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Showing 6865–6880 of 9481 results
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Sweetness from Ashes
$19.95Set partially in Vancouver, partially on a farm in rural Ontario and partially in West Africa, Sweetness from Ashes is a novel about family in its various forms. When Sheila, Jenny and Chris decide to respect a deceased relative’s wishes, and return the ashes to the family farm, the three begin a journey that takes them from their present-day lives in Vancouver to a deeper discovery of their roots and the family’s past. In Ontario, they meet their cousins and start to reconcile with a buried history. Mixed into the story is a book that Jenny is editing, a memoir of an Englishman living in the colonial Gold Coast in the 1950s. The link goes beyond the manuscript and interweaves with the Ontario family farm, and the new generation of people who have come home.
Sweetness from Ashes is a vibrant novel with a voice and perspective that is contemporary but gives a nod to the past.
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Swept Away
$14.95Eleven-year-old Ruth’s friend and neighbor, Bea, has just died — an accidental drowning. Or so they say.
Ruth’s not so sure. Bea was sixty-four and knew the area better than anyone. She was much too careful to get swept away by the flooded Teeswater River. And now Bea’s godson, Saul, says his godmother had premonitions that she would be murdered. She even left behind a box of clues to help Ruth figure out what happened.
Accident or murder? That’s the case Ruth, Saul, and Ruth’s wayward pet chicken, Dorcas, have to crack.
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Swim
$18.00Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?
Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing—a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool—sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves.
Swim entwines the present with those past actions and consequences that have brought Kat to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. She swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines on a chaise lounge, poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat’s parents, daughter, husband and lover. On entering each point in this history, Kat reveals an undertow of sound, rhythm and words in their rippling meanings. Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension within this innovative novel derives from the writing itself—its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.
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Swim / into the North’s Blue Eye
$18.00Annette Lapointe’s poetry collection swim / into the north’s blue eye explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage-country, from prairie to coast.
The collection also follows Lapointe’s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.
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Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream
$12.50"This collection comes highly recommended. It is a sparkling, vigorous debut and bodes well for Ms. Berkeley’s future in fiction." Irish Times.
"The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream is a collection of stories from a young writer with enormous talent." Sunday Press.
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Swimming Among the Ruins
$14.95These poems imagine the reconciliation of material reality with the spirit?s longing, through travel, the physical displacement of time and space, through contemplation, and through the unsettling of language. The submerged foundations of a ruined city, place names that recall the past, ancient statuary, a drop of water echoing in an empty tomb, personal memories, heat left on a path walked by generations?these remnants of passage are examined intensely, often through a lens rippled by water or vapour, looking back toward their origins and forward into the possibilities of transformation.
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Swimming from the Flames
$14.95From “Sitting Pretty’s” single, delicious moment frozen in time to “Turn of the Year’s” eerie landscape of loss, internationally acclaimed author Pauline Holdstock’s stories explore a reality once removed from our own; a place where her characters’ inner lives fuse with the weird and wonderful world at large.
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Swimming Ginger
$17.95Shortlisted, Independent Publishers Book Award, Poetry
The Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, sometimes called “Spring Festival by the River,” was thought to have been painted by Zhang Zeduan before 1127, when the Northern Song capital of Bian-Iiang was overrun by the invading Jin. Inspired by the figures in the scroll, Geddes found stories demanding to be told, tales of the droll, exacting, sometimes turbulent life of cities.
In shimmering verse, Geddes captures the voice of the painter himself and those of the underprivileged, with their not-so-subtle forms of dissent. Cleverly illustrated to intertwine East and West in dialogue, this ingenious volume juxtaposes a reproduction of the scroll that reads from back to front (experienced as Chinese reads) with Geddes’ poems, which read from front to back.
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Swimming in Darkness
$27.95An NPR Best Book of the Year
Pierre is a young man at a crossroads. He drops out of architecture school and decides to travel to Vals in the Swiss Alps, home to a thermal springs complex located deep inside a mountain. The complex, designed by architect Peter Zumthor, had been the subject of Pierre’s thesis. The mountain holds many mysteries; it was said to have a mouth that periodically swallowed people up. Pierre, sketchbook in hand, is drawn to the enigmatic powers of the mountain and its springs, and attempts to uncover the truth behind them in the secret rooms he discovers deep within the complex. But he finds his match in a man named Valeret who is similarly obsessed, and who’d like nothing more than to eliminate his competitor.
Gorgeously illustrated, Swimming in Darkness is an intriguing, noirish graphic novel about uncovering the powerful secrets of the natural world.
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Swimming into the Light
$14.95Swimming into the Light is a sequence of poems charting a woman’s struggle with infertility and her entry into motherhood through the back door of international adoption. The book traces these events in a connected narrative, from her frustration and despair over infertility to the uncertainty of international adoption and rescuing a new life from a war-torn country, and finally to the quiet reflections on motherhood. Shortlisted for the QSPELL A.M. Klein Poetry award, Swimming into the Light has recently been translated into French and published by Écrits des forges as La fille au bord de l’eau.
