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Showing 6577–6592 of 9493 results
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Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential
$20.00Through these far-reaching and searching poems, J. J. Steinfeld’s work continues to not only orbit a multitude of realities and multifaceted worlds, but to interrogate various aspects of being, whether they appear as the worldly or the otherworldly, the ordinary or the extraordinary, the physical or the spiritual. As Steinfeld concludes in his poem “The End of the World,” somewhat confronting the absurd and somehow embracing the existential: “I want a poem with a good ending / all the thoughts and uncertainties / and missed opportunities / tied together with metaphoric hope / even if that poem is about the end of the world / preposterous and ludicrous / as it might be.”
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Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You
$18.95Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You explores the peculiar places we look for validation, for purpose, for a life we might recognize as wholly our own. The off-kilter heroes and heroines in Jill Sexsmith’s debut collection of short stories find themselves camping in elm trees set to be felled; seeking refuge in a spare bedroom carved out of an opal mine; singing to a stranger on the other side of a bathroom wall. As her characters struggle with relationships, Sexsmith deftly cuts through raw and intimate moments to show how strangely impervious to their desperate circumstances people can be. Witty and unapologetic, the stories in Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You traverse the everyday and the unexpected to delightful effect.
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Somewhere Else
$24.95Somewhere Else contains George F. Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time; which represent, as he once said, his “classical veneer.” In them he honed his considerable and unique dramatic talent along “that fine line between the serious and the comic,” in settings outside the North American locales of his work since the 1980s.
Walker’s earliest plays, absurdist dramas reminiscent of Ionesco and Beckett, climaxed with Beyond Mozambique (1974), featuring a B-movie jungle locale populated by a drug-addicted, pederastic priest, a disgraced Mountie, a porn-film starlet and a demonic ex-Nazi doctor whose wife thinks she is Olga in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Zastrozzi (1977), utilizing all the baroque conventions of Jacobean tragedy, pits its protagonist, a self-styled, Machiavellian “Master of Discipline” against the chaos of the universe in a flurry of dramatic excesses that tend toward elegant self-parody. The Chalmers Award-winning Theatre of the Film Noir (1981), a murder mystery set in wartime Paris, is the culmination of his work in the Humphrey Bogart / Raymond Chandler style, so evident in his trilogy featuring the cynical investigative reporter / private-eye, Tyrone Power. The Governor General’s and Chalmers Award-winning Nothing Sacred (1988), an adaptation of Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, consolidated his popular reputation outside of Canada to such a degree that the Los Angeles Times declared it “the play of the year.”
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Somewhere In Between
$21.95Following tragic events from which Julie O’Dale believes she will never recover, she buys into her husband Ian’s dream to give up their comfortable city lives and retreat to the isolated Chilcotin area of British Columbia. Only after purchasing the remote six hundred acre cattle ranch do they realize that, along with the and, they have inherited the reclusive tenant who occupies and old trapper’s cabin on the property. As both Julie and Ian wrestle with their individual guilt over their deteriorating marriage and their sorrow, they also have to contend with the wilderness at their doorstep and the mysterious tenant, Virgil Blue. Another riveting novel from the author of The Promise of Rain, a Globe and Mail Top 100 title in 2009.
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Somewhere There’s Music
$19.95In this stark and unsparing coming-of-age story, the shy and intelligent Joel watches helplessly as his alcoholic and abusive paramedic father spirals ever downward and out of control. Joel’s life crumbles further when his older brother, disturbed by the drunken violence inflicted on their mother, flees their home seemingly for good. Convinced he must track down his brother and bring him back home if he is to survive in this lonely and frightening new reality, Joel’s awareness of his father’s workplace experiences gradually begins to expand as he starts to appreciate the many issues faced by first responders, even as he begins to doubt that he himself will escape the chaos of his recently shattered world. In Somewhere There’s Music, the reader is immersed in a young man’s struggle and desperate search to find what’s left of his family.
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Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen
$17.95Fans of offbeat cinema, discriminating renters and collectors, and movie buffs will drool over this checklist of the best overlooked and underappreciated films of the last 100 years. In Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, Richard Crouse, Canada AM film critic and host of television’s award-winning Reel to Real, presents a follow-up to his 2003 book with another 100 of his favorite films.
Titles range from the obscure, like 1912’s The Cameraman’s Revenge, to El Topo’s unusual existential remake of the classic western, and little-seen classics like The Killing. Each essay features a detailed description of plot, notable trivia tidbits, critical reviews, and interviews with actors and filmmakers. Featured interviews include Billy Bob Thornton on an inspirational movie about a man with his head in the clouds, Francis Ford Coppola on One from the Heart, and Mario Van Peebles on playing his own father in Badasssss!
Sidebars feature quirky details, including legal disclaimers and memorable quotes, along with movie picks from A-list actors and directors.
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Sonar
$17.00Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness — but what is madness? In a world that has traded Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs for Prozac and where zombies masquerade as the living, who is really mad? Through the eyes of an artist boxed in by tradtition, Kristian Enright’s debut poetry collection Sonar wrestles with language, mental health and identity. With the echoed voices of the beat generation, postmodernism and prairie poetics at his side, the narrator, Colin Verbanofsky, confronts a world steeped in melancholy. Between his dreams and the reflected impressions of medical staff and fellow patients, Colin struggles to find a place for himself in the brilliance and sadness he sees around him. Like his poetic forebears, Enright deftly uses poetry to express his own profound and epic Howl.
