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All Books in this Collection
Showing 6641–6656 of 9311 results
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Strength of Bone, The
$19.95Strength of Bone, The
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Stricken
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Strike!
$20.95It’s 1919. Brisbane, Seattle, Barcelona. Workers demand their share of the post-war pie but big business and big government say “no” to crippling general strikes. But in Winnipeg, an entire city shuts down for six weeks and becomes the nation’s battleground for the democratic dream. Mike Sokolowski and his godson Stefan have escaped Europe only to become “enemy aliens” in Canada. But where Stefan finds social justice in the strike, Mike sees a threat to his slave-wage job—his only hope of saving his family from revolution in Ukraine. When Stefan falls in love with Rebecca, a pro-strike Jewish suffragette, making a deportation target of them all, Mike turns against the strikers and their growing hope of changing the world.
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String Quartet
$29.95A collection of four plays by internationally renowned puppeteer Ronnie Burkett. This anthology includes the three plays of the Memory Dress Trilogy: Tinka’s New Dress, Street of Blood, and Happy, as well as Provenance.
Tinka’s New Dress
Two old friends become puppeteers, each performing with the same beloved folk characters, Franz and Schnitzel. Fipsi, ambitious and naive, aligns herself with the rule government, the Common Good. Carl, headstrong and outspoken, is forced underground as his satirical shows parody the censorship and oppression of the Common Good. Based on the illegal puppet shows staged in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Tinka’s New Dress examines propaganda versus truth, compliance versus censorship, and the collective society versus the individual.
Street of Blood
When Mrs. Edna Rural pricks her finger and bleeds onto her sewing he sees the face of Christ in a quilt square. As the media and the faithful converge on her sleepy prairie town, a has-been Hollywood vampire seeking rejuvenation and a karaoke-singing gay terrorist intent on revenge join the fray. And just as the bloodbath begins, the man in the quilt appears in the flesh to the odd trio, revealing that the bonds of blood are thicker and stranger than their individual thirsts led them to believe.
Happy
Happy, a cheerful veteran, homespun philosopher, and pensioner, wanders through episodes of grief in the lives of his fellow rooming-house tenants. Alongside Happy is Antoine Marionette, the emcee of the Grey Cabaret, who introduces arch presentations of sadness in song, pantomime, and burlesque that mirror and parody the stages of grief experienced by each character.
Provenance
Pity Beane, a young art academic, travels to Europe to trace the provenance of the subject of her obsession, a painting of a young man known simply as Tender. What she finds is so much more than she had ever imagined. In a broth run by an aging madam, the twentieth-century art scene is played out from Paris, London, and Vienna in an unrivalled exploration of beauty: our obsession with it, our fantasies about it, our addiction to it, and our ownership of it.
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Stripmalling
$24.95Stripmalling is the story of one young man’s embarrassing and hilarious journey to literary awareness. Jonny lives and works in a strip mall in suburban Winnipeg. For some people, this would be an exciting and fulfilling life. But Jonny has a dream: he wants to be a writer. He has almost everything he needs to make this dream come true: a supportive girlfriend, an active imagination, and an abundance of subject matter. There is only one obstacle: his own relentless stupidity.
Imagine Proust without all those annoying words and insights. Imagine a book so funny, so clever that even just touching it makes you a smarter, better person. Part journal, part comedy routine, and part graphic novel, Stripmalling is a unique experiment in genre and voice that is ambitious, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny.
Parts of Stripmalling have appeared on CBC Radio One’s All in a Weekend and in THIS Magazine, filling Station, Word, Event, Matrix, sub-Terrain, and Opium.
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Stripmalling
$16.95Stripmalling is the story of one young man’s embarrassing and hilarious journey to literary awareness. Jonny lives and works in a strip mall in suburban Winnipeg. For some people, this would be an exciting and fulfilling life. But Jonny has a dream: he wants to be a writer. He has almost everything he needs to make this dream come true: a supportive girlfriend, an active imagination, and an abundance of subject matter. There is only one obstacle: his own relentless stupidity.
Imagine Proust without all those annoying words and insights. Imagine a book so funny, so clever that even just touching it makes you a smarter, better person. Part journal, part comedy routine, and part graphic novel, Stripmalling is a unique experiment in genre and voice that is ambitious, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny.
Parts of Stripmalling have appeared on CBC Radio One’s All in a Weekend and in THIS Magazine, filling Station, Word, Event, Matrix, sub-Terrain, and Opium.
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Stroll
$24.95What is the ‘Toronto look’? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for a decade. His psychogeographic reportages, some of which have been featured in EYE WEEKLY and Spacing magazine, situate Toronto’s buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.
Stroll celebrates Toronto’s details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.
Stroll features thirty-two walks, a flâneur manifesto, a foreword by architecture critic John Bentley Mays and dozens of hand-drawn maps by Marlena Zuber.
‘Shawn Micallef looks at the city in a way we all should more often – he sees it as a living book thatis alive with stories just waiting to be told to the attentive observer. In Stroll, he gives us an introduction to just how interesting and surprisingly dramatic those stories are, and how exciting our city is when we hear them.’
