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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Shifting Paradigms

    Shifting Paradigms

    $20.00

    Continuing from Desire Lines, Shifting Paradigms is a collection of essays on art, poetry and culture–both high and low–gathered from the astute critical work of Toronto writer Ewan Whyte. Included: essays on Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Janet Cardiff, Damien Hirst, Viktor Mitic, Anne Carson and a number of other Canadian artists and poets.

  • Shifting the Balance

    Shifting the Balance

    $39.95

    Digital transformation expert Mark Schrutt reveals how the world’s top companies are using vast amounts of data to inform their decisions, disrupt industries, and get closer to their customers. Businesses that continue to rely only on intuition do so at their peril.

    What if you had the data you always wanted and could tell what was truly an emerging trend that would forever change your industry? Shifting the Balance analyzes the turn towards data-driven decision-making and describes how best-in-class organizations use data to shift their field of vision so it is forward-looking instead of reactive. Case studies with practical examples of how leading businesses address key challenges on the path to becoming data-driven include:

    • How companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Land O’Lakes, whose industries are defined by resellers, are connecting directly with their customers to improve satisfaction and relevancy
    • How data-driven decision-making shaped the largest one-sided deal in sports, paying the owners of a team that did not play a game for 40 years over $800 million
    • How companies such as Peloton and UberEats are using data-driven decision-making to disrupt and reimagine the fitness and restaurant industries
    • What professional sports franchises such as the Oakland A’s, Philadelphia Eagles, and Toronto Maple Leafs can teach us about using data in game-changing business decisions

    Shifting the Balance offers a roadmap that will enable organizations to make better business decisions that drive even better results, and provides a fascinating read along the way.

  • Shimmer

    Shimmer

    $22.95

    Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Short Fiction

    In ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other’s lives.

    Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.

  • Shimmerdogs

    Shimmerdogs

    $10.95

    Shimmerdogs is the story of young Lester B. Hopkins – Mike to almost everyone except his mother, Master Corporal Alice Mackelwain. He is just a boy trying to make sense of his own world that is ever more complicated by the intrusion of the world of his absent soldiering mother. Mike is very worried about his mother’s safety while she is in Bosnia. He, like his sister, gets caught up in his mother’s tragic stories like the one of a little boy named Edin, whose daily life includes the nightmares of the violence and terror of war. Mike wonders how to make sense of it all, how to step outside the fears he harbours and the unanswered questions he has.

    Stumbling upon a book he finds in the library that describes the ancient belief that dogs guard the doorways to death, he begins to shape an understanding of his troubles. Wasn’t he brought back to life by a shimmering white dog with “jewellery eyes” who saved him from drowning? The connections become more apparent when Mike’s dog, Merit, disappears, and he reasons she is on some kind of peacekeeping mission like his mother. Then he meets Jozef Lapinski, an elderly neighbour who has his own miraculous dog story from World War II. The pieces of his puzzling life are taking shape and he knows something but he cannot name it. Despite the admonishments of his teen sister, Nell, who is concerned about the effect of his rampant imagination on their mother, Mike pursues his instincts. As his self-doubt continues to diminish and his trust in his imagination guides his mind to make sense of what he knows, he sees more and more evidence of what he believes is true – that spirit or shimmer dogs are rescuing people from the very real dangers of our world. And for Mike, this is all the more reason to invent agents of protection for his family – or be assisted by them, whichever the case may be.

  • Shimmers of Light

    Shimmers of Light

    $24.95

    Robert Currie’s Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems uses the vernacular of ordinary working people to tell stories and sing songs of small-town prairie life. Like Alden Nowlan, or more recently, Billy Collins, this poet constructs poems from the unvarnished wood of common language—there’s no veneer, no glossing over here.
    These poems “work like small exquisite time machines . . .” writes poet Lorna Crozier in her introduction to this extensive collection of work dating from the 1970s to the present day. Currie’s poems powerfully evoke the reality of prairie life, with a frequent focus on the hard exteriors men and boys are expected to present to the world, despite the swarm of doubt and conflict roiling inside them. The characters who populate these poems are subject to difficult weather, internal and external, but their lives are sometimes illuminated by “a sudden radiance”: a deeper understanding of self, a breathtaking expanse of sky, the generosity of a friend or lover.
    The beauty of the unflinching rhythm and cadence of the poems brings light to the darker corners of even the most painful times. From a father’s tenderness in the face of his young son’s fears, to the death of a lifelong friend from ALS, to earlier narrative poems about depression-era deprivation and hardship, this work is carefully crafted, deeply honest, and open-hearted. With a foreword by Lorna Crozier and an afterword by Mark Abley.

