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Showing 6289–6304 of 9481 results
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Sextet
$18.95Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity – even, quite possibly, a compromised immune system, and certainly, in many cases, complete and utter memory loss – both before and after. It seemed only natural, then, for playwright Morris Panych to put these two types of human experience together into one play. After all, both take practice.
This dark and steamy comedy explores the harmonies and dysfunctions of six sexually entangled musicians on an ill-fated winter tour. When a blizzard strands this sextet for an extra night, they have only their instruments, each other, and their secrets to keep them warm.
Cast of 4 men and 2 women.
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sfumato
$19.99A dead mouse reclining in a slipper; a cigarette smouldering on a motel bedside table; a woman seeing her life reflected in a deserted bird feeder. In Stones’ poetic universe the images pile starkly into the complex tissue of mortal experience, an abstruse sfumato-like weave of the human soul. By turns playful, darkly meditative and beautifully transcendent, Stones ventilates a world keenly observed, acutely realized and memorably articulated.
Poets show people things that they cannot see themselves. David Stones is such a poet and sfumato is his mirror, at once engaging, boldly unflinching.
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Shackles
$19.95A reissued CanLit tale of feminism and power
Naomi Lennox struggles with two roles: promising writer, and dutiful wife to unambitious and proper Arthur. Will she follow her desire to pursue a writing career, supported by her lover Hugo Main and well-known writer Shireen Dey? Or will she remain bound to her husband, her family, and her role in society at the expense of everything else?
First published in 1926, Madge Macbeth’s Shackles magnifies the middle-class power and gender dynamics of its time. At turns provocative and surprising, and filled with dialogue and debate that expose early twentieth century limitations and opportunities for both women and men, Shackles is a colourful depiction of first-wave feminism in Canada.
“Shackles is a fascinating novel of one woman’s struggle to forge an artistic life amidst the intersecting restrictions of gender and economics.”—from the new introduction by Notes From a Feminist Killjoy author Erin Wunker
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Shade
$22.95After her plans for the future are disrupted by an unexpected breakup, Benni, born and raised in northern Ontario, seeks escape from her everyday routine by visiting her father in the Philippines– the fantastical land of ghosts and glamour that her parents described to her as a child. In the Philippines, Benni is captivated by the luxurious lifestyle of the wealthy members of her mother’s family. Canada, in comparison, is a bleak world of work, work, and more work, and Benni cannot understand why her parents ever left. During her visit, Benni finds much more than she bargained for: she discovers a world of poverty that supports the rich and the social restrictions that even the rich experience; she learns to value the honest, human relationships that come from seeking and reconnecting with family; and she comes to understand the importance of the stories we tell ourselves to construct and maintain our identity.
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Shadow Blight
$18.95Shadow Blight considers the pain and isolation of pregnancy loss through the lens of classical myth. Drawing on the stories of Niobe—whose monumental suffering at the loss of her children literally turned her to stone—and others, this collection explores the experience of being swept away by grief and silenced by the world. Skirting the tropes (“o how beautiful / the poets make our catastrophes”), MacAskill interweaves the ancient with the contemporary in a way that opens possibilities and offers a new language for those “shut up in stillness.”
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Shadow Life
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Shadow of Doubt
$19.95Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted, Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence (Non-Fiction)
On July 6, 2011, Richard Oland, scion of the Moosehead brewing family, was murdered in his office. The brutal killing stunned the city of Saint John, and news of the crime reverberated across the country. In a shocking turn, and after a two-and-half-year police investigation, Oland’s only son, Dennis, was arrested for second-degree murder.
CBC reporter Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon covered the Oland case from the beginning. In Shadow of Doubt, she examines the controversial investigation: from the day Richard Oland’s battered body was discovered to the conclusion of Dennis Oland’s trial, including the hotly debated verdict and its aftermath. Meticulously examining the evidence, MacKinnon vividly reconstructs the cases for both the prosecution and the defence. She delves into the Oland history, exploring the strained relationships, infidelities, and financial problems that, according to the Crown, provided motives for murder.
Shadow of Doubt is a revealing look at a sensational crime, the tribulations of a prominent family, and the inner workings of the justice system that led to Dennis Oland’s contentious conviction.
