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Showing 6641–6656 of 9493 results
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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.
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Spit Delaney’s Island
$18.95Jack Hodgins’ first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print – in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton’s Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General’s Award, Spit Delaney’s Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career.
Often compared to Faulkner’s fiction of the deep South, Hodgins’ stories develop through people who seem to live at the edge of the world, always in danger of falling off that edge. There is Spit himself, the keeper of a steam locomotive that has been exiled to Ottawa for display; there are loggers, country wives, bookstore owners, and people who “live up the mountain” in isolated communes.
Hodgins’ prose brings Vancouver Island to life in its touch, its taste and the sound of its dialects – a determinedly real world. At the same time he imbues his people with a sense that there is something more that they cannot see but which they sense and strive towards – a mystery or even magic that they can almost touch but which remains forever elusive.
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Split
$22.95In the aftermath of the 1960s, tensions simmer beneath the surface of a small town in rural Massachusetts. Watergate and the war in Vietnam have shaken Americans’ faith in their government, the energy crisis clouds the future, and the civil rights movement has given way to uneasy race relations. But identical twin sisters April and Pilgrim live happily on their parents’ farm, sharing a secret language and uncanny closeness. The twins shelter each other from the wider world, until adolescence and the hard realities of adult life catch up to them.
In 1975, when the girls are sixteen years old, their father single handedly recruits a young Bahamian doctor to minister to the town’s residents. While racial prejudice keeps patients away from his door, the idle “Dr. Panama,” as April and Pilgrim refer to him, spends much of his time with the family. While the relationship between the girls and the young doctor begins to strain the bounds of propriety and comes to light, the family is torn apart.
Years later, on the eve of the 2008 election that would sweep Barack Obama into the White House, the adult Pilgrim, long estranged from her family, learns her father has died and her mother, now suffering the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, is living in homecare. When she returns to Massachusetts to see her mother, Pilgrim discovers a country in financial crisis and her bucolic childhood home in shambles. It is in the midst of this decay that Pilgrim picks up the threads of her past and finds herself finishing what was begun three decades earlier.
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Splitsville
$19.95A bookseller’s love affair, start to finish, against the backdrop of a city in protest.
It’s 1971. Hal Sachs runs a used bookstore. Business isn’t so great, and the store is in a part of Toronto that’s about to be paved over with a behemoth expressway. And then Hal meets Lily Klein, an activist schoolteacher who’ll do just about anything to stop the highway. It’s love at first sight. Until it isn’t. And then Hal vanishes.A half-century later, Hal’s nephew, Aitch, waits for his baby to be born as he tries to piece together facts and fictions about Hal’s disappearance.
Splitsville is a diamond-cut love letter to a city whose defining moment was to say ‘no way’ to a highway, and a look at the obsessions that carry down through a family.
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Splitting Off
$15.95Triny Finlay’s debut collection of poetry is a meditation on the self’s negotiation with the material world. Finlay pushes poetic form and language, creating images of love and loss that are at once playful and profoundly disturbing. The poems in this collection are rife with metaphorical leaps and unexpected associations: the troubled self as conjoined twins or as a flatiron building; the predatory lover as axe-wielding gardener; coming-of-age as a surgical procedure. Blurring the line between subject and object, the voices in these poems explore individual experience from multiple points of view, never privileging any one possibility. These voices fill the book with startling discoveries of conflict and hope, simultaneously stitching and ripping the fabric of female identity.
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Sports and Pastimes
$20.00Inspired by Erik Satie’s work of the same name, Sports and Pastimes is the latest novel by acclaimed Montreal playwright and author Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.
Translated by Aimee Wall (whose translation of Vickie Gendreau’s Testament for BookThug in 2016 drew critical reviews), this fast-paced story follows the daily life, at once empty and overloaded, of a group of friends who spend all their energy trying to distract themselves with huge hits of endorphins, art and various substances, navigating pleasure and boredom, the extraordinary and the banal, as (more or less) worthy representatives of the best and worst of what their era has to offer.
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Spotted
$17.95Best friends, boyfriends, high school and haute couture — Gossip Girl has gone from a guilty pleasure to becoming the show everyone is talking about, from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, from gossip columnists to President Obama. From its not-so-humble beginnings as a bestselling book series set in the posh Upper East Side private schools of New York City, this show the Boston Herald deemed “every parent’s nightmare” has catapulted into the pop culture stratosphere. In the first two seasons Gossip Girl has proved itself a popular and critical darling, influencing the culture it critiques and setting trends while providing biting social commentary on this generation of entitled, tech-savvy youth.
In Spotted: Your One and Only Unofficial Guide to Gossip Girl, you’ll find:
- an episode-by-episode exploration of seasons 1 and 2, tracing the development of the characters and storylines
- bios of the cast and the show’s creators, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage
- comparisons to the show’s teen soap and literary predecessors, including how the Gossip Girl books were adapted
- summaries of the movies that inspire each episode’s title
- sidebars of fun trivia
- all the details on the music, the fashion, and the NYC locations where Gossip Girl films (complete with exclusive photos!)
- Chuck Bass. (And he’s wearing purple.)
Second only to a Blair Waldorf–inspired hair band, Spotted is the must-have accessory for any fan who says, “Not enough!” when the end credits roll.