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All Books in this Collection
Showing 625–640 of 9248 results
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Animal Farm 2017
$14.95This is a timely adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the context of the Trump administration’s disastrous epoch in American life.
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Animal Husbandry Today
$18.95An accessible and illuminating debut collection that explores the arranged marriage of the bestial and humane
Logic is strained, existence contracts and multiplies, connections amputate then graft in incongruous ways in Jamie Sharpe’s poems, which, like a funhouse mirror, reflect our own absurd image.
Nancy Reagan promotes crab salad (which is to say, her husband); the city of Paris spills into the countryside; a hammer seeks understanding through a vase. An assemblage of often disparate elements, Animal Husbandry Today attempts the ultimate reconciliation: that of the mind with the world.
A plane crashes on the border of two countries.
Can you wear white to the funeral
If you’re a virgin before mayday?— from “Two Trains”
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Animal Walk
$8.95An ear which shapes beautifully cadenced lines and an acute eye for images distinguish this first collection from Toronto poet John O’Neill. Animal Walks is a jamboree of human voice sung in chorus with all species. O’Neill’s bear, deer, moose, rabbit and goats inhabit the borders of all to human experience, constant others at once caught and free in the play of language.
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Animalphabetical Adventures
$19.95After having children of her own she rediscovered the magic and adventure in children’s books. Highly passionate about little people and creating memorable experiences for them through the world of stories, she wrote and illustrated her debut book, Animalphabetical Adventures, which takes children on a magical adventure with animals from A to Z.
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Animals
$18.95‘I used to want a black enamel farmhouse sink. Now, I just want shelter.’
From acclaimed playwright Karen Hines come two darkly comic meditations on security, safety, and shelter.
Crawlspace is a comic, Kafkaesque monologue about the darker side of home ownership that moves past ‘cautionary’ as it snakes through the brutal battleground of Toronto real estate, decorative twig orbs, and the state of the human soul.
All the Little Animals I Have Eaten explores questions surrounding existence, death, and salvation through the perspectives of one sleep-deprived young woman, the ghosts of brilliant authors, some well-heeled professionals, meth-curious lambs, a puppet in a beatnik onesie, tiny vertebrates, glowing arthropods, and other unexpected voices.
Praise for the Videofag production of Crawlspace:
‘Karen Hines’s macabre monologue about a real-estate nightmare – and a dead animal stuck in a crawlspace – was all the more terrifying for being true. This was Hines at her most horrifyingly hilarious.’
– Globe and Mail
‘Hines’s clever script, alternately savagely funny and disturbing, is full of facts the author keeps amending, underlining the bait-and-switch nature of the real estate swindle.’
– NOW magazine
‘The kind of story you want to talk about as soon as you get home. Horrifying and enlightening.’
– Mooney on Theatre
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Animate Objects
$9.95Alan Wilson believes that both poetry and science are in the business of seeking out the secret relations that form the skeleton of our world. Poets and scientists share a habit of probing, of looking at things from odd angles. Animate Objects is his collection of such angles.
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Anna, Like Thunder
$24.00In 1808, the Russian Ship St. Nikolai ran aground off the Olympic Peninsula; this novel is based on this astounding historical event and the lives of the people affected.
In 1808, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovna Bulygina is aboard the Russian ship St. Nikolai when it runs aground off on the west coast of Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula. The crew, tasked with trading for sea otter pelts and exploring the coast, are forced to shore into Indigenous territory, where they are captured, enslaved, and then traded among three different Indigenous communities. Terrified at first, Anna soon discovers that nothing—including slavery—is what she expected. She begins to question Russian imperialist aspirations, the conduct of the crew, and her own beliefs and values as she experiences a way of life she never could have imagined.
Based on historical record, Anna, Like Thunder blends fact and fiction to explore the early days of contact between Indigenous people and Europeans off the west coast of North America and offers a fresh interpretation of history.
