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Showing 6865–6880 of 9248 results
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The Angel’s Jig
$19.95Long-shortlisted, 2017 ReLit Awards
Facing the dwindling years of his life, an old man waits for his turn on the auction block, hoping to be sold to a family as decent as the one he is leaving. It is not the first time he has been here, and it may not be the last.
Mute in life but loquacious on the page, the old man tells the colourful story of his rootless life. Abandoned by his family and first auctioned off at the age of seven — “Ladies and gentlemen, this boy may not be a rare gem, but he is certainly worth a look” — he moves from one farm to another, taking comfort from the people around him.
Daniel Poliquin’s picaresque novel revisits an all-but-forgotten era, when orphaned children and the elderly poor were auctioned into a form of indentured servitude. Narrated through the eyes and ears of an unforgettable protagonist, The Angel’s Jig is a joyous meditation on identity and the unpredictable voyage of existence.
A French language finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, Le Vol de l’ange now appears in this lyrical translation by award-winning translator Wayne Grady.
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The Animal in the Room
$23.95LONGLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history.
Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body — really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
“Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition — the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what’s encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the ‘one painful spot of blue’ in a deer’s eye. I can’t say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don’t miss it.” – Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems
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The Animal Library
$13.95The Animal Library marks the debut of a remarkable poet – a poet of the flesh, his own and that of the animals he has lived with all his life, whether real or imaginary. Jason Camlot’s father was a furrier and he grew up in a world where, inevitably, “baby fur gets in your eyes” or in “your mouth.” In dreams, the poet becomes a whale corpse “washed up/ on a very pale beach/ and hundreds of flies came,/ and people,/ to see the tusk,/ spun like coral glass.” And as the boy grows up, images, at once curiously literal and yet surreal – images of being devoured or skinned alive – stay with him. The beauty of this collection is one of the mot juste, a concreteness and precision, coupled with a superb sense of rhythm.
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The Animal Sciences
$18.95The Animal Sciences is like a science fair project. Take a group of friends – the missing Robin, crazy Kookla, jealous Duffer, lost Autumn and Latvian Igor – add baking soda and vinegar, and watch what happens. As the story rockets back and forth between the past and present, the consecutive anecdotes start to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, and we begin to see how the different atoms – the characters – of this particular molecule are interdependent. We come to suspect, too, that just as the laws of nature make that baking-soda volcano inevitable, so too do they rule human relationships, making volcanoes out of some chemical reactions and warmth out of others. Maybe, just maybe, human sciences aren’t so different from the animal ones.
What is it that makes us human? Could it be love?
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The Animals
$23.00In a quaint tourist village, Dorn makes miniature scale models displayed in the local shops. Yet life is far from idyllic; he suffers under the thumb of a rich, philandering younger brother and an unloving father, and cannot find the courage to admit his love to Ravenna, the ungainly schoolteacher.
Life takes a strange turn when the government-sponsored “Wild Home Project” is introduced and wolves, rats, minks, otters, and bears move into villagers’ homes. Soon, Dorn receives a mysterious commission, finds a body in a park, and has several run-ins with a former classmate-turned police officer. When fire breaks out, Dorn takes on the unlikely role of hero in the hope of changing the course of his life.
A realist novel with the air of a fairy tale, The Animals is a surprising, funny, and thought-provoking story that explores the nature of relationships faunal and human, and reminds us of the challenges of finding one’s place in society . . . and that living with a wolf is not a very good idea.
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The Annotated Bibliography of Canada?s Major Authors
$28.00Volume 8 in the Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors series which brings together primary and secondary material written by some of Canada’s most preeminent literary figures. This volume includes annotated bibliographies on Irving Layton, Dennis Lee, and Duncan Campbell Scott.
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The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors
$28.00Volume 6 in the Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors series which brings together primary and secondary material written by some of Canada’s most preeminent literary figures. This volume includes annotated bibliographies on Margaret Avison, John Newlove, Michael Ondaatje, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, and Phyllis Webb.
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The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors
$45.00Volume 8 in ECW’s bibliography of Canada’s major authors.
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The Annual Migration of Clouds
$19.95AURORA AWARD WINNER“This packs a punch.” — Publishers Weekly“One of the most unique and engaging voices in genre fiction.” — Booklist“In this rich and nuanced universe, Mohamed offers an emotionally fierce and human story that takes the time and space to personalize apocalypse.” — STARRED review, Quill & QuireA novella set in post–climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her communityThe world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away — to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society — but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.
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The Anstruther Reader
$24.95Compiled to celebrate ten years worth of limited edition chapbooks and broadsides, The Anstruther Reader tracks the evolution of Anstruther Press, one of Canada’s most prominent micropresses. Featuring notable authors such as Klara du Plessis, Tolu Oloruntoba, David Ly, Rebecca Salazar, David Barrick, Fawn Parker, and T. Liem, The Anstruther Reader makes a case for the press’s reputation as a launching pad for emerging and established poets alike, and spotlights its mandate to publish poetry that both pushes against and expands the boundaries of Canadian literature.
