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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Self Care

    Self Care

    $24.95

    An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.

    Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.

    Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.

    An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.

  • Self Help

    Self Help

    $23.95

    Professional wrestler Al Snow delivers highlights from his onscreen antics and never-before-heard tales from the road in this high-flying memoir spanning 30 years in the ring

    In the late 90s, wrestling journeyman Al Snow looked in the mirror and saw a man who needed help. A man whose reputation within the wrestling industry was excellent but whose career was going nowhere. Channeling his frustration into the gimmick for which he would become best known, Al began talking to (and through) a mannequin head. With Extreme Championship Wrestling, Al reinvented himself as an unhinged neurotic and became one of the hottest acts in the most cutting-edge promotion in America when wrestling’s popularity was at its peak. This led to a journey back to the industry’s main stage, World Wrestling Entertainment, during the wildly popular Attitude Era, and in the central role as a trainer and father figure on the MTV reality show, Tough Enough.

    Now, after 35 years in the industry, Al Snow tells the stories of the unbelievable yet true events that formed his career, from his in-ring recollections to out-of-ring escapades, including drunken midnight journeys with a vanfull of little people, overuse of Tasers at autograph signings, and continual attempts on his life by assorted members of the animal kingdom. Self Help is Al Snow at his best, delivering what everybody wants and needs.

  • Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy

    Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy

    $18.95

    It is the Third Millennium. The 20th century is a memory. Humans no longer walk on the moon. Passenger planes no longer fly at supersonic speeds. Disinformation overwhelms the legitimate news. The signs of our civilization’s demise are all around us, but hope is not lost. In these poems, you will find a map through our dystopia and protection from all manner of monsters, both natural and human made. Only the products of our imaginations — buildings and movies, daydreams and wondrous machines — can show us how to transform our lives. Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy is a survival guide for the Dark Age that lies ahead.

  • Self-Portrait without a Bicycle

    Self-Portrait without a Bicycle

    $18.95

    “The poet listens, tastes and remembers, senses afloat, dipping into the past and then surfacing again, drawn by a perfect but fleeting moment.”
    – Descant

    Painters use the term “fugitive pigments” to describe inks or paints designed to lighten after brief exposure to light. In Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, poet and artist Jessica Hiemstra uses the idea of fugitive color to explore the grieving process: whether her subject is a lost grandparent, child, or cat, Hiemstra renders the fleetingness of life with fine, delicate strokes.

  • Self-Titled

    Self-Titled

    $16.95

    Can a breakup break you apart?

    In Self-Titled, Geoffrey Brown stares into a mirror and writes what he sees, what he thinks, what he feels. The result? A self-portrait that’s at once comic and psychotic, a complex consciousness captured in crystalline prose. Memories, manias, miasmas – Brown morphs the machinery of his mind into an utterly original entity, equal parts diary, criminal confession, sex manual and mash note, as hecontemplates a breakup.

    The novel splits into two parts; in ‘First,’ our slacker hero analyzes the minutiae of the relationship, trying to understand what he did, why it went wrong, and whether she’ll come back. In ‘Second’ he knows she’s not coming back, and he gets angry, flagellating himself with a whip of wordplay and remorse.

    Self-Titled is a singular achievement with universal appeal: who hasn’t squinted into a mirror and said, ‘What the hell is happening here?’ If Gertrude Stein’s autobiography was Everybody’s Autobiography, then Brown’s self-portrait is everybody’s self-portrait.

    Guest edited for the press by Derek McCormack.

  • Selkirk Avenue

    Selkirk Avenue

    $14.95

    When it was shortlisted for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for Drama, the jury said of Selkirk Avenue: “Quintessentially Canadian in its content, the play’s appeal resides in McManus’s skill in drawing us into the particular and varied lives of inhabitants of Winnipeg’s North End over 75 years, and in doing so, speaking to all of us.”

  • Selma Burke

    Selma Burke

    $18.95

    Winner of the Theatre BC Canadian Playwriting Competition, two Betty Mitchell Awards, and two Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards

    Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life is a flight of fancy based on the incredible life of sculptor Dr. Selma Hortense Burke, who lived from 1900 to 1995, approximately 49,932,000 minutes. Here, imagined, are ninety of them, in a play that asks, “Who gets to make art, and who gets to destroy it?”

