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Showing 49–64 of 9311 results
He lived alone with very little and more than enough, and preferred it that way. “Simply simply,” he was oft heard to say. He was alone, on his own, and that was okay…
Darrel is a middle-aged intellectually challenged man who lives with his mother. When she dies in her sleep, Darrel does not realize she is gone, and so, for over a week, he lives alone. Tandem to Darrel’s day-to-day routine are the adventures of his favourite children’s book characters, Honeydog and Little Burp. Their search for a home leads the dog and duck duo to an understanding of family, while Darrel’s ease in the world illustrates just how his mother has paved the path for him to be without her. Episodes from the past, like faded colour snapshots from a family album, illustrate this mother’s love for her son in all its honesty and fierce, unwavering will. Simple, tender, funny and unapologetic, 10 Days On Earth asks: If you were alone but didn’t know it, would you feel lonely?
Escaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird’s plumage, Michael Trussler’s 10:10 plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the Anthropocene. How can there be both terrible violence and extraordinary beauty in the world? How can birdwatching coexist with genocide? How can nature be loved and destroyed all at once?
Trussler’s poetic voice is delightfully fluid: moments and images from movies, aesthetic theory, and animal life collide in each poem, sometimes in a single line. From lyrics to prose, high art to emails, Trussler sifts through the shards of society to seek refuge in the beauty and strangeness of words, the beguiling richness of images, the intensity of the natural world.
With stories that chronicle the abused, the homeless, the suicidal, those seeking a world away from the reserve, and those returning to the indigenous community to improve themselves, 13 Lives is a fact-based account of events affecting thirteen indigenous persons. In each of these narratives nature plays a pivotal role, and against that backdrop 13 Lives commemorates each character’s struggles and celebrates their successes.
Brimming with a dark and brittle humor, 15 Seconds is a play about a young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother handicapped by cerebral palsy. These four characters are constantly making choices about reality and illusion; imagination and fantasy; the hale and the handicapped; about the way things are and the way they might be. The play’s characters each exist in their own worlds utterly without context: objectified to the point where their fantasies about who they might have been are all that define them to themselves, and who they superficially appear to be is all that defines them to each other. They are utterly unable to bridge this gulf and imagine each other; though they all remember that they should try to do so, they seem to have forgotten from where this moral imperative emanates. It is from this vestigial organ of empathy that much of the humour of the play is derived.
While the inability of such profoundly superficial and alienated characters to understand each other is the stock-in-trade of stand-up comedians and variety shows, 15 Seconds does something completely unexpected with this material—the audience is deprived of its traditional cathartic closure, and does not get to feel smug and morally superior after visiting with these characters. It is the characters themselves who, in their irredeemable banality, pronounce their own verdicts of condemnation. In the end, chance reigns supreme in a world where fifteen seconds of inattention or error can, and in fact does, irrevocably determine the shape of an entire lifetime.
Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
A collection of creative non-fiction stories about the colonization and immigration in northern Ontario.
WINNER, American Meteorological Society’s Louis J. Battan Authors’ Award
WINNER, 2019 Science Writers & Communicators of Canada Book Award
WINNER, 2018 Lane Anderson Award
“With wit and a humbling sense of wonder, this is a book that can be shared and appreciated by a wide audience who now religiously check their phones for daily forecasts.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“This terrific, accessible, and exciting read helps us to better understand the aspects of weather and the atmosphere all around us.” —Library Journal Starred Review
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air — 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer — 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm — at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate. Dewdney details the history of weather forecasting and introduces us to the eccentric and determined pioneers of science and observation whose efforts gave us the understanding of weather we have today.
18 Miles is a kaleidoscopic and fact-filled journey that uncovers our obsession with the atmosphere and weather — as both evocative metaphor and physical reality. From the roaring winds of Katrina to the frozen oceans of Snowball Earth, Dewdney entertains as he gives readers a long overdue look at the very air we breathe.
The true story of the first Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship.
The pride of Chatham’s East End, the Coloured All-Stars broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the Major Leagues. Fielding a team of the best Black baseball players from across southwestern Ontario and Michigan, theirs is a story that could only have happened in this particular time and place: during the depths of the Great Depression, in a small industrial town a short distance from the American border, home to one of the most vibrant Black communities in Canada.
Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year shines a light on a largely overlooked chapter of Black baseball. But more than this, 1934 is the story of one group of men who fought for the respect that was too often denied them.
Rich in detail, full of the sounds and textures of a time long past, 1934 introduces the All-Stars’ unforgettable players and captures their winning season, so that it almost feels like you’re sitting there in Stirling Park’s grandstands, cheering on the team from Chatham.
In 1939, a group of students at a fictional residential school in Ontario are faced with the daunting task of putting on a play by William Shakespeare for the King and Queen of England on their first Royal Tour of Canada. But as news spreads and audience expectations abound, the students, resilient and resourceful, find their own way into the text, determined to challenge the notion that there’s only one way to do Shakespeare. Born of both family legacy and the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the development of 1939 was guided by Indigenous Elders, survivors, and ceremony.
1949 continues the saga of the Mercer family, enlarged to include the extended family as well as off-stage characters from earlier plays. David French deals with the emotional and political decisions that the characters must come to as Newfoundland joins Confederation on April Fool’s Day of 1949. As recent immigrants to Toronto, the members of the Mercer family see this event both as a new future and as a loss of Newfoundland’s culture and independence.
Cast of 6 women, 6 men and 2 boys.
A fast-paced political comedy from Michael Healey, the critically acclaimed author of The Drawer Boy and Proud, that examines the space between ideals and political reality during a monumental moment in Prime Minister Joe Clark’s career.
It’s December 1979 and Clark’s minority Progressive Conservative government is under threat of dissolution before it has a chance to accomplish anything — even pass a budget. But Clark is young and idealistic, resolute on making his mark in office. When he steals a moment at his desk to make a crucial decision, his colleagues, including Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau, take the opportunity to steer him in different directions.
It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used to be, and his sister can’t wait to leave town for good. And everyone along his daily newspaper route looks at him a little differently, this boy who’s come back from the dead, who just might be the only one who understands the miraculous, heart-breaking mystery that is their lives.
Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of North America’s hard turn to the right, 1979 offers a smalltown take on the buried lives of those who almost never make the news, and one boy’s attempt to make sense of it all.
The turmoil of the Great Depression galvanized Canadians to rise up and fight for improved labour conditions, social equality and universal healthcare. In the frontier city of Calgary, Holly Burnside and Brian Mah get involved with the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the first national party dedicated to the needs of workers and farmers.
Set amidst the riotous times of the Great Depression, 1st Legion of Utopia explores the forces surrounding the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the trail blazing party of first female Member of Parliament Agnes Macphail and Tommy Douglas, the leader most instrumental in Canada adopting what has become one of our defining policies – public health care. The CCF went on to become the modern day NDP.
Free study guide available.