vigour of a younger generation in headlong pursuit of greater freedoms and pleasures. Watching from the sidelines, nineteen-year-old Savanna Mason struggles with the gravity of her perceived failures, finding release and security in the water. Savi believes that her swimming has the power to change her world. Just as it seems this notion has been shattered for good, she embarks on a journey to the Wrigley Ocean Marathon-a twenty-two-mile race from Catalina Island to Los Angeles. Inspired by true events, with vivid glimpses of Prohibition, class antagonism and the evolving attitudes of the flapper era, Sage Island is a poignant novel about a young woman diving and surfacing.
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Said Like Reeds or Things
$14.95Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!
Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.
Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. ‘poems’, seek strangeness in familiar language; their effect is harmonic dissonance within the mind – like an overturned toy box in your path to the television set, these poems are a fresh and amusing diversion from the everyday from which they are derived. Mysteriously entertaining and precise, these succinct, visual lyrics say as much about the world as they do about their own status as objects for reading, and they persist in the hilarity and contemplation of their own enigmatic possibilities.
‘Mark Truscott’s Said Like Reeds or Things is the work of a mischievous conservationist with a shadow of Basho in the mix. It’s sometimes snappy, sometimes calm, and always an exhilarating tease. This is the place where little pieces of perfection ride along a sublime horizon line.’
– Lisa Jarnot
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Sailors Can’t Swim
$24.95Sailors Can’t Swim is a squall of a novel: part bildungsroman, part maritime fairy tale, part history of an alternate eighteenth century. With gale-force vitality, it lays bare the meanness of meritocracy and the arbitrariness of citizenship in a world where every possession, or privilege, belonged to someone else first.
On the island of Ys, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, safety lies behind the city’s high walls – where citizens live in opulent security while the shore dwellers below rebuild their ruined homes after each great equinoctial tide. Here Danaé Poussin is an orphan – and a swimmer, a gift both rare and suspect on Ys. She was born to the sea but yearns for a life within the walls. Flowing between shore, city, and open ocean, she navigates the rocky possibilities for women – from salter to thief to aristocrat to sailor’s wife – in the calm before the revolution.
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Saint Frances of Hollywood
$19.95Her star rising as a Hollywood diva, Frances Farmer chooses to join the socialist Group Theatre in New York. This idealistic, raucous and non-conforming movie star, pursued by the government for her alleged communist connections, was finally incarcerated with the help of her mother at Steilacoom, a Seattle psychiatric hospital, where she was lobotomized and released as “cured” in 1949. Saint Frances of Hollywood has taken the biographical details of Frances Farmer’s life and transformed them into a mesmerizing and quintessential classical tragedy.
Cast of 4 women and 4 men.
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Saint John Fortifications, 1630-1956
$16.95Saint John became a gateway to what is now Canada in the early 1600s, and Fort La Tour, built in 1632, was one of the three main forts of Acadie. In Saint John Fortifications, Roger Sarty and Doug Knight trace the history of the port’s defences, from the earliest log palisades to the bunkers, gun emplacements, and communications stations built during World War II. Put to the test during the American Revolutionary War, Saint John has figured as one of Canada’s most significant guardians. American independence effectively closed the shipping route between the mouth of the Richelieu River, on the St. Lawrence, and the mouth of the Hudson River, at New York City. Saint John took over some of this traffic, and so the 19th century wars and threatened wars between Canada and the United States resulted in bigger and better fortifications for the city. Each new defence system has incorporated the old, including the installations built as protection from German invasion during the two World Wars. Although the last of the modern installations on Partridge Island was disabled in 1956, many sites still contain substantial reminders of their past strength. Visitors today can trace the evidence of this great commercial port’s military past.
Saint John Fortifications, 1630-1956 is the first book in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series published by Goose Lane Editions in collaboration with the New Brunswick Military Heritage Project.