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All Books in this Collection
Showing 6385–6400 of 9311 results
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So this is the world & Here I am in it
$24.95So This Is The World & Here I Am In It is a stunning collection of creative essays by poet and critic Di Brandt.Written over a period of ten years, these essays circle around questions of exile and violence, eros and wildness, land and mentoring, home and language. They are experimental engagements with a lively array of personal and cultural memories, of places ranging from Winnipeg and Windsor to Berlin, Germany, of joyfully unruly characters in Canadian fiction, of the esoteric lives of Mennonites, honeybees, and twins.
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Social Acupuncture
$19.95Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.
O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity,abundance and power of the social sphere.
Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.
‘No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O’Donnell’s talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses … The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.’
– The Globe and Mail
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Social Murder
$26.95Corporate power is one of the strongest forces shaping our world. More than half of the top 100 economic entities today are private corporations. With their immense size comes commensurate influence, to the point where corporations are able to wreak social and environmental destruction with few serious consequences. Yet, amazingly, this subject is essentially absent from the study of economics. The conservative economic theory that dominates the profession is based on the core belief that as little as possible should interfere with businesses’ pursuit of profit. This approach to economics ignores history, politics, poverty, the natural environment, and social class, among other inconvenient realities. Conservative economics would almost be laughable–were it not for the fact that this way of thinking helps prop up the worst excesses of capitalism.
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Socialist Cowboy
$19.95Socialist Cowboy is a political biography detailing the life and activism of longtime New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos, one of the most colourful and controversial political personalities in the history of Ontario politics. Throughout his illustrious twenty-three year career as a member of the Ontario legislature, Kormos’s unapologetic commitment to democratic socialism and his shoot-from-the-hip brand of small-town populism won him strong accolades back in his blue-collar hometown of Welland, while raising eyebrows at Queen’s Park and within his own party. From his days as a student strike leader, to his short-lived time in Bob Rae’s cabinet, to his run for the Ontario NDP leadership and his epic battles with the province’s political establishment, the book chronicles Kormos’s political trajectory, through interviews and archival research, with a view to unpacking the ideas and traits that have made him a New Democrat icon.
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Societies of Peace
$39.95Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past Present and Future, edited by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, celebrates women’s largely ignored and/or invisible contribution to culture by exploring matriarchal societies that have existed in the past and that continue to exist today in certain parts of the world. Matriarchal societies, primarily shaped by women, have a non violent social order in which all living creatures are respected without the exploitation of humans, animals or nature. They are well-balanced and peaceful societies in which domination is unknown and all beings are treated equally. This book presents these largely misunderstood societies, both past and present, to the wider public, as alternative social and cultural models that promote trust, mutuality, and abundance for all.
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Socket
$8.95‘Socket’ tells the gripping tale of Ronald Percy, an international aid worker who travels to Ethiopia to assist with an irrigation project for the African Development Organization. Upon arrival, he is unable to locate his agents or company representatives, and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of bureaucracy and state corruption. ‘Socket’ was selected as the Grand Winner from over 400 entries in the 2001 International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest.
” The language is vivid and economical, and the plot charges ahead with relentless momentum.” – Broken Pencil
“The story is so tightly written that you can’t put it down.” – Giest Magazine
Winner 2001 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
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Sodom Road Exit
$21.95Lambda Literary Award and Sunburst Award finalist; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
It’s the summer of 1990, and Crystal Beach in Ontario has lost its beloved, long-running amusement park, leaving the lakeside village a virtual ghost town. It is back to this fallen community Starla Mia Martin must return to live with her overbearing mother after dropping out of university and racking up significant debt. But an economic downturn, mother-daughter drama, and Generation X disillusionment soon prove to be the least of Starla’s troubles: a mysterious and salacious force begins to dog Starla; inexplicable sounds in the night and unimaginable sights spotted on the periphery. Soon enough, Starla must confront the unresolved traumas that haunt Crystal Beach.
Sodom Road Exit might read like a conventional paranormal thriller, except that Starla is far from a conventional protagonist. Where others might feel fear, Starla feels lust and queer desire. When others might run, Starla draws the horror nearer. And in turn, she draws a host of capricious characters toward her–all of them challenged to seek answers beyond their own temporal realities.
Sodom Road Exit, the second novel by Amber Dawn, is a book that’s alive with both desire and dread.
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Soft Geography
$15.95“What a wonderful, fresh voice Gillian Wigmore brings to the page. These wise poems know the push and pull within family. They reveal the tender truths behind the rough edges of small-town life. Her voice resonates with authenticity, and whether she is writing about a near drowning or ice fishing, she is ultimately writing about the complications of love. These are poems you will not soon forget.”
— Robert Hilles, Governor General’s Award-winner for Poetry
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Soft Inheritance
$21.95In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet’s rapidly evolving reality where kindness is a scar, though not all scar-makers are kind. ,” Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of “afterpost-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-deaththese poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.
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Soft Power
$19.95Watch out for those who have, seek, and hold onto power.
