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Showing 6849–6864 of 9248 results
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The Agents
$21.95Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Squid Game, via The Office, in this boldly dystopian novel
The agents don’t know what they’re agents of, but they’re very busy agenting, which means watching endless data feeds in their cubicles, cubicles that are piled one on top of another in a massive tower in which the agents both live and work. Empty floors serve as battlefields where different guilds of agents fight for territory. It seems that defenestration is the only way out, the ‘ballet of suicides.’
It is here we meet Theodore, who has amputated his own toes and must maintain a 30-degree angle to keep his balance. And Solveig, who is pregnant, though agents don’t usually have sex, as well as the artist Lazslo and self-mutilating Clara. And then there’s Hick, the new agent, who seems strangely happy and occupies a cubicle that is strategically very important.
The battle for key territory is heating up, and the agents aren’t sure which of them will make it out alive. If, indeed, that’s what any of them want…
The author of the acclaimed The Laws of the Skies turns his hand from literary horror to futuristic dystopianism in this unforgettable marriage between The Office, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Squid Game.
“Engrossing and unpredictable … a thoughtful and provocative speculative novel that casts a keen critical eye toward the contemporary world, addressing deep questions about the meanings of life, community, and work.” – Forward Reviews
“Unflinching in its savagery, the nightmarish poetry of this modern Lord of the Flies is undeniable.” – Publishers Weekly starred review on The Laws of the Skies
“A haunting book, if you can keep reading.” – LitHub on The Laws of the Skies
“The Law of the Skies is not an easy book to digest … but I found it exhilarating to read a novel that’s this unflinching, this nihilistic, and also this deeply profound.” –Locus Magazine
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The Alchemists’ Council
$16.95The first in a phenomenal new fantasy trilogy, where the power of words can change the fate of all dimensions
As a new Initiate with the Alchemists’ Council, Jaden is trained to maintain the elemental balance of the world, while fending off interference by the malevolent Rebel Branch. Bees are disappearing from the pages of the ancient manuscripts in Council dimension and from the outside world, threatening its very existence. Jaden navigates alchemy’s complexities, but the more she learns, the more she begins to question Council practices. Erasure — a procedure designed not only to remove individuals from Council dimension but also from the memories of other alchemists — troubles Jaden, and she uses her ingenuity to remember one of the erased people. In doing so, she realizes the Rebel Branch might not be the enemy she was taught to fight against.
Jaden is caught between her responsibility to the Council and her growing allegiance to the rebels, as the Council finds itself at the brink of war. She is faced with an ethical dilemma involving the free will of all humanity and must decide whether or not she can save the worlds.
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The Alcoholic’s Daughter
$20.00For Annie and Evan it was love at first sight. To the outside world, Annie was vivacious and charming, a successful broadcaster and writer. But once they start living together, Evan discovers Annie works desperately to hide her all-consuming fears, obsessions and neuroses. And her alcoholism. Evan believes love is forever and will conquer all. But soon Annie’s closeted physical and verbal abuse, control and emotional disorders turn his life upside down. Sex, drugs and booze offer little succor but the true nightmare begins when Evan decides he’s had enough and finds himself behind bars. He soon discovers the legal system delivers little justice, has its own penchant for abuse and men have few rights.
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The Allspice Bath
$22.95Winner of the 2020 International Book Award for Multicultural Fiction; Winner of the 2020 Ippy Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. “You should’ve been born a boy,” Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world. As she grows, Adele learns there are certain rules Lebanese girls must follow in order to be good daughters. First off, they must learn to cook, master housework, learn Arabic and follow the traditions of their culture. Above all, they must save themselves for marriage. But Adele dreams of being an artist. When she is accepted to the University of Toronto, this is her chance to have a life outside the confines of her strict upbringing. But can she defy her father?
When Youssef surprises her with a family trip to her ancestral home, Adele is excited about the journey. In Lebanon, she meets Elias. He is handsome and intelligent and Adele develops feelings for him until Elias confides to her that her unexpected meeting with him was actually a well-devised plan that is both deceitful and shocking.Will this unravel the binding threads of this close-knit Lebanese family? Crisscrossing between Ottawa, Toronto and Lebanon, The Allspice Bath is a bold story about the cultural gap and the immigrant experience.
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The Alma Elegies
$15.95A two-part volume of poetry, Allan Cooper’s Alma Elegies pairs the poems from his very first book with new poems written in the same place. The first half of the book was written in the autumn of 1978, when Cooper was living alone in his great-uncle’s house. These poems were published the following year in Blood-Lines. Twenty-five years later, having raised a family in the same house, Cooper has written a series of reflections or ‘answering poems’ about occupying that space and about the coming of winter years later.
Cooper’s early poems attend to the qualities of light, the texture of the soil, the turning of leaves and the build-up of snow with the gradual onset of winter. Inside the house, Cooper comes to know rooms still occupied by his ancestors as he makes space for his own occupation as a descendant and as a poet. These realizations are accompanied by tributes to the work and lives of other artistsHerman Hesse, Vincent Van Gogh, Robert Blywhose paths inspire Cooper’s own and whose painting and writing supply images parallel to those in his immediate surroundings.
