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Showing 6449–6464 of 9248 results
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Special Topics in Being a Human
$24.95S. Bear Bergman’s illustrated guide to practical advice for the modern age, filtered through a queer lens.
As an author, educator, and public speaker, S. Bear Bergman has documented his experience as, among other things, a trans parent, with wit and aplomb. He also writes the advice column “Asking Bear,” in which he answers crucial questions about how best to make our collective way through the world.
Featuring disarming illustrations by Saul Freedman-Lawson, Special Topics in Being a Human elaborates on “Asking Bear”‘s premise: a gentle, witty, and insightful book of practical advice for the modern age. It offers Dad advice and Jewish bubbe wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens, to help you navigate some of the complexities of life – from how to make big decisions or make a good apology, to how to get someone’s new name and pronouns right as quickly as possible, to how to gracefully navigate a breakup. With warmth and candor, Special Topics in Being a Human calls out social inequities and injustices in traditional advice-giving, validates your feelings, asks a lot of questions, and tries to help you be your best possible self with kindness, compassion, and humour.
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Specks
$16.95Widely noted for the popularity of his dynamic performances, Michael McClure has been celebrated since his first poetry event. At twenty-two years old, in San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg gave their first poetry reading—Ginsberg read “Howl” that night. McClure’s writing followed his deepening environmental awareness and biological studies, and he became an outspoken advocate, through his essays, music, theatre and novels, for the protection of all living beings.
When McClure’s Specks was first published in 1985 by Talonbooks, it was a revelation in terms of its transcending the proprioceptive poetic methodology of Charles Olson and entering an Aristotelian realm of metaphysical questions that alchemically combined matters both scientific and mystical. In this much-anticipated return, with incisive and bombastic projective verse, McClure’s stance in the face of futurity is even more topical, as the senses of the physical-poetic body explore its properties, powers and limitations, expanding forth as the benevolent love child of its own consciousness.
Specks assumes the form of a blastula, offering a poetic model of embryonic development that arises from the cellular division known as “cleavage.” Specks presents groupings of ideas that mimic and challenge one another in a deep biological state. With mind aglow in recognition of muscular imagination and the intelligence of the sensorium in all its unapologetic tonality, McClure’s luminous journey leaps with the grace of Muhammad Ali and Fred Astaire, and tempts the reader into the mysterious abyss of dark energy that Federico García Lorca calls duende.
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Spectacle of Empire
$21.952006 marked the 400th anniversary of a major theatrical event in the history of North American drama. The Theatre of Neptune in New France by lawyer, poet and historian Marc Lescarbot was a masque of welcome performed on the Bay of Fundy by members of the tiny French colony of Port Royal on November 14, 1606. It celebrated the return of the ship bearing the Sieur de Poutrincourt and navigator-explorer Samuel de Champlain from their travels along the coastline as far south as Cape Cod in search of a more temperate site for the colony.
It is a paean to empire, a thanksgiving for survival and an extraordinary theatrical spectacle in a “new” world peopled by Native inhabitants who are represented in it as both characters and audience. Arguably the first American play, it has also been called “a significant entry-point of Western cultural hegemony,” sparking political activists to disrupt the re-enactment planned for its four hundredth anniversary celebration.
This new edition includes the original French script along with its long out-of-print English translations by American historical preservationist Harriette Taber Richardson and Canadian scholars Eugene and Renate Benson, as well as Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), an illustrative contemporary English imperial spectacle. The extensive historical and critical introduction and bibliography are provided by Jerry Wasserman, Professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia.
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Speechless
$22.95A’isha Nasir is a Nigerian teenager who has been charged with adultery and sentenced to death. Sophie MacNeil is an ambitious young Canadian journalist who meets A’isha and writes an impassioned article about her plight. But when the article sets off waves of outrage and violence, Sophie is forced to come to terms with the naivete with which she approached the story. Who can — and should — tell a story?
Speechless is a stunning novel of justice, witness, and courage. In luminous prose, Simpson explores the power of words, our responsibility for them, and the ways they affect others in matters of life and death.
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Speed Bump
$19.95Hey, if Dave Barry thinks Speed Bump is funny, who are we to argue? Syndicated to over 250 newspapers worldwide, including the Globe and Mail, Washington Post, New York Daily News, and Detroit Free Press, Coverly’s well-drawn, thoughtful cartoons have a large, loyal following of readers. Speed Bump: Cartoons for Idea People is a collection that you’re likely to read over and over, and share with others.