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Shadow of Doubt: Revised and Expanded Edition
$22.95A national bestseller, now updated, expanded, and revised to tell an even bigger story.
On July 6, 2011, Richard Oland, scion of the Moosehead brewing family, was bludgeoned to death in his Saint John office. In a shocking turn, the multimillionaire’s only son, Dennis, was arrested for second-degree murder. Found guilty by a jury in 2015, Dennis Oland successfully appealed his conviction and was retried three years later.
In this new revised and expanded edition, MacKinnon takes readers inside every stage of one of Canada’s most gripping murder trials. She addresses the issues with the original police investigation, Oland’s appeal and his subsequent appearance at the Supreme Court of Canada, new evidence and witnesses brought forward at the retrial, and the sensational final verdict.
A reporter for the CBC, Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon covered the Oland case from the very beginning to the judge ’s final verdict. In this definitive account of a series of trials for a horrific crime, she lays bare the tribulations of a prominent family and the inner workings of the justice system that led to Dennis Oland’s contentious conviction, retrial, and acquittal.
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Shadow of the Living Brightness
$24.95Poems about unknowing and the uncertainty of in-between states
Shadow of the Living Brightness takes its title from Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s description of the ‘sensation of God’s presence.’ Béchard manages to make this and other ineffables effable in this collection of poems that offers multiple dimensions of knowing and feeling that are at once fugitive and palpable. How to limn the tension between stepping into and away from the world? What do we not see in our seeing? How to sound sound? The book explores, with the dazzling honesty only a slant approach can achieve: grief, withdrawal, hope, mental illness, suicide. This is a book about unknowing, about uncertainty and in-between states. At the same time, the aching beauty of things and the language that evokes them can fire up a sense of radical attention and connection. Here it’s the very fallibility of set identities and truths that invites our re-engagement with their wobbly splendour.
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Shadow Sonnets, The
$14.95In this new collection, Richard Sommer shadows the Shakespearean sonnet, taking the most traditional form for expressing love and expanding its range and message to reflect our times. Sommer’s sonnets create a strange music, with rhymes that are often proximate rather than identical. They are shadows, too, of the spirit of the sonnet, of its ever present thread of argument, its dense and gnarled sense of intimate conversation or panicked declaration, its erotic unrest, its terrible desire for someone and something unpossessed and not to be possessed. Sommer extends the sonnet beyond its traditional territory of love between man and woman to embrace the natural world around him and the deteriorating ecology of the planet. The result is a rich weave of past and present, love and pain, language and world.
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Shadows and Light
$40.00When the pandemic began in March 2020, Calgary emergency physician Heather Patterson was already feeling burnt out. Photography had always been a way of unwinding for her, and as the pandemic gathered speed, Patterson decided to begin chronicling it. Shadows and Light presents a selection of Patterson’s images, taking readers to the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic and giving them an illuminating, behind-the-scenes view of the real impact of the virus and the heroic front-line workers who have been fighting it for over two years.
Patterson’s expert lens gives incredible insight into the life of healthcare workers — physicians, nurses, and hospital support staff — during the pandemic, and what patients experience when hospitalized with COVID. Yet, amid the isolation of lockdowns and a seemingly never-ending cycle of new restrictions associated with new variants, Patterson finds hope and a renewed sense of purpose in the resilience of the human spirit and the inspiring fortitude of Canada’s often invisible pandemic heroes.
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Shadows of the Crimson Sun
$24.95After the Russian invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria (Manchukuo) in 1945, fourteen-year-old Akihisa Takayama escapes with his family to their ancestral Taiwan. Here they find themselves under the brutal Chinese dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In the 1960s, now a physician calling himself Charles Yang, he escapes with his young family to the United States, from where they finally go on to Canada to become among the first Taiwanese Canadians in Vancouver. Charles Yang’s experiences illuminate the “White Terror” of Taiwan, and the geopolitical dispute between Communist China and Taiwan over the meaning of “One China.” This is a rare, humane, and personal account of the little known histories of Manchukuo and Taiwanese immigration to North America.