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Anne of Green Gables vs. G.I. Joe
$19.95Was it better that our ancestors chose to migrate to Canada, or should they have gone to the U.S.? Snow and ice and high taxes? Or unaffordable health care, guns in kindergarten, and great weather? And didn’t they have to film the hit movie Chicago in Canada because we had the studios, the gaffers, and the 65 cent dollar? Gould takes a hard look at our measurement systems: how Canadians have welcomed the metric system (except for weights and distances) while the Americans — along with only Burma and Liberia — have clung to pounds and miles. What about our national dreams? Gould defines the American Dream as the obligation for every American to achieve fame, fortune, and a trophy wife up to one-half the age of the first one, but only after he accomplishes the first two. The Canadian Dream is to pay a serviceman in cash to avoid the GST, to go to Hawaii (if you live in B.C.), and to be able to move to the U.S. to make real dollars. And what about our different political systems? In the U.S. there is serious debate about campaign finance reform; in Canada, we turn to Hansard to follow a similar discussion: “Oh shut up” “YOU shut up.” “Up yours!” “Oh yeah? You’d probably enjoy that, Svend.” G.I. Joe or Anne of Green Gables could be just about the funniest book you’ll read this fall.
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Anne Wilkinson
$9.95A critical volume describing the life of Anne Wilkinson and her literary work.
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Annihilated Time
$29.95Reading against the grain of global ideological flows, Derksen demonstrates how borders, identities, national literatures, urban territories, built space and the spaces of culture and politics have not simply been eroded by globalization, but how the traditional identity-determined scales of culture are being re-imagined as contested spaces for dynamic communities of discourse.
Apologists for the current global American imperialism ironically characterize it as a civilizing force generously brought to the world by a presumed American exceptionalism to empire. In their view, it is an extension of a neoliberal economic developmentalism, imagined as non-ideological and anti-authoritarian (“democratic”) and as the highest cultural form of capitalism.
Poetry, that under-achieving commodity, that “greeny flower,” has not been exempt from the increased glare of what is now the new state cultural watchdog. An early public controversy—generating vitriolic discourse—was the long poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” by Amiri Baraka, then poet laureate for the state of New Jersey. Jeff Derksen spins this controversial issue (and many others) around the pivot of September 11, 2001. To read these works in the cultural and social context that led to them being criminalized or erased, we can look to how 9/11 provided an historical occasion for a reconfiguration of the role of culture in the nation state.
In this collection of essays, Derksen explores the ways in which seemingly minor forms of culture—poetry, visual art, and critical practices—encounter what he calls “the long present neoliberal moment” of the imperialist agenda of globalization. The title inverts Marx’s famous view (central to critical geography) that “the problem of space” has been overcome: that capitalism annihilates space with time. Today, literary, cultural and geographical readings emphasize our lived experience of space and contest the representations of a globalized environment that capital and its ideological software, neoliberalism, promote.
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Another Country / bloom
$17.95Guillermo Verdecchia’s first play, Another Country (originally Final Decisions [War] ), was his response to his home country Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976–83, when leaders of the military junta held that their campaign against “leftist subversives and terrorists” was the beginning of the Third World War. The scale of their undertaking was defined by their statement: “First we will kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, those who are undecided.” The public relations firm Burson-Marsteller was hired to make Argentina look good while the junta (trained in counter-insurgency at the U.S.-based and funded School of the Americas, or The School of the Coups as it’s known in Latin America) and its collaborators reorganized the nation.
His latest play, bloom (the title is taken from a line in Paul Celan’s poem, “Psalm”: “we bloom in thy spite”), overflows with images from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land(“hooded hordes swarming over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth,” among others), and seems utterly contemporaneous with his first, in the context of the current destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, part of the larger effort of an international reorganization of the world we know as “The War on Terror.”
Published together here for the first time, these plays constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.