  • Shiner

    Shiner

    $17.00

    Shiner is Eva H.D.’s powerful successor to her critically acclaimed debut, Rotten Perfect Mouth, and includes the Montreal International Poetry Prize-winning “38 Michigans.” This is lyrical poetry that is as beautiful as it is angry, bracing in the sharpness of its observations. Whether noting the emotional effects of the financial crisis, the long tail of grief, or the unfolding panorama of a cross-Canada road trip, Eva H.D. measures the world around her in vivid, rambunctious, and musical excursions that ricochet with images and ideas–a surprise at every turn.

  • Shinny’s Girls and Other Stories

    Shinny’s Girls and Other Stories

    $19.95

    While Mary Burns is a writer of exceptional talent in the “social-realism” school, Shinny’s Girls is a collection of stories which are more than just a “good read.” All of the stories in this collection are about mothers and daughters, written from a sensitive and perceptive “post-feminist” point of view, examining the lives of the fictional characters in a way which is neither determined by, nor a reaction to, male consciousness or perceptions. These stories all re-examine the myths of mother-daughter relationships, both in the classical sense of “myth” (Gaia / Demeter / Persephone) and in the modern sense of “myth” (social lies about relationships).

    Mary Burns’s stories have been published in magazines throughout North America, as well as broadcast on the CBC and the BBC.

  • Shiva’s Really Scary Gifts

    Shiva’s Really Scary Gifts

    $21.95

    Governor General’s Award-winning visual artist John Scott is perhaps best known for his Trans Am of the Apocalypse, a car with the entire Book of Revelation scratched onto it, which is on display at the National Gallery of Canada. As Ann MacDonald discovered when she began working with him, Scott’s personal life is no less compelling. So she sat down with Scott, a tape recorder and a stack of napkins for him to draw on – Shiva’s Really Scary Gifts is the result.

    From catching a baseball bat in the teeth to harbouring the FBI’s most-wanted fugitive in his Queen Street studio, John Scott has, it seems, done it all. Join him as he, in words and drawings, terrifies a pair of robbers, loses a parent, and struggles to get a gun permit for an art installation – John Scott’s intriguing stories and the hundred accompanying drawings will help you get to know the man behind the Am.

    Shiva’s Really Scary Gifts is a self-portrait of the artist as a delusional, diseased and debauched young man, a book as hilarious as it is touching.

  • Shoebox

    Shoebox

    $29.95

    In this gritty and emotional exploration of the human condition, Steve Lewis, a dedicated paramedic, faces the devastating aftermath of a fatal accident that casts a dark shadow over his once-passionate commitment to saving lives. Plagued by guilt and grief, he finds his career, family, and very existence hanging in the balance as he navigates the complexities of trauma both personal and professional. As Steve grapples with the high stakes of his job amidst the scrutiny of a community that admires yet questions him, each life he saves rekindles his passion for his work, reminding him of the profound connections he can forge through compassion and care. A compelling and visceral journey of personal redemption and triumph over adversity, Shoebox explores the human spirit’s capacity for healing.

  • Shooters

    Shooters

    $22.95

    The secret history of the real fighters in pro wrestlingShooters recounts the stories of athletes like Brock Lesnar and Gene LeBell, men who have lived their lives on the border between “works” and “shoots,” between the routines of the professional wrestling circuit and the legitimate confrontations that made their reputations.From catch wrestling masters Strangler Lewis and Billy Robinson to pro-wrestling icons like Frank Gotch and Lou Thesz, from Olympic heroes Danny Hodge and Kurt Angle to the Japanese wrestler who trained the famous Gracie family and gave birth to the global phenomenon of MMA, Shooters takes you from the shadowy carnival tent and the dingy training hall to the bright lights of the squared circle and the Las Vegas glitz of the Octagon. This volume takes fans of pro wrestling and MMA from Billy Riley’s legendary Wigan Snake Pit to the rigorous UWF Dojo in Tokyo, and draws on meticulous research and original interviews with today’s tough guys.

