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Showing 6897–6912 of 9248 results
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The Atheist’s Bible
$21.95Shalom Camenietzki_s short story collection details the fractal nature of the self as seen through the flaws and assets of the characters that stoically inhabit his pages. Each tale examines the rough edges of misguided obsession: an unrequited love affair with the nanny, the perils of a competitive look-a-like, the numbing indignity of going the wrong way on the corporate ladder. Fixated, let down, disappointed, enraged, and confounded by the shackles of their own consciences, Camenietzki_s characters unburden secrets and force the reader to bear witness to their “dark nights of the soul.” This is the place where the boundaries blur between religious fervour and lewd advance, money and mental illness, accident and destiny.
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The Average Height of Flight
$18.00The poems in Average Height of Flight are founded in the landscape of coastal BC, built on the losses within the narrator’s life in counterpoint to her walks in the natural world. In forests with her dog, along watersheds and hill climbs, Beth Kope goes off trail to find inspiration and time for meditation. She observes as the landscapes change with storms blowing through, absorbs the names of plants, finds sustained comfort whatever the season: crisp, clear days, rain is fine, or the snow that reveals the other creatures that share her routes. Kope invites the reader to join her on these walks and meditations on grief. The metre of feet and heartbeat creates a cadence of solace, but lovingly follows the nose of a dog.
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The B-Side of Daniel Garneau
$25.00The B-Side of Daniel Garneau concludes a rollicking three-book series set in Toronto featuring the misadventures of boyfriends Daniel and David, their eccentric family and friends. As Daniel prepares to graduate from med school and propose marriage, David sets out to donate his sperm so his brother can have a baby. But as his celebrity ex, Marcus, launches his boldest exhibit yet, an unexpected crisis forces Daniel to re-evaluate his priorities in life.
The B-Side of Daniel Garneau is the inspirational follow-up to A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018) and Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020). At turns both comic and tragic, it is a celebration of queer identities and non-traditional families, as Daniel struggles to discover himself and his path in the world. At its heart, it is a philosophical reflection on acceptance and living with courage and love.
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The Baby Blues
$16.95The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïve women partners who are always left holding the bag, the “big questions” of heritage, family, cultural context and personal identity are ruthlessly stripped of their conventional meanings and become so much useless, embarrassing roadkill on the highway of life.
Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
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The Back Channels
$14.95Jennifer Houle’s debut collection, The Back Channels, reflects the effort to build a meaningful life in a rapidly changing culture, in a region afflicted, as many are, with outmigration and an economy of anxiety and hard choices. Here, where memories of a more prosperous past loom large, she takes us to the backwoods where a discouraged woman walks, down to the shore beyond the fairgrounds, and into the parking lots where smokers gather to talk about layoffs or pay cuts. Houle’s poems invite the reader to listen in on these moments and pause among these landscapes, never mistaking its often rural settings for places of retreat or escape. The largely Acadian culture depicted in these poems may still be influenced by the past, caught in its own reflected image, but it moves, as do the poems, to a steady, if moody, rhythm determined to find meaning and purpose in spite of difficulties, flux, and a seemingly pervasive cynicism. Reminiscent of Karen Solie’s early work, Houle’s brilliance as a poet is her mastery of language and keen sense of observation with which she draws the reader in. These poems come from a place of grappling, an attempt to find meaning, beauty and connection in the day-to-day, without being confined by it.
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The Back Story on Spine Care
$28.95“A tour de force of spine care from a master spine surgeon who has literally seen it all over the course of a four-decade career! This book is a must-read that is accessible to both the layperson and healthcare professionals. I found it both enjoyable and informative.” — Dr. Andrew J. Schoenfeld, Harvard Medical School professor and Spine editor in chiefA practical and occasionally provocative look at the state of spinal surgical careJust a few decades ago most spine surgery was literally a gamble: maybe you’d get better and maybe you wouldn’t. Today we have the knowledge, understanding, and technology to predictably relieve pain and neurological deficits like never before — yet many patients are still getting subpar care. Foundational knowledge of surgical spine care isn’t spreading to the medical community, let alone to patients, whose quality of life hangs in the balance. With The Back Story on Spine Care, orthopedic specialist Dr. Drew Bednar presents case studies that illuminate the common issues plaguing patients — and their treatment — today.Back problems are among the most common health issues, and with Dr. Bednar’s insights, knowledge, and practical tips, medical professionals can provide care that leads to healthier backs and happier lives.