In the second half of the collection, entitled ‘The Gathering Cold,’ Cooper offers reflections imbued with some of the same local imagery and personalities. These new poems also acknowledge the weight of decades gone by and the sense of belonging that has developed over time. Cooper’s work engages the spirit of days and lives passed, and the animism of his environs. Here too, former existence filters into the present, as the light of bygone mornings colours the poet’s view of ones that follow, and bygone generations continue to fill the rooms of his family’s home.
According to the author: “In the fall of 2004, I told poet Harry Thurston that it had been twenty-five years since my first book, Blood-Lines, was published, and about fifteen years since it had gone out of print. I wanted to do something with it, but it seemed too small on its own. Harry suggested that I write a new sequence of poems to accompany it. The time seemed right: for years I had lived in the ancestral house in Alma, NB, with my family. But now my daughter was entering university and my wife was teaching full time. During the days I found myself in an ocean of solitude. So I started writing answering poems. The tradition seems lost now, but Wang Wei and P’ei Ti wrote the Wang River Sequence over 1200 years agotwenty poems each. The object was for one poet to write a poem, and the other to answer him. I decided to write answering poems to myself, still facing many of the issues and concerns I felt in 1978.”
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The Alphabet Game
$21.95A member of the sound-poetry collective, The Four Horsemen, winner of a Governor General’s Award for Poetry and writer of Fraggle Rock, bpNichol was one of Canada’s most important poets.
All of Nichol’s writing is distinguished by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. The astounding range of Nichol’s practice included musical theatre, children’s books, comic book art and collage/assemblage. Broadly spanning the history of Nichol’s work, The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader includes both classics and esoteric treasures. From the early typewriter poetry of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer and Nichol’s life-long work of poetry The Martyrology, to the heartbreaking prose of Journal and the whimsical autobiography of Selected Organs, this collection maps the literary career of this enigmatic poet.
For first-time readers of Nichol, this comprehensive collection is a perfect introduction to his groundbreaking work; for loyal Nichol fans, this reader is the the long-awaited compilation of his less readily available work.
‘His wit, along with the seriousness, was there to keep the language free and untethered, to keep the poem aware of its roots, like a tuxedo worn with bare feet in a muddy river … No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent.’ – Michael Ondaatje
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The Alphabet of Aliens
$20.95The dream-like, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate margins and melt points of migrancy. Intensely personal, it is at once an ambitious autobiography and a dream book, a diary and a field guide. Here, the hybridity of the form serves both as a device of subversion and as an ocular pointing at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging. Here wounds multiply in a potato. The soul can be photographed. A mirror hides in a discarded baguette. A phantom-like empty coat in Bardo becomes a bloated pumpkin. The mood is playful, the tone deliberately whimsical giving voice to discourses on passage, arrival and rootlessness of migrant diasporas. Regarding migrancy as an act of self-preservation, disavowing discourses of deservingness and viewing migrants (in the context of Robert Bly’s “Stealing Sugar from The Castle”) as one encompassing class of “sugar-seeking” ants, these poems create constantly shifting rooms for the coexistence of contradictions. The funny, enchanting, fantastical poems capture the life of ants, the art of tea, the virtue of fish, Greater Toronto at the turn of the century, the terrors of personal and collective histories and a mind dealing with the sentence of place here and elsewhere.
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The Amazing Mazie Baker
$24.95When author Kay Johnston first met Mazie Baker, she came to know her as the reigning queen of bannock, selling out batch after batch of fluffy, light frybread at local powwows. She soon learned that Mazie, a matriarch and an activist, had been nurturing and fiercely protecting her community for a lifetime.
In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squamish Nation, a community caught between its traditional values of respect-for the land, the family and the band-and the secular, capitalistic legislation imposed by European settlers. When she was six, the police carried her off to St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, as mandated by the 1920 Indian Act. There, she endured months of beatings, malnourishment and lice infestations before her family collected Mazie and her siblings and fled across the border.
Once in Washington, the Antones weathered the Depression by picking fruit and working in the shipyard. After the war, the children were old enough that the family could safely return to their home on the Capilano Reserve. At sixteen, Mazie began working at a cannery; she packed salmon for eleven years, all the while learning to defend herself from supervisors and fellow packers foolish enough to make her a target. Mazie married her sweetheart, Alvie Baker, and together they raised nine children. Part of the legacy of residential school was that Mazie and her generation were alienated from their culture and language, but through her children, she reconnected with her Squamish identity. She came to mourn the loss of the old style of government by councils of hereditary chiefs and to criticize the corruption in the band leadership created in 1989 by federal legislation.
Galvanized by the injustices she saw committed against and within her community-especially against indigenous women, who were denied status and property rights-she began a long career of advocacy. She fought for housing for families in need; she pushed for transparency in local government; she defended ancestral lands; she shone a bright light into the darkest political corners. Her family called her ch’sken: Golden Eagle.
