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Showing 6881–6896 of 9481 results
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Swinging Through Dixie
$19.95The two novellas and three short stories in this new collection by Governor General’s Award winner Leon Rooke are united by place and mood. The title novella, set in a southern post-WWII American town—a kind of “comic Winesburg, Ohio, ” as the author describes it—sports a Watermelon Queen, a ten-year-old businessman, and other colourful eccentrics, all of whom are puzzled by the familiar lead in a new sexy movie that?s come to town. The second novella takes place further south, in a small village perched in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Told in the style of Jose Saramago or Garcia Marquez, daring young women, mad mothers, and traumatized children are affected radically by the magic of their world. With these joyful, touching, brilliantly crafted pieces, Rooke speaks to a time and sensibility long forgotten.
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Swiss Sonata
$19.95Swiss Sonata is the first novel by Gwethalyn Graham, written when she was just 25. The novel is set in a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland in 1936. What makes this novel extraordinary is not just the penetrating insights into the behaviour of the girls — echoed later in novels such as The Wives of Bath — but for her timely insights into the dark clouds of war and hatred gathering over all of Europe at the time.
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Swivelmount
$21.95Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again.
Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best.
Past Praise:
“This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice
“On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi
“The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet
“I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage
“Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist Hatchet
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Swoon
$20.00Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry
The poems in Swoon speak to the steady wending of a life’s thematic drama: the falling / rising permutations across biographical phases. Indications are filtered through relationship, encounter, art, the natural world, and dream. Associations coalesce in a rhythmic clocking of feeling / thought. Randomness and accident may have a part to play, destiny and mystery, too; suggestion of a plot. There’s storyline unfolding that resists a denouement.
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Sympathy Loophole
$16.95This lively first collection, often both creepy and hilarious, serves up an image-laden universe Ñ the sideshow we call home Ñ where contortionists, womanizing ventriloquist dummies, and pickled sharks compete with the everyday for the mark’s hard-earned buck. Jaime Forsythe’s poetry is loaded with wit, mystery, surprise, and breathtaking juxtapositions Ñ it’s a contemporary inventory of pop culture and human experience that proves the wacky and the poignant can share a seat in the same roller-coaster of a stanza.
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Symphony No. 3
$23.00Symphony No. 3 follows the life of renowned French composer Camille Saint-Saëns as he ascends from child prodigy to worldwide fame. As his acclaim grows in Paris, the musical world around him clamours with competitors, dilettantes, turncoats and revenge seekers. At the height of his success, Camille leaves everything behind to embark on a Dantean quest for his dead lover, Henri. At the end of this adventure, still haunted by the holes in his past, he takes up an invitation to journey by ocean-liner to the New World.
Finely crafted in its own unique rhythmic language, Symphony No. 3 is cast in four sections to mirror Saint-Saëns’s famous work, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. Written and performed in London England in the infamous late 1880s, this was the composition he hoped would finally destroy Beethoven’s stranglehold on the industry and reinvent the form. Though set in the decades surrounding the fin de siècle, Symphony No. 3 speaks directly to our present moment and the rise of political violence.
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Synapses
$16.95Formally inventive, Simon Brousseau’s Synapses orchestrates a series of beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each involving a different character, eloquently presented using a sole, twisting and turning, stylistically accomplished sentence written in the second-person singular. Brousseau depicts a vast society of differing psyches and souls, all unique and idiosyncratic, yet interconnected, quasi neurologically, in a dialogic network of humanity. With Synapses, his first novel, Brousseau realizes the surprising feat of a pointillist literary masterpiece.
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Synchro Boy
$16.95Sixteen-year-old Bart Lively desperately wants to feel comfortable in his own skin. Being a jock doesn’t mean he isn’t the target of gay jokes, and the macho culture of his swim team is wearing him down. When he gives in to his curiosity and tries synchronized swimming, he discovers he has a natural talent — not to mention a spark with one of the girls. So when Erika Tenaka asks him to swim the mixed duet with her, he commits to taking them all the way to the Olympics.
But judges’ scores and Erika’s sudden decision to quit the duet threaten to derail Bart’s dream and kill what made the sport so liberating and alluring in the first place. And it doesn’t help that as he falls in love with Erika, he’s falling in lust with her frenemy … not to mention a cute boy in the diving club.
Ultimately, Bart will have to give in to his intuition as it leads him to realize there are many ways to be a boy. If he doesn’t, he’ll lose not only his friendship with Erika but also his new Olympic dream — and the joy he feels as he dances in the deep.
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Syncopation
$24.00In the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into strange new cultures, castes and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories and hyperloop terminals, Whitney French brings us a dazzling novel-in-verse where memory is the highest currency and love, like all revolutions, is dangerous, unruly and singed with hope.
O and Z are two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates through the Earth’s crust, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers until, torn between choosing their values or each other, a fateful decision must be made at the el Corazón space station.
In this speculative and intoxicating novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates so powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labour, and survival.
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Syria, Anatomy of Regime Change
$24.95On December 8, 2024, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad departed for Russia after militia forces took Damascus. An Al-Qaeda affiliated group led by Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani took power. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman hooted that it was the “biggest . . . most game-changing event in the Middle East in the last 45 years.” Yet until then, Al-Jolani was wanted for terrorism and had a U.S. State Department $10 million bounty on his head since 2017.