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The Backbone of Night
$14.95In the Automatic Age, the autovolts have swept the earth clean of most of its human inhabitants. Kerion and Barry are of the few survivors, mistaken as robots in the first purge because of Kerion’s prosthetics. Kerion fears that his son will grow up a lonely anomaly on an earth free of people. The discovery of a group of intentionalized fanatics may be the hope they need to reconnect with the human experience. But is it better risk dangerous isolation or stay with a group of religious zealots?
The truth will send them on the run in a fight for survival beneath the sea of stars to the tower known as the BACKBONE OF NIGHT.
Chomichuk has developed a fascinating, complex setting . . . And he uses it to explore timely themes of automation, scarcity economics, and robot ethics, while also showcasing his formidable imagination. – Quill & Quire
Desperate, suspenseful action in a nightmarish scenario. – Kirkus Reviews
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The Baldwins
$15.95In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. “Who are the Baldwins?” the Congress asks. “Do they actually exist, and if so, what is their history and their fate?” Only one thing seems certain to these Baldwinologists: “The Baldwins resemble us: they knew nothing of their origins, nor of their destination.”
Set in the landscape of one vast disposal site containing all the refuse of history, and using the rhetorical conventions of precise, objective, depersonalized scholarly research, the world Serge Lamothe brilliantly creates with this novel of fragments is one of a mysterious ambiguity, haunted by Kafka, Orwell, Gibson and Fukuyama.
This is contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental, creating a post-historical world so devoid of difference that the only imaginable use of language is for the mass production of consent—a world in which a nine-year-old’s suicide bombing may well, in fact, constitute the only meaningful act left to The Baldwins: a joyful embrace of the ultimate existential gesture, in which all difference is obliterated, consummated in a martyrdom of innocence on the consensual altar of the morally and politically correct.
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The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin & Kitimat
$19.95Two epic labour plays, based on true events, by the acclaimed author of Fado: The Saddest Music in the World.In The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin, discover how Canada got the eight-hour day – and in Kitimat, visit the fastest declining town in Canada, whose residents are suddenly offered a deal by Big Oil. The plays, performed from Los Angeles, California, to Lisbon, Portugal, are the recipient of many awards, including the Mellon Foundation Environment Arts Commission, and Best New Play, Audience Favourite, Best Production Awards from the Victoria Fringe and Victoria Critics Circle.
The Ballad of Ginger GoodwinWith a cast playing everyone from a radical socialist to an Italian laundress to a scientist-industrialist, The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin is about the dreams of immigrants, coal and smelter workers in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, and the battle for workers’ rights. Featuring music of the period, including a new ballad by composer/activist Earle Peach, the play recreates the events surrounding the mysterious death of Albert “Ginger” Goodwin, who, through a strike at a Canadian zinc smelter in Trail, BC, brought the WWI British war machine to a halt.
Kitimat
Kitimat, British Columbia: an industry town in glorious wilderness finds itself the centre of international controversy when the town is asked to vote no or yes on an upcoming oil pipeline project. As election day approaches, the residents of Kitimat struggle to decide between economic prosperity or protection of the natural world.The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin: Cast of 2 women and 3 men
Kitimat: Flexible, between 6 and 16 actors
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The Ballad of Jacob Peck
$19.95Shortlisted, Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
On a frigid February evening in 1805, Amos Babcock brutally murdered Mercy Hall. Believing that he was being instructed by God, Babcock stabbed and disembowelled his own sister, before dumping her lifeless body in a rural New Brunswick snowbank.
The Ballad of Jacob Peck is the tragic and fascinating story of how isolation, duplicity, and religious mania turned impoverished, hard-working people violent, leading to a murder and an execution. Babcock was hanged for the murder of his sister, but in her meticulously researched book, Debra Komar shows that itinerant preacher Jacob Peck should have swung right beside him. The mystery lies not in the whodunit, but rather in a lingering question: should Jacob Peck, whose incendiary sermons directly contributed to the killing, have been charged with the murder of Mercy Hall?
In this epic saga, media accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the murder have taken on a life all their own, one built of half-truths, conjecture, and narrative devices designed to titillate, if not inform. A forensic investigation of a crime from the Canadian frontier, the tale of Jacob Peck, Amos Babcock, and Mercy Hall remains as controversial and riveting today as it was more than two hundred years ago.