– David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto
‘A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.’
– Douglas Coupland
Stroll is co-published with EYE WEEKLY.
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Stroll, updated edition
$27.95THE TORONTO STAR‘S “30 BOOKS WE CAN’T WAIT TO READ THIS SPRING”
The updated edition of a Toronto favourite meanders around some of the city’s unique neighborhoods and considers what makes a city walkable
What is the ‘Toronto look’? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for decades. His psychogeographic reportages situate Toronto’s buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.
Stroll celebrates Toronto’s details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.
“Shawn Micallef is the unofficial mayor of Toronto, the genial ambassador the city needs and deserves. As he strolls Toronto’s broad avenues and its little streets, he finds hidden pockets of delight – and weirdness, too. Join him and fall in love with the city again.” – Liz Renzetti, author of Bury the Lead
“When I moved to Toronto in 2011, Stroll was the first book I added to my library and course reading lists. My students and I get lost in the PATH, sneak into lobbies, and visit the archives with this book as our guide. Micallef’s friendly voice invites us to slow down and notice not just a few landmark buildings but the city’s built fabric as a whole. This updated version offers our collective memory a much-needed affectionate yet critical view of recent changes to the city.” – Erica Allen-Kim, Author of Building Little Saigon
“Stroll is a delightful and eccentric guidebook, full of clever writing, amusing stories and charming maps that will make you want to strap on your walking shoes and head into the streets of Toronto.” – Carol Off, Author/Broadcaster
“Shawn Micallef looks at the city in a way we all should more often – he sees it as a living book that is alive with stories just waiting to be told to the attentive observer. In Stroll, he gives us an introduction to just how interesting and surprisingly dramatic those stories are, and how exciting our city is when we hear them.” – David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto
“A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.” – Douglas Coupland
This new edition updates things in the city that have changed and includes several new walks.
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Strong Hollow
$19.95In her bold debut novel, Linda Little has crafted a story where music, creativity, and sexuality merge, as a young Nova Scotian carver embarks on a profound discovery of his sense of self. Strong Hollow tells the story of Jackson Bigney, a young man coping with a crippling past of repression, alcoholism, and poverty.
Failure seems built-in to Jackson’s life. His father, a brutal man with a short fuse, despises his son, and Jackson’s brothers thrive on drinking, violence and petty crime. Jackson finds solace only by carving tiny objects — acorns, field mice, bottle caps and leaves — as he has done since childhood. The day Jackson finds his father dead in a ditch beside the MacIntyre road is the day he begins his own metamorphosis. At nineteen, the seventh of nine children and the eldest still at home, Jackson seems predestined to follow in the feckless footsteps of his father. He becomes silent and empty, unable to feel or to articulate emotion.
Setting himself up as a bootlegger, Jackson builds a small cabin. He lives only in the present, expecting no more from life than work, alcohol and empty sex. One summer, Jackson meets Ian Sutherland, an accomplished fiddler and a powerful attraction develops between them. Twenty-nine and in love for the first time, Jackson feels alive with anticipation and fulfilment. Inevitably, at summer’s end, Ian leaves and Jackson is shattered. Seeking to fill the void in this life, Jackson begins to restore a derelict fiddle. At a music shop in Halifax, he meets an accepting circle of friends. And as the fiddle takes shape, Jackson’s perceptions of himself begin to change and he realizes that how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself.
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Strong Hollow: GLE Library Edition
$19.99In her bold debut novel, Linda Little has crafted a story where music, creativity, and sexuality merge, as a young Nova Scotian carver embarks on a profound discovery of his sense of self. Strong Hollow tells the story of Jackson Bigney, a young man coping with a crippling past of repression, alcoholism, and poverty.
Failure seems built-in to Jackson’s life. His father, a brutal man with a short fuse, despises his son, and Jackson’s brothers thrive on drinking, violence and petty crime. Jackson finds solace only by carving tiny objects — acorns, field mice, bottle caps and leaves — as he has done since childhood. The day Jackson finds his father dead in a ditch beside the MacIntyre road is the day he begins his own metamorphosis.
At nineteen, the seventh of nine children and the eldest still at home, Jackson seems predestined to follow in the feckless footsteps of his father. He becomes silent and empty, unable to feel or to articulate emotion. Setting himself up as a bootlegger, Jackson builds a small cabin. He lives only in the present, expecting no more from life than work, alcohol, and empty sex. One summer, Jackson meets Ian Sutherland, an accomplished fiddler and a powerful attraction develops between them. Twenty-nine and in love for the first time, Jackson feels alive with anticipation and fulfilment. Inevitably, at summer’s end, Ian leaves and Jackson is shattered.
Seeking to fill the void in this life, Jackson begins to restore a derelict fiddle. At a music shop in Halifax, he meets an accepting circle of friends. And as the fiddle takes shape, Jackson’s perceptions of himself begin to change and he realizes that how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself.