So drink
As the fanged stoat from the rabbit’s nape
As though from a flagon of river water
Shaken with ancestral ash
As if it isn’t knowledge you seek
But some osmotic soul-food
To be filled up with blurs
That might later resolve themselves
Into memories
To return to where you really live
With changes in your bloodLyrical yet shot through with experimental and political veins, the poems in Soft Power are engaged with both the here-and-now of a world on the brink and the hope of something better, a planet where “generations hence / Inactivists will bathe under a sun made safe / By the collapse of oil-can economics.”
Traversing badlands, sandhills, prairies, suburbia, Miami, London, Dublin, Paris, and beyond, Cole’s voice revels in questions of travel while resonating with the unheimlich “Canadalienation” of his expatriate existence. Whether bog surfing, gallery hopping, bug hunting, or meditating on the “strange genre” of national anthems, the poems in Cole’s long-awaited follow-up collection to his critically acclaimed Questions in Bed exist in a searching exchange with the world, both entering and being entered by it.
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Soft Serve
$22.95Allison Graves’ edgy debut collection of short fiction scrutinizes unconventional and confused attachments between people and the reasons they last. The extraordinary becomes the ordinary as people navigate the weird, the quirky, and the sad aspects of everyday life.
Through encounters in retail and fast food chains, on highways and dating apps, the characters in this collection wander through the non-places of our modern lives. The stories connect readers to the spaces that ultimately make them feel lost—zones for reconsideration. Delving into the confusion and boredom of everyday life, Graves’ fiction documents the emotional experiences and disillusionment of middle-class millennials seeking a meaningful life in both the isolating and the ordinary.
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Soft where
$15.00“Soft Where by Marcus McCann is a hard-hitting cutting edge poetic expose of a world filled with experimentation and valour. This stunning book explores the possibilities of bringing image to life, written in the language of the people and soaked in a heart of sapphire. The jury was intoxicated by this book, and feels this young writer should be encouraged in every and all ways—to the full extent of poetic promise. The language in Soft Where is as stark and meaningful as the images which express a lifestyle hard-lived and yet as delicate as an origami bird.”—Gerald Lampert Award jury citation
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Soldier’s Heart
$16.95David French’s award-winning and ongoing dramatic cycle about the Mercer family, both in their native Newfoundland and later, as participants in the great outport clearances, relocated in Toronto, has become a defining part of Canada’s theatrical history.
Set in Toronto, the first play, Leaving Home (1972), introduced the family saga’s key figure, Jacob Mercer, who appears in all of the plays. Also in this series are Of the Fields, Lately (1973); Salt-Water Moon (1984); and 1949 (1988), which deals with this expatriate family’s reaction to Newfoundland’s entry into confederation.
With Soldier’s Heart, French looks back in time at the thoroughly alienated 16-year-old Jacob, standing on a railway platform, his suitcase and one-way ticket away from home in hand. His father Esau, a veteran of the First World War, rushes to the station in a last-ditch effort to persuade his son not to leave. Unable to speak of what had happened in the Great War since his return, Esau begins, in halting and tentative language to tell of his comrades and his brother, their training in Scotland, the agony of Gallipoli, and finally the formative events at the battle of the Somme at Beaumont Hamel. At first defensive in response to his son’s probing and impatient questioning, Esau’s answers evolve into stories of pride, foolishness, anger, desperation and finally mindless terror, leaving only the image of a man driven by the blind animal instinct to survive. It is this devastating and unsparing account of all that is in a soldier’s heart, that finally brings father and son back together.
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Soldiers for Sale
$29.95A fascinating study that uncovers an important aspect of the history of the American Revolution, this account reveals how the British Army that fought the American Revolutionaries was, in fact, an Anglo-German army. Arguing that the British Crown had doubts about the willingness of English soldiers to fight against other English-speaking people in North America, the book details how the task of providing troops fell upon the princes of German States, who were relatives of England’s ruling family. In return for large amounts of money, German princes and barons provided about 30,000 soldiers, many of whom were dragged unwillingly from their families and sent to fight in a war in which they had no interest. While some of the soldiers eventually melted into the French and English-speaking societies of Canada, little history has been available, not even to the descendant families. These soldiers’ experiences offer new insight into the battles that took place between 1776 and 1783 and had an impact that spanned four countries.
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Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys
$23.95CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023
THE TORONTO STAR ‘MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR’
‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity.
An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She’s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home.
And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city.
Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment.
“Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker’s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art.” – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time
“In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo.” – Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats
“Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any.” – John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
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Solidarity
$24.95The year 1983 began like any other year in Canada’s West Coast province. Then suddenly everything changed when the newly elected provincial government announced an avalanche of far-right legislation that shocked the country.
In response, a resistance movement called Solidarity quickly formed across British Columbia uniting social activists, trade unionists and people who had never protested before. The movement rocked social foundations resulting in massive street protests, occupations, and plans for an all-out general strike.
Filled with revealing interviews and lively, insightful prose Solidarity goes behind the scenes of one of the greatest social uprisings in North American history. In revisiting this one singularly dramatic event, Solidarity chronicles the history of 20th century British Columbia, exploring its great divides and alliances, cultures and subcultures, and conflicts that continue into the 21st century.