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Showing 49–64 of 8929 results
10 Days on Earth
$16.95He 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?
10 Women
$20.00Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada’s preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can’t really tell for sure. Depending on your proclivities, some of them might even seem pretty hot – like the lurid fantasies that illustrate the covers of pulp fiction novels, the ethereal intellectual beauties that emanate from poetic fields of asphodels, or the petit bourgeois housewives that litter Alice Munro stories, these ten characters remind us that for every fetish there’s a partner.
Praise for 10 Women:
“the maestro is at it again” (The Vancouver Sun)
“This is a rarity in [short story] collections; an elegantly structured book with a central theme general enough to let the author run totally amok while maintaining a satisfying sense of unity overall.” (BC BookLook)
“The contents page is a list of ten names. The personalities that emerge are unforgettable.
10 Women is word punch spiked with an intoxicating brand of comedy, and every woman in it is fortified with dizzying power shots. Memorable phrases linger beyond the morning after.”(Foreword Reviews)
13 Lives
$19.95With 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.
15 Seconds
$15.95Brimming 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.
150 Years Up North and More
$20.00A collection of creative non-fiction stories about the colonization and immigration in northern Ontario.
16 Categories of Desire
$18.95Douglas Glover’s collection of stories mezmerizes like no other. A sheer tour-de-force, the collection features eleven new stories that demonstrate that Glover is capable of writing like no other writer. Like a good Beatles album, the collection includes Glover’s best new stories, linked only by the quality of the writing. The stories are wide ranging examples of fine, often comic, writing.
“The Left Ladies Club” is about a man who leaves teaching to become a writer, giving himself licence to live the bohemian life. In Glover’s merciless portrayal, the Ragged Point literary scene consists of the sorriest bunch of excuse-mongering losers you’ll ever encounter.
In “La Corriveau” (ref: the Siren of Quebec who murdered her husband and was later hanged in an iron cage above a crossroads), an Anglo woman awakens to find a dead man (presumably a francophone) in her bed. In a hilarious turn-of-events, the female narrator, who cannot at first even remember the man’s name nor how they happened to share the same bed, conceives of ways to hide the body in plain sight, while narrating the political implications of her circumstances interplayed with details from popular culture and Quebec history. In “Lunar Sensitivities,” a mathematician and a scientist compete for the attention of a beautiful woman; in “Abrupt Extinctions at the End of the Cretaceous,” dinosaurs compete for love and life. In both stories, love does everything but triumph. Ranging over time from pre-history to the present, from the American South to the Canadian North, Douglas Glover maps the heart in all its passion, valour, ineptitude, and vulnerability. Occasionally scabrous, horrifically funny, intermittently appalling, and wildly erotic, the stories in this collection bring to life a world in time, irony and desire prevail.
18 Miles
$21.95WINNER, 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.
1934
$24.95The 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.
1939
$18.95In 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
$18.951949 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.
1949: The Twilight Before the Dawn
$19.951949 is an historic, non-fictional account of the role one man played in breaking the shackles that kept Britain’s oldest colony in a state of permanent poverty and who led its people to a knock-down, drag ’em out battle into Confederation and the 20th century—Joseph R. Smallwood.
1979
$17.95A 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.
1979, by Ray Robertson
$19.95It’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.
2 Trans, 2 Furious
$21.952 TRANS 2 FURIOUS is a Lambda Literary Award-winning LGBTQ anthology of Fast & Furious content made by trans writers and artists. Created in the noble tradition of the fanzine, this book features 40+ personal essays, short stories, comics, games, poems, illustrations, and other works created by a wide array of transgender and nonbinary contributors. Read on to discover: an electrifying new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin; the scoop on the franchise’s little-known canonically nonbinary character; a demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene; an essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut; instructions for a Fast & Furious-themed tabletop roleplaying game; a poem written by the US/Mexico border, allegedly; bingo cards; a walking tour; acrostic poetry; classic zine collages; and so much more…
2000
$16.95According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium.”
In the play, the cougar appears to embody the precarious and increasingly circumscribed state of nature. Each character relates to nature in a different way, whether it be with distrust, cynicism, awe or longing. The figure of the “Mountain Man,” who has abandoned all of his civilized ways, even speech, to live among the animals of the forest, provides a meeting ground between humanity and nature. Like the cougar, increasingly crowded by a rapidly encroaching civilization, he scavenges what precious little remains of the beautiful animal in all of us.
Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
21 Black Futures
$34.95What is the future of Blackness? Obsidian Theatre presents twenty-one versions of it.
In 2021, Obsidian Theatre engaged twenty-one writers to create twenty-one new stories about imagined Black futures. Twenty-one to celebrate Obsidian’s twenty-first anniversary in 2021. Each playwright was tasked with scripting a ten-minute monodrama in response to the question “What is the future of Blackness?” To counter the intense early-pandemic isolation and the trauma of witnessing heightened violence toward Black bodies, Obsidian’s goal was to give as many opportunities to as many diverse Black artists as possible and to bring new voices together from both theatre and film. It was a grand experiment to create a rich tapestry of possibilities and to uplift Black artists in the process.
A radical offering in unprecedented times, newly appointed Obsidian artistic director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s curatorial aim was joyful, aspirational, and empowering: come together in this moment and create something communal, unapologetically Black, and with the Black gaze at its centre—art as the architecture for creating those futures. Includes plays by Amanda Parris, Cheryl Foggo, Shauntay Grant, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, Lawrence Hill, Djanet Sears, and many others.