This compilation covers a wide variety of topics ranging from relationships to health and from work to kids — with a healthy dose of aliens and philosophy thrown in for good measure. Included are chapter introductions written by Coverly, dozens of full-page color pullouts, and oddball segues, such as drink recipes and caption contests.
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Spells
$19.95Spells is a violent coming-of-age story set in suburban Canada in the 1970’s. Andy Loch, a chubby 14-year-old, is obsessed with witchcraft and the occult. Convinced that occult forces curse his family, and that he himself possesses supernatural abilities, the boy dabbles in black magic in a desperate effort to connect with his remote father. Andy’s fascination with the occult peaks during “Tut-mania,” the craze sparked by the North American tour of Tutankhamun’s burial treasures. As Andy begins a macabre road trip from his small hometown to Toronto to see the exhibition, his world and his sanity spiral out of control.
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Spin Doctors
$35.00As Canada was in the grips of the worst pandemic in a century, Canadian media struggled to tell the story. Newsrooms, already run on threadbare budgets, struggled to make broader connections that could allow their audience to better understand what was really happening, and why. Politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith.
This book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from racialized workers to residential care to policing. It demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of these issues and helped to justify the maintenance of a status quo that created the worst ravages of the crisis. Spin Doctors argues alternative ways in which Canadians should understand the big themes of the crisis and create the necessary knowledge to demand large-scale change.
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Spine
$18.95In her second collection of poems, K.I. Press reflects on a great love of books and fictional characters, and of reading, printing and typography. Her poetry takes existing texts to thrilling heights, bringing Alice in Wonderland alongside Jane Eyre and the Bible. Readers will delight in the caustic silliness of poems like “Slushpile” and “Library,” and in the psychological depth and tragedy of the “Anne and Jane” sequence.
The act of reading and the imaginative process provide the foreground of Spine. Reading is at once indulgent and sharply necessary. One poem tells of books who take on the physical character of their genre. In another we meet a reader of Proust who finds herself unable to leave her reading, and in another the sense of abandonment that comes during a sabbatical from reading, when “cats no longer sat in my lap, birds sang only when trying to wake me.”
Press’s fascination with reading opens onto a realm where fictional and historical characters expand beyond their original texts. The “Anne and Jane” sequence reexamines the heroine’s position in two well-known novels. In “Joanna” the poet provides a vivid characterization of typographer Eric Gill and his home life, from the perspective of his daughter Joan. “The Letters” are fiery variations on the biblical letters from Paul to several of the early churches. Here Press combines modern details and a new level of fervency to recreate the impatience and overwhelming tenderness of this apostle.
The landscape and populace of this collection take their cues from contemporary geography and from styles reminiscent of other periods. Throughout Spine, Press demonstrates a deftness for shifting between contexts, making Jane Eyre a function of contemporary female experience and placing mementos of the twenty-first century inside the Bible.
This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with cover flaps. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Eric Gill’s Joanna types and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper. The cover is printed letterpress on Fraser Mosaic stock.
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Spiral Agitator
$19.95Steve Venright, the true heir to the literary legacy of Henri Michau, Christopher Dewdney and Jorge Luis Borges, is the only surrealist ever to come from Sarnia, Ontario. Spiral Agitator, his fourth book, is a sumptuous assortment of prose poems and visual art from beyond the Turbulated Curtain.
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Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals
$19.95Skye Rayburn, a somewhat eccentric but well-respected veterinarian, always had a troubled relationship with her daughter Moira. When Moira is killed in a car accident, Skye has no choice but to take in her two-year-old grandson Duncan. Maybe this time she will “get it right.” Over the years, Skye creates a diary: Life Lessons for Duncan. This diary, a surreal blend of fact and fiction, catalogues human and animal characteristics?their similarities and differences, as well as their complex interdependencies, which she hopes will help Duncan understand his now-homeless father, his mother’s death and her own heartbreaking secrets. As her story unfolds we learn how her life choices have, at times, contradicted her alleged love of c hildren and animals. In the summer of 2011, Skye, now 91, finds herself alone when Duncan is invited to show his art at the Edinburgh Festival. Skye must make peace with what she’s done and Duncan must to come to terms with who he is.
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Spirit of the West
$29.95Spirit of the West
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Spirit Singer
$19.95A brand-new edition revised by the author of Edward Willett’;s multiple-award-winning young adult fantasy.