    African American sculptor Selma Burke chronicled many of the extraordinary and devastating events of the past century in her outstanding work: lynchings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Holocaust, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Understanding that it is always easier to rip things down than build them up, Burke persisted in artmaking in the face of a society that didn’t always recognize her talents, a husband who demolished her work, and a government who stole it.

  • Selvage

    Selvage

    $22.95

    We don’t choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past.

    Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.

  • Semi-Detached

    Semi-Detached

    $24.95

    Hearts may freeze or thaw, but love never dies.

    In December 2013, an ice storm buries Toronto as realtor Laura Keys prepares to sell a one-of-a-kind house on behalf of its comatose owner. Haunting Laura, and longing to be invited in, is a mysterious teenage girl with a Scottish terrier tucked into her coat.

    As Laura readies the house for showing, she learns more about its owner, Edna “Eddie” Ferguson. Leading up to the Great Snowstorm of 1944, Eddie, a brickmaker, enters into a passionate yet ill-fated affair with her boss’s daughter. While uncovering the past, Laura navigates both the death of her mother and a troubled marriage straining under the weight of her infertility.

    Across two paralyzing winter storms, set nearly seventy years apart and connected by a house and a murder, Semi-Detached contends with living after loss, love, and the meaning of home.

    Insightful and evocative, emotionally intelligent and propulsive, this is a novel from a writer at the top of her game.

  • send

    send

    $20.00

    Domenico Capilongo continues to play with lyricism, form and language in his new poetry collection. send is a collection of poetry that explores our many modes of communication from smoke signals to texting. The work uses lyric meditations, personal narratives and experimental poetry to shed light on the ways in which we try to express ourselves.

  • Send Me Into the Woods Alone

    Send Me Into the Woods Alone

    $20.95

    Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbanite.

    Send Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood.

    These essays touch on the major milestones of raising children, from giving birth (and having approximately a million hands in your vagina) and taking your beautiful newborn home (and feeling like you’ve stolen your baby from the hospital), to lying to kids about the Tooth Fairy and mastering the subtle art of beating children at board games. Plus the pitfalls of online culture and the #winemom phenomenon, and the unattainable expectations placed on mothers today.

    Written from the perspective of an always tired, often anxious, and reluctant suburbanite who is doing her damn best, these essays articulate one woman’s experience in order to help mothers of all kinds process the wildly variable, deeply different ways in which being a mom changes our lives.

    “Easily the most validating book you’ll read this year.”—Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books

  • Send More Tourists…the Last Ones Were Delicious

    Send More Tourists…the Last Ones Were Delicious

    $19.95

    ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE MIRAMICHI READER’S ‘THE VERY BEST!’ SHORT FICTION AWARD***

    ***2020 RELIT AWARDS: SHORT FICTION WINNER***

    With birth, death, contemplation, and close calls, Send More Tourists… the Last Ones Were Delicious explores how we respond to the weight of social expectations. From the hidden pressures of wall paint and tarot card predictions, to the burden of phone numbers and the dismembering of saints, Waddleton takes us on a surrealist road trip through the missteps of her vivid characters with honesty and compassion. These are stories of survival. Unafraid, dreamy, and downright weird, these stories cross boundaries of geography, gender, and generation with an eye to the transient nature of human life

  • Sensational Vancouver

    Sensational Vancouver

    $24.00

    Winner, City of Vancouver Heritage Award (2015)

    #1 BC Bestseller List

    History books typically show Vancouver as a pioneer city built on forestry, fisheries, and tourism, but behind the snow-capped mountains and rain forests, the Vancouver of the first half of the 20th century was a hotbed of civic corruption. The top job at the Vancouver Police Department was a revolving door with the average tenure for a police chief of just four years.

    In those early years Detective Joe Ricci’s beat was the opium dens and gambling joints of Chinatown, while Lurancy Harris – the first female cop in Canada – patrolled the high-end brothels of Alexander Street. Later, proceeds from rum running produced some of the city’s most iconic buildings, cops became robbers, and the city reeled from a series of unsolved murders.