Mainstream and even alternative media celebrated Assad?s defeat, making it into a story of popular “rebels” triumphing over “evil.” Erased from the record was Washington’s role in initiating and coordinating this long-standing regime change operation.
Syria: Anatomy of a Regime Change offers the first comprehensive account of the U.S. regime change operation in Syria. The operation was underway ever since Bashar’s father, Hafez-Al Assad, was targeted by the U.S. government because of his support for Arab unity, his nationalist economic program, his support for the Palestinians, and his steadfast opposition to U.S. and Israeli hegemonic designs in the Middle East.
The methods utilized to oust Syria’s leaders fit a long-standing U.S. regime-change playbook applied around the world. Ukraine and Libya are prime examples. Key aspects include a protracted demonization campaign targeting Syria’s leader, imposition of economic sanctions designed to destroy Syria’s economy, and CIA financing of rebel groups under the billion-dollar Operation Timber-Sycamore, the CIA’s largest covert operation since its support for the Afghan mujahadin in the 1980s.
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Syzygy
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Tablet Fragments
$17.95Tamar Rubin grew up immersed in Hebrew, Jewish traditions and texts, in a secular household, the daughter of an immigrant mother. In becoming a physician, she learned yet another language: medicine.
The poetry in Tablet Fragments, Rubin’s first published collection, weaves between the texts of all her learning, deploying evocative biblical mythopoetics and the precision of medical science.
Writing as a diagnostic eyewitness to the complexities of her life, Rubin explores the natural history of familial and romantic relationships, the impacting of migration and displacement, and her composite identities as outsider and insider; as doctor and her own body; as daughter, lover, mother and poet.
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Tabloid Trash
$17.95Tabloid Trash is a funny, irreverent, wildly entertaining take on the great American subculture of supermarket tabloids, as well as a classic detective novel in its own right. It opens as the infamous U.S. Reporter decides to hold a lavish retirement gala for its star sleazebag journalist, Max Kowalski. But the party comes to an abrupt close just after midnight, when Max is found dead — murdered during a robbery.
One of the guests happens to be Max’s nephew Arnie Kowalski (a crippled ex-cop with a major chip on his shoulder) who begins his own investigation into the dual crime. As Arnie and his trash-talking girlfriend Charlene start to ask questions, they also begin to run into problems with various parties and their already strained relationship begins to unravel. Their task is not made any easier by the fact that almost everyone had a reason to loathe Uncle Max, including a Nazi rabbi, a sensitive sumo wrestler, an incompatible biker couple, an oriental astrologer, an oversexed former hooker, a stunt man who once climbed the Empire State Building in a King Kong suit, and a 100-year-old from Iowa who was abducted by aliens.
As the plot develops, strange clues, smart deductions, and unlikely twists lead inexorably to a racy climax, as Arnie Kowalski finally uncovers the surprising truth about his uncle’s death — and life.
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Tacet
$20.00Charlotte–a gifted but broken jazz singer–has found security and support under the roof of an overbearing French patroness of the arts, only to become trapped by her own dependence. There are no bars on the windows and no locks on the doors, but Charlotte is very much a prisoner in an opulent but unsympathetic world in which her self-worth is contingent on her voice. When the irresponsible and headstrong Theo re-enters her life after thirteen years, she is compelled, finally, to choose between complacency and autonomy.
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Tackling the Taxman
$17.95Many questions swirl around the heads of worried Canadians at tax time every year. As they snap their pencils, slam down their calculators, and let out an anguished sigh, they wonder, “How on earth did this convoluted system of taxation ever evolve?” That question breaks the logjam of many others, and Alex Doulis is here to answer them:
- Does the taxman ever lose? Yes.
- Would the taxman lie? Yes.
- Has the government ever used the tax system to bludgeon its opponents? Apparently.
- Does the government use the tax system to help its friends? Only the wealthy ones.
- Can ordinary Canadians equip themselves to deal with RevCan from a position of strength? Absolutely.
Doulis tells true stories of taxpayers who have taken the taxman to the Bar and left him in tatters. He stiffens the backbones of Canadians who are all too ready to confess when the taxman comes to their door. He explains the difference between a tax audit and a tax investigation and shows how to deal with both (“nothing by mouth” is his prescription: turn the taxman away and insist he put all his questions in writing).
No one ever hears about taxpayers’ triumphs over the taxman (though his victories are broadcast widely, usually during tax-filing time). Read Tackling the Taxman to find out how these taxpayers managed to win.
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Tacoma Narrows
$17.95In Tacoma Narrows, Mitchell Parry reflects on the nature of disasters, both public and private. A reflection on things lost, Parry allows himself to feel deeply, to ask what went wrong and to ruminate tragic moments with humility and romantic sensibility. Acutely aware of the nature that surrounds him, Parry embraces things like the wind howling at his window, an elk in the backyard or an orange sunset, and attaches them to memories.
A deep mediation in three parts, Tacoma Narrows is a consideration on how we weather storms, the “currents, turmoil, vortices” of life and recognizing that one is “still learning to let lost things stay lost.” The result is a courageous, moving and deeply personal collection that asks us to realise that letting things go is the hardest thing disasters of all kinds demand of us, but it’s also perhaps the most important lesson they can teach us.