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Another Day in Showbiz
$24.95The story of an unassuming kid from rural Canada who worked his way to the top of the world of glitz and glamour. He’s hunched back in the 30th row of the massive Staples Center, far from the cardboard cut-outs indicating where Britney Spears, Will Smith, U2, and Céline Dion will be sitting for the 44th Annual Grammy Awards. Sporting a baseball cap, sweatpants, sneakers, and an ear-to-ear grin, he looks like an oversized teddy bear. A grandfather of one of the performers? Guess again. Sitting and watching over the proceedings is 78-year-old Pierre Cossette, far better known to all the techs and musicians in the arena as the ”Father of the Grammys.” Another Day in Showbiz tells the story of an unassuming kid from rural Canada who worked his way to the top of the world of glitz and glamour, transforming the music industry in the process. Cossette, after much wrangling and hair-pulling, convinced the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences to let him produce the Grammy Awards on television for the first time in 1971. The Grammys had previously been held in hotels and in front of small crowds, generally consisting of a few performers and their families. Since then, Cossette has transformed the Grammys into an international spectacle with an estimated one billion TV viewers tuning in to witness the gyrations of today’s pop sensations. In his insider’s look at showbiz, Pierre Cossette touches on more than just the stars, directors, and producers in the industry. Another Day in Showbiz is not just about movies, TV, record companies, or breathtaking stage productions. Cossette’s tale is the whole shebang, told from the point of view of a young man who hit the big time in his own style and on his own terms.
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Another Home Invasion
$16.95We, each of us in the civilized Western world, live in a space inviolate. “Our home is our castle,” as the saying goes: our shelter from the intrusion of the weather and other “outside influences;” our defence against physical and mental threats, real and imagined, to our private space; vault to our accumulated private property; theatre of our desires and aspirations; arena of our private victories and defeats, no matter how large or small; harbour of our secrets and fears; refuge to our children and family.
Yet the very protection and security our home provides us with also isolates us from our neighbours, our relatives, and the public affairs of our communities—constructs a garrison of anonymity around us and our loved ones in which we can become unknown, unloved—no one that anyone need be concerned nor care about.
We see the recent rise of home invasions in our society as a violation of our most intimate places: the perpetration of heinous crimes upon the aged, the disabled, the helpless, victimizing our citizens precisely where rules of hospitality and generosity should govern our social relations.
All this and more is the subject of Joan MacLeod’s perceptively poignant play, Another Home Invasion, where “another” carries both its meanings: something commonplace; and something of an entirely different kind and nature. Of course this play involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to find there, but is he the real threat to the home’s occupants? He even shows up for a return visit.
Who, then, are the real perpetrators of the heartless betrayal of the elderly couple who lives here: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family—their home? The answers to these questions are as surprising as they are unsettling.
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Another Margaret
$16.95Anxiety is the watchword at most school reunions, with side-eye comparisons of greying hair and extra pounds around the belly. Not our Randy Craig. She’s more concerned with resolving a 20 year old CanLit scandal and catching a ruthless killer. While helping her best friend Denise organize their 20 year reunion at the University of Alberta, Randy’s tumultuous past as a graduate student comes rushing into the present as she faces off against old ghosts and imminent death.
Another Margaret is both Janice MacDonald’s first and sixth installment in her wildly popular Randy Craig series set in Edmonton, Alberta. Embedded in this latest adventure is Janice MacDonald’s very first, now out of print, Randy Craig mystery.
“This is going to be the yummiest reunion. It’s as if we all went to grad school with Jessica Fletcher!”
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Another Name for Bridge
$16.95Suzanne Hancock’s debut collection of poems seeks to explore seemingly disparate things: family bonds, self deceit, lost desire, and the final days of Descartes’ life. With precision and urgent honesty these poems take us from an apple orchard in summer, to a Dutch slaughterhouse, to diving from a train bridge. Yet, there is cohesiveness throughout these pages that can be explained by the author’s yearning to discover the world, to be transformed by language and its implications. In Another Name for Bridge, the author attempts to link pieces of the world: experience and memory, one side of the river to the other, the dialogue between natural philosophy and painterly practice. These poems sing the praises of connection, but never seem to forget the vast spaces that cannot be linked.
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Another Nirvana
$20.95These poems explore the meaning of home and belonging and a search for transcendence through love and art. They reflect on what it means to live between cultures and continents, question traditional female roles, ponder over the role of art in life. The poet’s search for home leads her to different places: in her aboriginal friend she finds “a lost part of India/that Columbus never found.” In McLeod Ganj, also known as “Little Tibet,” she imagines a path to Tibet’s freedom. In “Another Nirvana” she grapples with nostalgia as her memories move between parts of India and Toronto, questioning the meaning of home, departure, and belonging.