    But Vancouver is more than bookies, brothels, and bootleggers – the city also produced legendary women, world-class entertainers, and ground-breaking architecture.

    Sensational Vancouver is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver’s famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived.

    Sensational Vancouver covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, Bryan Adams, and Michael Bublé.

    Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown.

    Praise for Sensational Vancouver:

    Recommended by Peter Darbyshire for Non-Fiction of 2014 (on Corey Redekop’s blog)

    BC Books for Everybody Pick

    “Lazarus is an enthusiastic researcher, a quirky writer of prose, and an energetic amateur historian in somewhat the same manner as the late Chuck Davis. Her book jumps around like an antipodean marsupial but it’s great fun – particularly when it deals with dope peddlers, hardworking bootleggers, disgraced mayors, and corrupt chief constables.” (The Georgia Straight)

    “Sensational Vancouver provides lively social history, appeals to a broad readership, and adds to the growing number of enlightening books about our city’s past.” (BC History)

    “Sensational Vancouver is lavishly illustrated with photographs of people and places, and a map makes it easy to tie things together. This book is filled with great stories, and they are short, so it’s easy to dip in here and there as the mood strikes. As a package, they make for fascinating reading.” (Victoria Times Colonist)

  • Sensational Victoria

    Sensational Victoria

    $24.00

    The follow-up to Eve Lazarus’s successful At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes, Sensational Victoria gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks. Sensational Victoria covers legendary women, including Emily Carr, Nellie McClung, Gwen Cash, Sylvia Holland, and Myfanwy Pavelic; prominent madams and their brothels; murders in the capital – five ranging from 1898 to 1992; and, the homes of limners (painters of ornamental decoration), writers, and entertainers, including Herbert Siebner, Elza Mayhew, Pat Martin Bates, Robin Skelton, Carole Sabiston, Bruce Hutchison, Alice Munro, David Foster, Spoony Sundher, and Nell Shipman.

    Lavishly illustrated throughout with archival and contemporary photographs, Sensational Victoria is a must-read for both history buffs and regular visitors to The Garden City.

    Praise for Sensational Victoria:

    “Sensational Victoria is an eclectic compendium of truly captivating stories. While a few are sensational because they are about murders and ghosts, most of them are sensational because they excite our senses of sight and sound and allude to our sense of smell. The work of selected artists, writers, poets, and gardeners comes to life through Lazarus’s carefully written prose, brief quotations, and excellent photographs.” (BC Studies)

    “Some of the stories are well known but presented from a different perspective, and the chapter on the Linners brings to light a creative group many may not know. Overall, Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Ghosts and Gardens provides an interesting portrait of Victoria and some of the personalities that call the city home.” (Spacing)

    “This has already been a stellar year for books about local history. If you’re still looking … there are more than a dozen top-quality choices on the shelves, from books on Victoria City Hall and the University of Victoria to ones on the Japanese community and Government Street. This late arrival, Sensational Victoria, is one of the year’s best. … Dozens of archival and modern photographs of the people and the buildings help to bring the stories to life. It’s a great presentation that helps make the book a success.” (Times Colonist)

  • Sense Of Style

    Sense Of Style

    $26.00

    Professor Keith believes that insufficient attention has been paid in the recent past to the art of Canadian fiction. A Sense of Style returns to more traditional emphases. Keith has chosen the work of ten fiction-writers representing the range of Canadian fiction during the past fifty years, and has discussed their writings in what he believes to be the most appropriate terms — terms which emphasize artistry rather than theme or the exploration of national identity. The writers considered are Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, Jack Hodgins, Hugh Hood, Margaret Laurence, W.O. Mitchell, Alice Munro, Howard O’Hagan, and Ethel Wilson.

  • Sensorial

    Sensorial

    $18.95

    Sensorial is a journey in sensory perception. The senses guide us through urban landscapes, animal connections and familial bonds as we consider who we are, where we are?both physically and metaphysically?and what truly matters. Sensorial proposes one set of responses to the never-ending data we process as we navigate through life. In particular, it considers aging and illness on the journey towards life’s end?and examines gain and loss in the aggregate.