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Shaf and the Remington
$24.95Shaf, a physics teacher and a philosopher, fought as a partisan in the Balkans during the Second World War. He has not been heard from for 40 years. How could such an ubiquitous and expansive person disappear? Did the murder of his mother and girlfriend by fascists during the War spark his sporadic displays of insanity? Rumours had him teaching in the United States and Europe during the Cold War.
Ben, Shaf?s former student and now a lawyer in Zurich, has never given up looking for him. He finally meets up with Shaf in his home town, where they first met. The encounter does not turn out as expected.
Peopling the story are four generations of a Balkan family. They include Ben?s grandfather, a vicious bureaucrat and admirer of Mussolini, his father, an enigmatic doctor and partisan leader, his mother, a professor of Electro-Magnetism in a Polytechnique, and his sister Nika, whose fate is characteristic of the times. An 1890 Remington double-barrel shotgun appears and disappears throughout the story.
Set in Sabzic, a fictitious town in an unnamed country in the Balkans, Shaf and the Remington chronicles the lives of a family, a people, a town and a nation, from dawn at the time of the first great War to dusk as the Cold War sputters to an end.
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Shag Carpet Action
$18.00Finalist, ReLit Award (2012)
Shag Carpet Action is Matthew Firth’s boldest and brashest collection of stories to date. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada’s most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.
Firth’s gimlet-eyed, deep mining of the bowels of contemporary Canadian life is unwavering. Here are tales of some of Canada’s forgotten people – strivers who are down, but not quite out – surviving by their wits and guts during these harsh times.
Praise for Shag Carpet Action:
“Firth’s strength lies not simply in provocatively deploying overt sexuality, but rather the way he leverages bald carnality to make broader, potent statements about the human condition.” (Quill & Quire)
“Short stories work best when they’re memorable, and Firth’s gift is to lodge a vivid image in the reader’s numb brain to keep him from nodding off and perhaps linger on. This gift is clever, concise writing no superfluous flowery shit. To the point, bold, matter of fact.” (OttawaXpress)
“Firth’s stories remind us of the realities of being human; what we think, feel, and do. The writing is easy to read, raw-to-the-bone honest, and refreshingly real. And that’s why I highly recommend you forget about your clean-cut CanLit filler and get your knees dirty with something a little more to the floor – Shag Carpet Action.” (Jerrod Edson, blog)
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Shaggy
$19.95“First and foremost, I am a reggae artist,” insists Shaggy. Born Orville Richard Burrell, the multi-platinum pop icon is a worldwide ambassador for reggae, but few know just how connected Shaggy is with the sound of Jamaican rhythms. Shaggy: Dogamuffin Style details the rise of a superstar from Kingston, Jamaica, to his teen years in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to his time spent in the Marines during the Gulf War, while at the same time introducing the reader to the fascinating history and rich culture of reggae music. Delving into the musical trends in Jamaica during Shaggy’s formative years, the popularity of soundsystem “deejays” (the Jamaican equivalent of rap MCs), and the influence of both 1970s reggae and Bob Marley, Micah Locilento provides an insight into Shaggy’s unique sound. Although most, if not all, journalists label him a rapper, Shaggy: Dogamuffin Style reveals not only Shaggy’s reggae roots, but opens the door to exciting new music sure to please fans of Mr. Boombastic.
As Locilento explains, almost everything about Shaggy, is in fact rooted in the rich and lively culture of the Jamaican dancehall, a culture that’s been the driving force behind almost every development in reggae music over the past half-century, beginning in Jamaica and spreading throughout the world in the form of hip hop, techno, and electronica.
• Shaggy’s last album, Hot Shot, sold more than 10,000,000 copies worldwide
• Sales higher per capita in Canada than
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Shah of Shea Heights, The
$19.95The Shah of Shea Heights is the tall tale of a criminal family as told by Billy Tucker, a colourful character with an equally colourful past. His “mother of all tales” had been relayed by his own father one night beside the fireplace, accompanied by increasing amounts of Lambs & Coke. The delightful results invoke the intimacy of the classic fireside tale and the enduring narratives of Mark Twain.