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Strongman
$19.95Tom Thurston has written the first biography of one of Canada’s athletic legends, Doug Hepburn. Born in Vancouver with a club foot and a severe alternating squint, Doug decided as a boy to surmount his disabilities by training with weights, setting his sights on becoming the world’s strongest man. And this he achieved. Doug is now known as the grandfather of modern “power weightlifting.”
Doug was World Weightlifting Champion in Stockholm in 1953, and he won the gold medal in the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954. Joe Weider and others claimed that Doug may have been the strongest man in history. But there was much more to Doug than his weightlifting. He went on to become an eloquent advocate for drug-free sport, and he made a reputation as an inventor. As a singer, he became well-known for his own compositions. Radio stations still play the Hepburn Carol each Christmas.
For those interested in building a super-strong body that will last well into old age, Doug’s complete, drug-free training secrets are revealed in a way that are easy to understand and employ. For those looking for the inspiration to tackle some of their own goals, Doug Hepburn presents a fine role model. For all Doug’s successes as a strongman, his life was filled with much sadness, many setbacks and even, at times, poverty. Thurston’s biography does justice to all aspects of Doug’s life, illuminating the fortitude with which he met his many challenges. A truly splendid biography with many black and white photographs.
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Struck
$10.00Meet Finnigan Heller, drifter: reclusive, abrasive, and clairvoyant. He’s also been struck by lightning more times than you’ve had hot dinners. It happens in every town he passes through. But is he following the weather or is the weather following him? Heller’s bizarre “gift” has him on the run from a scientist, a Canadian Intelligence agent, and an Englishman with a taste for violence. ‘Struck’ is a story about thunderstorms, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the nature of luck, andthe fate of one very attractive nose.
” ‘Struck’, a brisk and brain-tweaking debut from Calgary writer Geoffrey Bromhead, graduates lightning from flash-and-boom backdrop to driving force of theme and plot.” – The Globe & Mail
25th Annual 3-day novel contest winner
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Stuck
$12.95Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. Stuck charts the roller-coaster odyssey of Jack, a twentysomething would-be actor is search of sex, drugs, and cash. As Jack wanders the streets of Toronto, his series of wild encounters include nuns on the make, Mormons on the hustle, venal directors, and a host of venereal and utterly unforgettable characters.
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Stuck in Downward Dog
$14.95“Refreshingly realistic … as good as having Sunday brunch with a girlfriend.” — Winnipeg Free Press
Mara Brennan is about to unravel. Three days after her 28th birthday, her boyfriend dumps her, leaving her with nothing but a basement apartment, a futon and a pile of unpaid bills. Mara realizes it’s time for an identity makeover. Navigating the dueling worlds of yoga and cosmetic surgery, gourmet dinners and Frankenberry cereal, etiquette handbooks and too-helpful loved ones, Stuck in Downward Dog is Chantel Guertin’s unforgettable comic debut about how to get unstuck when you’re caught in a rut.
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Studies in Description
$18.95Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. One hundred years since publication, Carl Peters offers a sustained reading of the 1914 edition, responding to the eccentric sounds and rhythms of this long prose-poem with annotations that bring understanding, in particular, to the composition’s syntax, which is noted for its defiance of conventional norms; for example:
ROAST POTATOES.
Roast potatoes for.
[Annotation] Grounded! Such annotations demonstrate that an apprehension of Stein’s whole art comes from the project and praxis of reading the work literally, actually. “Read her with her for less,” she asserts. “Translate more than translate the authority.”In Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Peters demonstrates ways in which Stein’s thought questions everything, underlining reasons that her work has long served as the wellspring for generations of experimental poets, inspiring Language movement poets such as bill bissett, bpNichol, and George Bowering, and novelists such as William Gass, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway.
The Modernist work Tender Buttons can be used to show how in the early twentieth century Stein and others helped us discover a different world in our midst, a moment of the Modern.
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Studies in Motion
$18.95Photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife’s lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. However, these events, which predate his subsequent obsession with stopping time and freezing motion, become the ghosts that haunt Muybridge in the fictional world of Governor General’s Award winning dramatist Kevin Kerr’s new play, Studies in Motion. Attempting to absolve himself of the tragic consequences of his past actions by inventing a new world where action is neutralized by scientific analysis, Muybridge uses instantaneous photography to dissect time into its smallest possible fragments—to reconstruct his life, his identity and his legacy.
On the surface, these sequences of still photos signify a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science: understanding through controlled observation and rational analysis, using the potential of technology to transcend the limits of our own senses, to enhance our powers of perception. Women and men, usually nude, are presented performing “everyday” actions alongside movements that are ritualistic, comic, sensual, absurd and even diseased and pathological. The variations seem endless. There is a tension in the collected images: scientific, classical, elegant, erotic, startling, disturbing and grotesque.
But taken together, particularly as the technology pioneered by Muybridge lead to the world of cinematography, they seem to say something else—to inescapably construct a narrative that has shaped our culture into one that objectifies human beings, where information is fragmented, mediated, where observations through the filter of technology are trusted more than those acquired directly through our physical senses, and set images into motion in the service of a public manipulation of perception as effectively as Muybridge himself used them in the revision of his own private mythology.