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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • 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.

  • Short Haul Engine

    Short Haul Engine

    $14.00

    Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it’s hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There’s a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.

    from “Signs Taken for Wonders” … Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin….

  • Short Takes on the Apocalypse

    Short Takes on the Apocalypse

    $18.95

    Shortlisted for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize 2017

    In her new collection, two-time Governor General’s Award nominee Patricia Young decodes the fragile narratives that hold together our collective sense of self. Her poems leave no aspect of human nature untouched: passions, shames, and even our most blasé conditions are transformed through bold and unconventional metaphors. Young will comfort you and scare you with the same question, revelation, turn of phrase, yet she accomplishes all this amid an unquenchable joy, an abandon only barely contained.

  • Short Talks

    Short Talks

    $20.00

    Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner’s first poetry collection. Includes new material.

    On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a “Short Talk on Afterwords” by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

    First issued in 1992, this is Carson’s first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson’s other bestselling and award-winning works.

    The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.–“Short Talk on the Youth at Night”

    Praise for Short Talks: “Short Talks is a unique form of slag-like poetic address that arises from the full formative force of Carson’s young embodiment of a northern Ontario mining-town winter of mind.”–Margaret Christakos, from the Introduction.

  • Shot-Blue

    Shot-Blue

    $19.95

    Shot-Blue is that rarest species, a genuinely wise novel.’ – Rivka Galchen

    Rachel is a young single mother living with her son, Tristan, on a lake that borders the unchannelled north — remote, nearly inhospitable. She does what she has to do to keep them alive. But soon, and unexpectedly, Tristan will have to live alone, his youth unprotected and rough. The wild, open place that is all he knows will be overrun by strangers — strangers inhabiting the lodge that has replaced his home, strangers who make him fight, talk, and even love, when he doesn’t want to. Ravenous and unrelenting, Shot-Blue is a book of first love and first loss.

  • Should the Word Hell be Capitalized?

    Should the Word Hell be Capitalized?

    $14.95

    In these stories, J. J. Steinfeld explores the way in which the modern mind is both haunted and helped by the past. Steeped in post-Holocaust sensibility, Steinfeld’s writing demonstrates that history’s impact is as much psychological as it is physical, as he explores the many facets of survival.

  • Shout Kill Revel

    Shout Kill Revel

    $27.99

    The Undrowned Order rules the land. Their horrific plans dance to the whims of ancient cosmic entities, fuelled by the fears forced upon every soul in sight. It is believed that the young woman Helmina is their messiah, that the darkness lurking within her will one day unleash an unimaginable horror upon the earth.

    As that day approaches, Helmina, after a lifetime of wrestling with her cosmic affliction, must do more than run and hide from the cultists, her own mind, and the world itself to put an end to the madness.

    The Wild West is over. This is the Dark West. Remain fearful.

  • Shouting Your Name Down A Well

    Shouting Your Name Down A Well

    $20.00

    David W. McFadden has been exploring the Japanese forms of haiku and tankas for six decades. This is the first full-length collection of his work in those forms. The 400 or so poems in this collection create a mesmerizing overview of his life and his philosophy. With his usual tenderness and humour, he talks of the great tragedies of life and the great moments of whimsy and magic.

  • Showbiz

    Showbiz

    $18.95

    A comedian’s career is ended after a presidential assassination, and a journalist tries to track him down decades later, in this darkly humorous novel

    In 1963, Jimmy Wynn was the second most famous man in America. The comedian’s uncanny impression of the president made him a star. But when the genuine article died in a hail of bullets on a sunny afternoon in New Orleans, Jimmy’s career met a fate almost as grisly. What happened to the funny man afterward was a mystery no one cared to solve.

    Nearly twenty-five years later, Nathan Grant, an ambitious young journalist, discovers the trail Jimmy cut through the entertainment netherworld. He soon comes to realize that this forgotten court jester may have played a very serious part in the country’s favorite conspiracy theory. His strange and increasingly dangerous odyssey takes him from a dingy New York record store to the showrooms of Las Vegas, a ghost town in the Mojave Desert, and even a dinner theater in Niagara Falls, in a dark comedy about the cost of fame, a man who became a punchline, and a writer who is desperate to find out how the rest of the joke goes.