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The Answer to Everything
$22.00Ken Belford’s career has spanned six decades and three lives. The Answer to Everything collects Belford’s poetry of the 1960s in Vancouver, his “lan(d)guage” poetry of the early 2000s influenced by his time on remote Blackwater Lake, and his more political-charged poetry of the last decade while he lived in Prince George. This collection allows readers to discover or reflect on Ken’s unique and challenging work, seeing patterns and themes in his poetics as they evolved out of his TISH-influenced poetry and into more contemporary dialogues where Belford seemingly establishes a poetic school of his own.
The collection has been organized chronologically, setting foundational texts from his earlier work next to his celebrated recent books that concretized his distinct poetic sensibilities. This remarkable collection is assembled based on Belford’s wishes by those close to him as a definitive record of his life’s work.
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The Antifa Comic Book
$21.95The shocking images of neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 linger, but so do those of the passionate anti-fascist protestors who risked their lives to do the right thing. In this stirring graphic non-fiction book by the author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, Gord Hill looks at the history of fascism over the last 100 years, and the concurrent antifa movements that have worked fastidiously to topple it.
Fascism is a relatively new political ideology, yet in its short history some of the greatest atrocities against humanity have been carried out in its name. Its poisonous roots have taken hold in every region of the world, from its beginnings in post-World War I Italy, through Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and the KKK in America. And today, emboldened by the American president, fascism is alive and well again. At the same time, antifa activists have proven, throughout history and again today, that the spirit of resistance is alive and well, and necessary.
In The Antifa Comic Book, Gord Hill documents these powerful moments of conflict and confrontation with a perceptive eye and a powerful sense of resolve.
Full-colour throughout. Includes a foreword by Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
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The Apocalypse Ark
$24.00“You fool,” Sariel said. She gestured with a hand and the table between us slid to the side. “You ridiculous mortal fool. What did you do with the sphinx?”
With these words Cross finds himself thrust into his most dangerous adventure yet, working with the double-crossing angel Sariel to stop Noah from ending his eternal suffering by ending the world. But this Noah has not saved any beings from the flood, he is God’s warden, and he is bound to hold all God’s mistakes captive on his ark for eternity. And he has gone mad. Between provoking the sorcerous pirate Blackbeard, dealing with the devious vampire Ishmael and travelling beneath the seas with Captain Nemo and the last of the Atlanteans, Cross struggles to keep one step ahead of Noah until the last battle occurs before the very doors of Atlantis itself.
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The Apple House
$19.95Anglophone Imogene Jackson grew up in an English suburb on the uneasy edge of a francophone world. At the age of nineteen she quit college to marry a shoemaker from the close-knit French village of Saint-Ange-du-Lac. For ten years she has lived with her husband, Thomas, above his family’s historic shoe shop, immersed in village life. When Thomas dies in a car accident, she is shattered and her hard-won mastery of the French language deserts her. Isolated and grief-stricken, she retreats to her childhood home. There she discovers that a petty drug dealer she knows from the village has rented a ramshackle farmhouse, nicknamed the “Apple House,” at the corner of her parents’ street and befriended her easily influenced brother Petey. Her childhood obsession with the old house resurfaces and she finds herself confronting events from both her recent and more distant past as her two worlds collide.
Set in 1970s Quebec and written with a gentle humour, The Apple House is an intimate portrait of life during a time of great change.
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The Apple in the Orchard
$22.95In experimental lit veteran Brian Dedora’s third novel, prose fragments and narrative threads come in and out of focus as, on a winter’s night, a reveller in an upscale Toronto restaurant begins the most dangerous of things: a journey into memory. Is he a narcissist or is he among the wounded? What is it to be gay in a small desert town and in the heart of a sprawling city? The Apple in the Orchard navigates the truths and half-truths of a traveller, a loner plunging through city streets and into the woods, a Canadian wrapped in the myths of the North and tangled in the snare-traps of the urban. As this layered, undulating novel explores class tensions, a family in disintegration, and how the effects of sexual abuse wind through generations, and while cameos by voyageurs, cowboys, Black Robe, and Grey Owl flicker to life and vanish again, the tragic story of the unnamed Her emerges in verbal snapshots.
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The Appraisal
$19.95In the vein of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels comes a smart thriller with literary chops. Art appraiser Helena Marsh explores shady deals and complicated history as she navigates post-WWII corruption in the art world.
“This peppy thriller from Porter bursts with banter and tantalizes the reader with half-revelations and game-changing twists.” — Kirkus Reviews
“[A]n intelligent and exhilarating thriller.” — Publishers Weekly
“A gripping thriller set against the rich post-war history of middle-Europe.” — Staunch Book Prize Committee
When wealthy octogenarian Geza Marton hires art expert Helena Marsh to buy back his family’s Titian painting, Helena flies to Budapest to close what she expects will be a reasonably simple sale. But nothing is ever simple in this beautiful, flawed city where corruption abounds. Helena discovers that there are multiple bidders for the painting, including some dangerous Slavs. Soon there are also dead bodies, and a complicated history that leads her to men Marton knew in Vorkuta, one of Stalin’s notorious gulags.
As she works to unravel the truth of the painting’s ownership and dodges her tail, the dogged ex-detective Attila Feher, Helena is forced to call on all her considerable skills to stay alive and out of jail. Smart, fast-paced, and wildly entertaining, The Appraisal is a terrific thriller set against Budapest’s corruption and lost promise.