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Swimming Toward the Light
$18.99The thirteen linked stories in Joan Clark’s Swimming Toward the Light are like a spectrum of bright colours refracted into a clear white beam. Layer by layer, they reveal the life of Madge Murray, from her childhood in wartime Nova Scotia and her youth in New Brunswick, to her defiance as a young divorcee and her continuing quest as a West Coast artist.
Always, Madge struggles to live in peace, dependent by instinct but pulled towards independence by her circumstances and the discovery of her own creativity. Decent, fallible, and startlingly complex, Madge’s family, from her distant ancestors to her grown children, shares her own tangled nature.
In Swimming Toward the Light, Clark portrays a determined girl growing into a strong woman who faces violence and misery head-on. Some stories, such as “Luna Moths,” contain passages of lyrical beauty, and others, including “War Stories” and “The Train Family,” are rich with the poignancy that comes with delayed understanding.
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Swimming Towards the Sun
$25.00Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2018 gathers together five decades of poetry of the accomplished Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. He invites us to take a poetic odyssey, starting in the late 1960’s enriched by his travels to Europe, leading us through the turbulent times in cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1970’s, to a long residence in New Brunswick and finally his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time.
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Swimming with Piranhas
$19.95In this memoir, the former president of the National Wrestling Alliance, Howard Brody gives a first hand account of how he’s been able to survive the world of pro wrestling politics, despite getting a few bloody noses along the way. Brody delves into the historical aspects of his time at the NWA, describing encounters — both good and bad — with some of professional wrestling’s most powerful and creative minds including Vince and Linda McMahon, Eric Bischoff, Paul Heyman, Tod Gordon, Antonio Inoki, Hiro Matsuda, the Funks, Dusty Rhodes, Jim Cornette, Jimmy Hart, the Hart family, Hulk Hogan, and more.
Brody describes how he got hooked on the business, how he raised money to shoot a ladies wrestling TV pilot, and how he finally ended up in the NWA, serving as its president from 1996 to 2001, and the controversy surrounding how and why he left.
Delving into the inner workings of booking and promoting shows, from dealing with talent to building managers, radio and television stations, Brody explains the differences and similarities between small, medium and large promotions, and talks about the nature of negotiating and selling wrestling to television networks and sponsors.
Swimming With Piranhas covers aspects of the pro wrestling business that have yet to be captured on paper. This book reveals the true war stories as Brody takes the reader into the boardrooms and back offices of the most exciting business in the world: professional wrestling.
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Swimming with Turtles
$17.95This book is moving and true. Mexico begins with the shock of dislocation, entry into “the exotic”; Caribbean Odyssey feels like a darker and more troubled grappling with spirit and place (and the Bolden references are terrific.) In the third movement the traveler feels more settled; humour is available, with a kind of exhaustion around the edges that accepts the surreal almost as status quo. And then in the South Seas there’s the sense of cosmic openness, contemplation, agape. Hula Hymns celebrates the mystery, in human terms. To end on Cook’s death, shape-shifting, myth, legend, brings us full circle to dislocation, but a dislocation where all the parts are in a kind of suspension with the vision developed through the text allowing new perspective.
“A pastiche of travel, Doug Beardsley’s Spirit of Place is where the adventurous reader wants to go afar and meld with the paradisiacal of exotic places still in existence on an increasingly degradable earth. In Beardsley’s travel narratives we have the right tonic for that restless global traveller. This poet has soul and I wish soul replaced the gold standard, but in this workaday consumer world, what is to be said is truly said by Beardsley. There is biting honesty, a hard edge to this volume.” – Joe Rosenblatt
“Once again, Doug Beardsley is ‘going down into history’. In the tradition of Stevenson and Melville, he sails the waters of the South Pacific and the Caribbean in search of ‘spirit of place’. Beardsley looks beyond the invasion of ‘mahogany tourists’ and finds he cannot help ‘thinking of slavery’ and ‘sea dragons’. He meditates on those who have come before; from Cortez and Cook to Gauguin and Neruda. In Swimming with Turtles history and myth fuse with the present in fine poems like ‘Dark Hummingbird’s Dance’ and the final ‘Sacrificial Presence’.” – David Day -
Swing in the Hollow
$9.95‘Swing In the Hollow’ is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton’s language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience.
“It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow.” – Winnipeg Free Press
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Swing in the House and Other Stories
$18.00Swing in the House and Other Stories paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racisms to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a deftly-constructed morality play. In the novella-length title story, a young mother timidly explores the possibilities of an affair to alleviate the suffocations of a loveless marriage, to detrimental effect. In “Indelible Markers,” a girl vacationing in Greece learns that growing up with a schizophrenic father has affected her relationship with men. In “Something Steady,” a lonely, mentally challenged teen vents his anger on a co-worker’s boyfriend. Throughout, Anand’s incisive intelligence, sharp prose, and sly wit breathe dark undercurrents into these seventeen cautionary tales