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The Ballad of Samuel Hewitt
$19.95Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, a young horse thief and his unlikely accomplice are pursued through the forbidding landscape of the BC interior. There they encounter villains, drifters and fiercely insular circus folk in a profound tale of friendship, forgiveness and finding home.
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The Band of Merry Kids
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The Banquet of Donny & Ari
$20.00Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse.
If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne’s thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?
Amid a fictional marriage in a state of malaise and a real world on the edge of environmental disaster, Guttman lays open moments of vexation and tenderness, of grief, guilt, betrayal and love. Sounding through these moments are the harpsichord and the loom, drawing Donny and Ari, their sons Stephan and Onno, their corgie and their parrot, into the long weave of myth, art and human history.
Donny envies her the order of her threads, neatness of the loom, palettes of skeins piled high. Compare this to the score he must unwind, ingest, to play by heart. The orchestra accompanying the voices is Orfeo’s lyre.
–from “Rehearsals: Mastery”
Praise for Naomi Guttman: “Richly detailed, passionate, witty, despairing, and brave, the lyric force of these poems conveys most of all a deep knowledge and love of a complex but recognizable world.” — Peter Meinke
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The Barefoot Bingo Caller
$19.95Witty, wide-ranging stories of one man’s adventures in the world
“Filled with pleasures . . . I enjoyed it immensely.” — Meg Wolitzer, New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings
In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what’s funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from a bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories of his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood; his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian Canadian father; and such memorable characters as aging beat poets, oblivious college students, and an obdurate porcupine.
Passing through places as varied as a prime minister’s office and the streets of Paris, these wry and moving dispatches on work, family, art, and identity are masterpieces of comic memoir and social observation.
“The memories have been vividly, deliberately shaped by a master storyteller over a lifetime of telling, to powerful and often hilarious effect.” — Quill & Quire (starred review)
“Funny and wistful, always engaging and wholly original, The Barefoot Bingo Caller charts the geography of belonging from the suburbs of Weston to the streets of Vilnius, from iconic Parisian bookstores to secret fishing holes in the backwoods of Ontario.” — Will Ferguson, Giller Prize–winning author
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The Barking Dog
$24.95“Told with such humour and suspense that it’s hard to put down . . .
A rare achievement, an unstintingly honest, hilarious, and dreadful delight.” — Globe and MailGreer Pentland is having a challenging year. Her teenaged son, Sam, is on trial for the murder of two senior citizens, a crime allegedly committed while he was sleepwalking. Greer is also battling breast cancer, a disease that has left her with a litany of physical side effects and deep anger toward the incompetence of the medical profession.
Yet, in the face of all these obstacles, Greer’s story is full of hope and delicious dark humour. Her indelible strength is fuelled by her unconditional love for her son and the moral support she receives from her 88-year-old aunt, a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling, vitamin-popping senior whose continual commentary on the morbid news of the day is wickedly funny and provocative. This novel about one courageous woman’s fight to survive in a post-millennium culture gone mad is heroic, heart stopping, and affecting.
The Barking Dog, the fifth novel from Cordelia Strube, Canada’s pre-eminent writer of urban fiction, is an unforgettable portrait of modern life in these media-saturated, apocalyptic times.
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The Bastard of Fort Stikine
$19.95Winner, Canadian Authors Award for Canadian History, Jeanne Clarke Memorial Local History Award, and Prince Edward Island Book Award for Non-Fiction
Is it possible to reach back in time and solve an unsolved murder, more than 170 years after it was committed?
Just after midnight on April 21, 1842, John McLoughlin, Jr. — the chief trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Stikine, in the northwest corner of the territory that would later become British Columbia — was shot to death by his own men. They claimed it was an act of self-defence, their only means of stopping the violent rampage of their drunk and abusive leader. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s Overseas Governor, took the men of Stikine at their word, and the Company closed the book on the matter. The case never saw the inside of a courtroom, and no one was ever charged or punished for the crime. To this day, the killing remains the Honourable Company’s dirtiest unaired laundry and one of the darkest pages in the annals of our nation’s history. Now, exhaustive archival research and modern forensic science — including ballistics, virtual autopsy, and crime scene reconstruction — unlock the mystery of what really happened the night McLoughlin died.
Using her formidable talents as a writer, researcher, and forensic scientist, Debra Komar weaves a tale that could almost be fiction, with larger-than-life characters and dramatic tension. In telling the story of John McLoughlin, Jr., Komar also tells the story of Canada’s north and its connection to the Hudson’s Bay Company.