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Song of Kosovo
$29.95Some days, it doesn’t pay to be a lapsed pretend Buddhist… particularly when you’re charged with a lengthy list of war crimes. Vida Zanković has done many things to stay alive. A wily young man caught in the insanity of the Balkan wars, Vida has dealt drugs, been forced to join the army, and then deserted when he tried to save a young boy trapped beneath a mountain of corpses. Being accused of genocide, however, forces Vida into a whole new level of surrealism.
In Song of Kosovo, Chris Gudgeon exposes the universal human experience like never before, fashioning a satirical world where one earns a following as a levitating holy man while the US Air Force drops “bombs” of condoms, candy, and Ikea pillows to subvert the populace.
Weaving strands of Balkan mythology and history, threading them through the life of a man who only wnats to live out his days with the woman he loves, Gudgeon crafts a tanscendent tale at once grotesque and absurd, satiric and tragic, touching and real. As much Catch-22 as De Niro’s Game, Song of Kosovo is a unique examination of how ideas may rise above reality to drive world events and how a nation caught in the grip of conflict may ultimately earn a sense of itself.
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Song of the Say-Sayer
$15.95During a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the home of the Lastings, killing the parents and forever bonding the children, even though Rock, William, Fred-James and Naomi are not blood-related. Years later, still haunted by their terrible childhood memory, the three older brothers await the return of their beloved sister who has been singing in faraway places. But the redhead who returns is horribly sick. Now the Lasting clan must join forces again, because the ‘municipals’ are threatening to turn away their sister.
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Song of the Sword
$19.99A magical quest. A nerdy sidekick. The power of the Lady of the Lake. Ariane’s life just got a lot more interesting.
On the first day of her suspension from school for fighting bullies, Ariane hears the lake singing to her, meets the Lady of the Lake from the days of King Arthur in an underwater chamber, and learns she’s heir to the Lady’s magical power over water.
Now she and Wally Knight, who unexpectedly followed her, have a quest: find the scattered shards of King Arthur’s sword Excalibur before the ruthless wizard Merlin can, in his modern-day guise as the rich, powerful Rex Major.
Can Ariane learn to use her power in time-and keep herself and Wally alive-in the race to beat Merlin to the first shard?
Song of the Sword is an exciting modern-day young-adult fantasy by award-winning author Edward Willett, perfect for anyone who thrills to stories of modern-day magic and tales of King Arthur.
Plunge into adventure in this first book in the five-book Shards of Excalibur</em series.
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Song of the Taxidermist
$17.95There’s something fresh and fantastic in Aurian Haller’s view of the world. In Song of the Taxidermist, he demonstrates both a fascination and unease with the independence of the body — its resistance to the self’s colonizing imperative.
Employing a powerful visual and intellectual imagination, a camera and a roving curiosity, he investigates the ways that flesh inhabits the spaces around us. Building upon the stories of famous taxidermied specimens — the celebrated French giraffe, Zarafe, and the Alaskan sled dog, Togo — he explores what it means when the shell of a being becomes iconic in a culture: how place, an idea, or a quality might fill a standing skin.
Like his compatriots Erin Mouré, Roo Borson, and Michael Ondaatje, Aurian Haller pushes beyond the constraints of the short lyric or narrative moment to experiment with larger thematic forms. This stunning new collection, so carefully executed in image and phrasing, so agile in its metaphors, is both astonishing in scope and lush in its imaginative landscape.
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Songs for Relinquishing the Earth
$18.95Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was first published by the author in 1996 as a hand-made book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth.
Part of Jan Zwicky’s reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry’s public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.
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Songs For The Cold Of Heart
$29.95Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)…Songs For The Cold Of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century?long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters?with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca.
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Songs for the Dancing Chicken
$16.95In Songs for the Dancing Chicken, Emily Schultz’s debut collection of poetry, the films and life of acclaimed director Werner Herzog become linguistic launch pads, jumping off points for subtle investigations into everyday life. Like her subject, Schultz uses hypnotic images to imbue that everyday life with profound insight.
While fans of Herzog will recognize the details of his amazing life and words from Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo, Stroszek, and Nosferatu, Schultz finds the intersection between Herzog’s art and her own poetic voice with authority and verve.
Songs for the Dancing Chicken is part fan letter, part dark cultural translation, and much, much more.
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Songs from a Small Town
$19.95Inspired by a true incident of mass hysteria in Le Roy, New York in 2011-2012, Songs from a Small Town (in a Minor Key) is a novel written as a series of stories from different points of view. It examines a mysterious condition that strikes only teenage girls in a small farming town–their arms twitch and jump, and they can’t control the movements–and while people speculate about what is causing the disease, no one knows for sure. As the stories progress, various facets of this bizarre phenomenon are explored, dark secrets come to light, and the hysteria grows.
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Songs From This and That Country
$27.95“A visceral depiction of the inhumanity of oppression, Songs from This and That Country is, at its core, an unforgettable story of the evocative resonance of one’s past.” — Don Aker, bestselling author of The First Stone
It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity;
thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being;
forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white;
600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under the Ottomans, to meet the witch Baba Roga from whom she learns that father and Turk are not so very different;