This intimate biography of a community leader illuminates a difficult, unresolved chapter of Canadian history and paints a portrait of a resilient and principled woman who faced down her every political foe, unflinching, irreverent, and uncompromising.
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The Ambassador of What
$19.95Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an 11-year-old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar. Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce — these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What. Driven by an ear for how we talk, how we feel, how we fail, and how we love, these are tough and tender stories that take hold, and linger.
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The Amber Garden
$19.95The stunning and beautifully crafted conclusion to The Alchemists’ Council series
In Book Three of The Alchemists’ Council trilogy, eternal conflicts between the Council and Rebel Branch escalate. Secrets about time-travel manipulation are revealed, uncomfortable truths about alchemical children are discovered, and Council dimension itself begins to disintegrate. Amidst this fallout, the Amber Garden dissolves, conjoined pairs suffer torturous separation, alchemists die in the process, and Cedar is banished to the outside world where she endures a living death within her conjoined partner.
Efforts of both alchemists and rebels to resolve the dissolution of Council and Flaw dimensions prove futile. People of the outside world experience ever-increasing political turmoil and the risk of environmental collapse. Mercifully, the alchemists have woven a thread of hope into an alchemically inscribed book, which they release into the outside world with the purpose of attracting new Initiates to Council. At first, Initiate Virginia appears to be a disrespectful interloper with whom Jaden loathes to work. However, their combined scribal efforts prove astoundingly powerful — so much so that they are sent through time to inscribe critical messages into ancient manuscripts. Events associated with one such manuscript lead Cedar to propose a solution to the dimensional fallout: all remaining alchemists must permanently vacate Council dimension.
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The Americans Are Coming
$19.99An invasion? For teenagers Dryfly Ramsey and Shadrack Nash, poor and ignorant in the world’s terms but rich in the lore of the magical Miramichi, the annual influx of American anglers, with their money, fishing gear, and thirst for salmon seems like one, and it sets the stage for action. A cast of quirky, unforgettable characters — Nutbeam, a large-nosed, floppy-eared hermit; Shirley, Brennan Siding’s toothless postmistress and Ramsey family matriarch; and Buck, who appears once a year to sire another child — conspire to capture the imagination in Herb Curtis’s now classic novel. And what of the Whooper, that mystical beast whose cries result in amazingly tall tales?
In The Americans Are Coming, the voices of Brennan Siding ring out in the rich vernacular of New Brunswick’s Miramichi region, a world immersed in myth, folklore, and the sulpherous belch of a nearby pulp mill, and where ghosts and demons are as real as the Lone Ranger or the spring run of gaspereaux. With a new afterword by David Adams Richards.
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The Amethyst Cross
$9.95World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2024.
When Margaret finds a cottage to rent in the moorlands for her visiting Aunt Dorothea, she pays no mind to its rumored dark history. But when Dorothea goes missing only days after her arrival, a haunting tale of greed and murder soon comes to light.
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The Analyst
$18.95In her latest collection, Molly Peacock, one of Canada’s most beloved poets, tells the story of the decades-long relationship she’s had with her psychoanalyst, who returned to painting after surviving a stroke. By translating techniques of visual art into language, The Analyst guides us through galleries of breathtaking settings and portraiture, leading us on a search for authenticity behind the illusions of pose.
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The Anarchist Banker
$20.00A new Interpretation and a new English Translation with the original Portuguese Edition
The story of The Anarchist Banker takes place in a Lisbon café where the narrator meets an old friend, now a wealthy banker. He questions his friend about his anarchist origins and discovers to his amazement that the banker still considers himself to be an anarchist. The story revolves around the banker’s vigorous defense of his position and his assertion that he is the only genuine anarchist among the banker’s so-called anarchist friends. This is a bilingual English/Portuguese edition.
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The Anatomy of Clay
$18.95Taking off from the Promethean myth of human creation, Gillian Sze’s second poetry collection explores the “anatomy of clay” and the individual as a sentient mystery. At times reflective, instructional, playful, or strange, the first section, Quotidianus, offers observational poems, which recount intimate and ordinary moments often missed, overlooked, or forgotten. Sze tugs at the fabric of habit and amidst the urban mundane finds her subjects in a woman waiting for the bus, a neighbour who talks to his plants, a girl smoking after a storm. The following section, Extimacy, takes a lyrical and confessional turn, veering inwards, dealing reflexively with the materiality of inner life: the self as ingredients, the self as experiment, the self as animal and artist. The Anatomy of Clay finds exceptions in the most prosaic conditions and the ineffable distinctions between people, selves, objects, and histories.
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The Angel of Solitude
$17.95The Angel of Solitude presides over the lives of eight young lesbian women who strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia, their pasts and their differences are abolished. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that none of the women are present directly—they come into being, and live their lives, only in and through the memories, observations and imaginations of each of the others. Thus, their mission to establish a fortress for themselves remains inconclusive; they have too much to overcome, both within themselves and in the world at large, to abandon their individual struggles for the sake of a group.