Amarynth is a spirit singer gifted-or cursed as she sometimes thinks-with the ability to lead the spirits of the dead from the Lower World through the Between World to the Gate of the Upper World and the Light that lies beyond it.
While she is still an apprentice her grandfather and tutor dies slain by a mysterious Beast in the Between World that is blocking access to the Gate. Without a Spirit Singer her village cannot survive so Amarynth embarks on a hazardous quest to find out what the creature is how it can be defeated and how she can become a full-fledged Spirit Singer — a quest that takes her not only from her tiny seacoast home to the great city of Havenheart and the haunted mountains of the south but across the even more rugged terrain of her own soul.
Awards
Winner of a 2002 Saskatchewan Book Award
Winner of a 2002 Dream Realm Award
Winner of a 2002 EPPIE Award
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Spirited Away
$15.95In this companion volume to their collaboration An Old Man’s Winter Night, Tom Dawe and Veselina Tomova present a fascinating, tantalizing, and chilling collection of fairy lore. No benign tooth fairies here; these fairies are amoral, tricky, dangerous, and beguiling.
A young school teacher learns about strange lights in a foreboding marsh; a nurse in a remote outport visits the baby she delivered just weeks before to find a devastating change; a woman meets a mysterious funeral procession late one evening; a musician happens upon a group of strange little people; a girl is entranced by a strange green butterfly. The pages of Spirited Away are populated by those who wander onto fairy paths or fall under the spell of mysterious music; by the fairy-led?people lost in surroundings long familiar; by changelings; by people who stray onto fairy turf, and experience unnerving events.
These literary renderings of stories and anecdotes Dawe has collected across the province offer an accessible and engaging introduction to one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most powerful and peculiar folk traditions. Tomova’s darkly poetic wood-cut illustrations plumb the fascinating heart of these strange and affecting tales.
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Spirited Away
$22.99In this companion volume to their collaboration An Old Man’s Winter Night, Tom Dawe and Veselina Tomova present a fascinating, tantalizing, and chilling collection of fairy lore. No benign tooth fairies here; these fairies are amoral, tricky, dangerous, and beguiling.
A young school teacher learns about strange lights in a foreboding marsh; a nurse in a remote outport visits the baby she delivered just weeks before to find a devastating change; a woman meets a mysterious funeral procession late one evening; a musician happens upon a group of strange little people; a girl is entranced by a strange green butterfly. The pages of Spirited Away are populated by those who wander onto fairy paths or fall under the spell of mysterious music; by the fairy-led—people lost in surroundings long familiar; by changelings; by people who stray onto fairy turf, and experience unnerving events.
These literary renderings of stories and anecdotes Dawe has collected across the province offer an accessible and engaging introduction to one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most powerful and peculiar folk traditions. Tomova’s darkly poetic wood-cut illustrations plumb the fascinating heart of these strange and affecting tales.
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Spiritual Mentoring
$21.95The path towards enlightenment is best traveled with a guide. Spiritual mentoring is the process of assisting others in their quests to deepen and sustain contact with the holy, a complex practice in any religion. This guide focuses on spiritual teaching issues within the Pagan community and addresses topics such as good seeker-to-mentor matching, clear communication, religious maturity, and the role of community. Exercises for clarifying and enriching spiritual relationships are described and are accompanied by open-ended questions intended to help readers find their own spiritual answers.
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Spiritual Pursuits and Other Stories
$22.95Lien Chao’s new collection of stories is about Toronto as a meeting place for people of all backgrounds. Set in the decades from the 1980s to the 2020s, the stories depict the ripple effects of China’s economic success, the peak of business globalization, and its inevitable decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author has chosen an unhampered social and geographical setting to observe Canadians in the world and at home, including immigrants and refugees. The author has depicted in great detail friendships among neighbours and single women. As Canadians merge into mixed neighbourhoods, spiritual pursuits in individual lifestyles are shared socially as communal rituals.
These five long stories touch on a number of social groups. Newcomer portrait artists build their businesses on the streets of downtown Toronto in the 1990s; a Canadian business club tries hard to enter the retail markets in China in the 2010s; a multi-millionaire from China organizes an artists’ salon in Scarborough; a group of spiritual pursuers meet weekly in Markham Village for meditation and discussion of ancient Chinese wisdom and spirituality.