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All Books in this Collection

Showing 49–64 of 9005 results

[boxhead]

By: Darren O’Donnell

$16.95

Dr. Actions: What do you think it all means?
Dr. Thinking: I think it means that our collaboration is destined for great heights and the basking glory of inter-planetary fame and fortune.
Dr. Actions: But you said your dream was terrifying.
Dr. Thinking: Well, I’ve always been afraid of success.
Dr. Actions: Well, get over it, Blockbrain. Now that we’ve invented the echoless yell, nothing is going to getin our way. Lay it on me.

Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknownst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall madly in love, fall in science and fail to make a baby.

The cast consists of the two boxheads, who also play two disembodied narrators. The conversationbetween the four voices, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation. Through a series of rapid exchanges, verbal games and musical numbers, they discover that all their thoughts come from God, all their words come from the devil, and their desire for love is a habit acquired from the cinema. Sound familiar? Don’t be so hard on yourself.

‘Audacious, thought-provoking and frequently hilarious …a tightly wound complex of existential postulations, metaphysical ruminations and poop jokes.’

– Eye Weekly
[OR]

By: Brian Henderson

$18.95

[OR] might be a book of steganography. Or not. The tension of appearance inheres in it, and ciphertexts seem to abound. As the poems take up their concealing/revealing, coded/decoded, intelligence/counter-intelligence themes, borders and borderlands appear, are crossed, or are closed. Many of the borderlands turn out to be their own interiors – “secret” workings of the codes ghosting through them. Are they abject castoffs, lost possibilities, proscribed mutations, or future events?

Codes are hidden everywhere, sliding through the atmosphere, slipping into microwave towers, handheld devices, nervous systems, brains, retinas, bar codes, antimissile systems, the antennae of DNA, the traces of virtual particles, the Chauvet Cave drawings, your Twitter account. Each broaches a transformative version of its own transduction. The buck never stops. And since it’s been documented that perception happens before we know it (Benjamin Libet), and the future might already have happened, these poems ask what this might mean – especially in an accelerated, “semio-inflated” world of signs, words, and information.

Maybe it’s no wonder that the poems use tropes from spy thrillers and code breakers. In them a character may have been murdered, or moved to another dimension. Along the way strange perturbations occur to narrative and its others: memory, (prosthetic memory), dream, reportage, code, a little history of the future, déjà vu, paramnesia, the virtual – versions, evasions, and alternatives. Each poem gets read a few times, its code deciphered or ciphered back up. Some of the poems decay. Each reader reads his or her own poem and encodes it for another. What communication crosses out, these poems try to find. They might ask “What is reading?” while at the same time “Who are you?” In asking they acknowledge fragility, and in fragility, suggests William E. Connolly, lies the beginning of freedom.
[Sharps]

By: Stevie Howell

$19.95

Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Emergencies, faith, truancy, and poverty intersect in this wry debut that volunteers a transfusion of the unpredictable for those who yearn to transition beyond a muralized Olive Garden world.

Stevie Howell’s [Sharps] takes its cue from an Egyptian hieroglyph used interchangeably to represent “waters,” the letter N, and all prepositions within a sentence. Similarly, [Sharps] alters its structure and functionality from page to page. The Queen launches an advertising campaign to procure our envy. The last unicorn crochets a sweater out of the sisal cords of the books. The falsity of Billy Joel’s New York propaganda is grounds for libel. We discover the one thing you can do “With a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity/about human biology.”

From certain angles, [Sharps] embraces the possibilities of poetry — from others, it engages in a protracted street fight with language.
[Squelch Procedures]

By: MLA Chernoff

$20.00

In [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], MLA Chernoff contemplates the ways that trauma, poverty, and strict gender norms rupture the concept of childhood. The tension of multiple meanings in the word “squelch” acts as a guide to Chernoff’s unique voice, which uses language to swaddle intrusive thoughts and mimic defense mechanisms such as avoidance, depersonalization, and derealization. [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] is an ambitious attempt to show how healing and regression are often indistinguishable, while the past is always predisposed to happen more than once: first as tragedy, then as farce.
#HashtagRelief

By: Blossom Thom

$4.95

#HashtagRelief
#postdildo

By: Danielle LaFrance

$19.95

After a carnal encounter with garbage, some space emerged for Danielle LaFrance to air her dildos. In #postdildo they think and write through the limitlessness and limitations of sexuality, communication, and desire. Focusing on the dildo as sexual object and social relation, LaFrance asks, “How shall You fuck without causing harm?” What came before #postdildo if not internet porn, the confession booth, colonial capitalism, settler sexuality, patriarchy, and feminism, all providing a blueprint for how inadequately to be touched and fucked? What comes after delights? #postdildo is a mass of contradictions that more often than not finds a lot of dis/pleasure in a lot of refusal.
10 Days on Earth

By: Ronnie Burkett

$16.95

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?
10 Women

By: George Bowering

$20.00

Ten 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

By: Michael Pawlowski

$19.95

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.
15 Seconds

By: François Archambault

$15.95

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.
150 Years Up North and More

$20.00

A collection of creative non-fiction stories about the colonization and immigration in northern Ontario.
16 Categories of Desire

By: Douglas Glover

$18.95

Douglas 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

By: Christopher Dewdney

$21.95

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.
1934

By: Heidi LM Jacobs

$24.95

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.
1939

By: Jani Lauzon, Kaitlyn Riordan

$18.95

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

By: David French

$18.95

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.