  • Shooting Star

    Shooting Star

    $34.95

    For many years the British motorcycle industry was the largest in the world, not counting low-powered mopeds and scooters and the like. After World War II the motorcycle industry was the third largest source of foreign exchange for the United Kingdom after motor cars and Scotch whiskey. Yet by 1975 the industry was essentially dead. What led to the fall of the motorcycle industry in Britain, after virtually defining the country for so long?

    Shooting Star: The Rise and Fall of the British Motorcycle Industry is the first comprehensive look at the motorcycle industry with a critical look at business and trade practices that led to its demise. The full romance, beauty and excitement of the machines and especially the top racers who rode them is captured here, but it’s all blended for the first time with information about the lesser known businessmen who built the companies and then ran them into the ground, as well as a critical look at some of the engineers and designers who were brilliant and badly flawed at once. The failures of the British motorcycle industry are a painful object lesson for the badly strapped American automobile industry at the present time.

  • Shop Class Hall Pass

    Shop Class Hall Pass

    $19.95

    Karin Martel had never considered what happened to her in ninth grade shop class as sexual abuse. So when she is in a regularly scheduled, routine session with the department therapist to talk through the stress of her job as a 911 operator, she surprises herself by suddenly bringing up the memory of the groping she endured in high school.

    In her job Karin deals with victims of abuse on a regular basis, but has never identified herself as one of them. Shop Class Hall Pass delves into the difficult eighteen months of therapy as she unravels the serious consequences of trauma and recognizes the impact trauma has on her callers and in her community. She also must come to terms with the realization that for thirty-five years she has been trying to fix, or control, or do, or not do whatever it was that made the boy sexually assault her every day in class, humiliating her in front of her classmates and teacher. Most importantly, Karin learns to feel compassion for her past, current, and future self.

  • Shopping Cart Pantheism

    Shopping Cart Pantheism

    $14.95

    Glorifying consumerism as the de facto religion of our time, Shopping Cart Pantheism offers a preposterous yet challenging invitation to participate in commodity worship. As our narrator meanders the Las Vegas Strip, its sites and monuments become examples of Christian sainthood, miracles, worship, and dogma now transformed into icons of consumerism. Satiric, witty, and deeply insightful, Shopping Cart Pantheism reveals the fraught beginnings of the twenty-first century’s most pervasive neurosis.

  • Shore Girl, The

    Shore Girl, The

    $19.95

    Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth.

    The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators–family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself–her family’s dark past, and the core of her mother’s despair, are slowly revealed.

    The Shore Girl is a mosaic of Rebee: of her origins, of her past and present; from darkness and grief, to understanding and hope for a brighter future.

  • Shorelines

    Shorelines

    $18.95

    A small military-occupied community sits, waiting, parched of natural water while nearby levees hold the rising global shoreline. Seventeen-year-old twins Alix and Evan pass the time in an empty, abandoned pool with what they are able to scavenge from the abandoned houses, while government official Portia returns to familiar places, her past colliding with the present. The planned evacuation notice that eventually reaches all cities has finally come, but the twins learn that survival is not guaranteed. As they rush to reach their grandmother, a retired journalist now living with dementia, her snippets of memories flow like humanity’s record player, skipping tracks before the final flood.

    A non-linear poetic play that acts like a postcard from the future, Shorelines is about family and community in a world ravaged by climate change. It also speaks to the inevitable inequality of disaster response and how poorer communities are disproportionately affected by it. Mishka Lavigne’s message within her lyrical piece is urgent and multi-dimensional: it is a reminder that all things are connected and hope can only lie in the relationships we form with the people around us.

  • Short Accounts of Tragic Occurrences

    Short Accounts of Tragic Occurrences

    $18.95

    Funny, smart and sharply composed, Nick McArthur’s debut book is just what the title suggests – a tome on brevity and heartbreak, – an all-out exploration of weirdness. At its heart, Short Accounts of Tragic Occurrences is a full account of failure, and an inventory of loss. The trials and deprivations probed in McArthur’s fiction are of the direst variety: a promising sandwich goes completely uneaten; in another, an elderly woman devolves into a ball of flesh; a high-ranking government official falls madly in love with his fax machine, only to find that his love unrequited. With a wry manner and quick gait, Short Accounts of Tragic Occurrences is a bold gambit from a unique voice in Canadian writing.