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Showing 7073–7088 of 9481 results
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The Art of Building a Bunker
$16.95The Art of Building a Bunker is a dark, viciously funny story recounting a week in the life of your average Elvis as he endures mandatory workplace sensitivity training. Elvis struggles to meet the demands of Camerson, the sensitivity traning leader, and to work with the group that surrounds him without revealing anything about what he really feels or believes. His struggles culminate in a radical oration delivered on the last day of the course to the sensitivity group, workplace colleagues, as well as international luminaries of sensitivity like Nelson Mandela, Geddy Lee, and Malala.
Created for Toronto’s SummerWorks 2013, Verdecchia explained to Colin Thomas of the Georgia Straight the impulse to create Bunker: “We were just looking around the city and at the culture generally,” Verdecchia said – remember that Rob Ford was Toronto’s mayor at that time – “and there was a kind of incivility in the air, which I think is still there. It seems like it’s permissible to say things that you couldn’t say before, like ‘Fuck her right in the cunt,’ or whatever guys are saying on television.” (Verdecchia is referring to the phenomenon that reporter Shauna Hunt very publicly challenged recently.) “There was also this incredible anger on the web, YouTube videos with people ranting about their situations or about Obama—a lot of Americans. They seemed like really disenfranchised folk who were stewing in their anger and fear. And that struck us as really interesting. Adam and I genuinely want to ask about what is permissible.”
Bunker is to be played by one virtuosic actor.
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The Art of Floating
$22.95Melanie Marttila captures the solace and healing she has found in the terrestrial landscapes, flora, and fauna of northeastern and southwestern Ontario while balancing the ebbs and flows of her mental health. There is similar reprieve in looking skyward as she shares in beautifully crafted poems the reflections of celestial patterns on moods, perceptions and relationships. Through the often insignificant and mildly miniscule moments in life, Marttila demonstrates the truth and hope that lie within each, whether connecting with land or sky. The Art of Floating is dedicated to the poet’s father, who taught her how to surrender to and survive the rough waters of mental illness.
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The Art of Libromancy
$24.95ONE OF LIT HUB‘S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023 • ESQUIRE‘s August 2023 Book Club Pick
The essays in The Art of Libromancy explore the politics, philosophies, technologies, emotional experience, and craft of selling books in the twenty-first century.
With Amazon’s growing power in both bookselling and publishing, considering where and how we get our books is more important now than ever. The simple act of putting a book in a reader’s hands—what booksellers call handselling—becomes a catalyst for an exploration of the moral, financial, and political pressures all indie bookstores face. From the relationship between bookselling and white supremacy, to censorship and the spread of misinformation, to the consolidation of the publishing industry, veteran bookseller and writer Josh Cook turns a generous yet critical eye to an industry at the heart of American culture, sharing tips and techniques for becoming a better reader and, of course, recommending great books along the way.
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The Art of P. K. Irwin
$22.95P. K. Page?the celebrated poet?was also a gifted visual artist working under her married name, P. K. Irwin. The Art of P. K. Irwin charts the evolution in her art, detailing an expansive range of artistic influences, from the geographical and temporal, to the poetic, artistic and spiritual.
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The Art of Superbrothers
$14.95Video games, once dismissed as idle entertainment, are experiencing a cultural renaissance. Galvanized by easier manufacturing methods and better distribution channels, a new generation of independent designers and developers have created games that are startlingly original, accessible and artistic. In 2011, one of the most
visionary of those indie developers, Superbrothers, released Sword and Sworcery EP. An immersive, paradigm-shifting adventure game — Wired magazine said it had ‘the best creative direction of any mobile role-playing-
game we’ve seen’ — it became a global phenomenon.Now, writer Adam Hammond journeys to Superbrothers’ secret headquarters in rural Quebec to chronicle the creation of their eagerly anticipated follow-up title. As one of the first players of the new game, Hammond provides a unique, ringside account of the gaming world. Along the way, he shows how indie video
games have evolved into a socially progressive art form, tracing their creative DNA in everything from modernist fiction to punk rock. -
The Art of Trespassing
$14.95Contributors explore the urban systems and structures that frame our everyday lives. The Art of Trespassing imagines networks, neighbourhoods, and relationships, exposing them as both confining and liberating.
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The Art of War
$18.95Nick wears a soldier’s uniform but wields only a paintbrush. As an embedded Canadian artist during the Second World War, he is tasked with an impossible mission: to capture the chaos and carnage of battle on canvas. With soldiers, refugees, and showgirls as muses, Nick embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery to understand the purpose and power of his art. What he witnesses—and what he paints—will change him forever and help shape the vision of a young nation.
In The Art of War Yvette Nolan offers a poignant meditation on the role of artists in times of war and peace. Finding humour and insight in the challenges of expressing the inexpressible, it is an exaltation of those who steadfastly seek truth amidst great turmoil.
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The Artemesia Book
$14.95Granddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake a Colleen Thibaudeau wordscape for any other. Her poems might have been written just after the imagination was invented. So lithe and playful, so naturally leaping even in elegy, they would seem like fabulous accidents if Colleen hadn’t been making them, with no loss of freshness, for over forty years. There is a lifetime of poems in this book.
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The Artist and the Assassin
$19.95Rome, 1600. In the shadowed cellars of Cardinal Del Monte’s palazzo, a shaft of light illuminates the face of Luca Passarelli. Across the room, behind an enormous canvas, the brilliant, mercurial artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio paints with sure brushstrokes Luca’s likeness into a new masterpiece.
Caravaggio is both revered and reviled by his patrons as well as his fellow artists. His innovative paintings and his blazing temper have made him powerful friends, but also powerful enemies-enemies who are determined to quench the flame of his talent.
What Caravaggio does not know is that Luca is a professional assassin, a bitter and spiteful man who, in his dark past, has `breathed in death’ and has committed murder on multiple occasions. What the artist does not know is that when next they meet it will not be a canvas that brings them together, but rather revenge … and death.
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The Assimilation
$24.95In the early 1990s, Maurice “Mom” Boucher and his fellow Montreal Hells Angels, reputedly the most ruthless and vicious bikers in the world, subdued all comers except the tough-as-nails members of the Rock Machine. Founded by Salvatore Cazzetta, an ex-friend of Boucher, the Rock Machine had every intention of standing up against the Hells Angels. Seven years of bloody conflict, which left over 160 people dead and countless injured, was the result. Heavily outnumbered, the Rock Machine appealed to the worldwide Bandidos Motorcycle Club, who rivaled the Hells Angels in terms of membership and strength. In January 2000, the Rock Machine ceased to exist and became a probationary Bandidos chapter — the first to be established on Canadian soil.
Biker Edward Winterhalder was assigned by the Bandidos to coordinate the transition. Although the stage had been set for an end to the biker war and a positive outcome for all, it was anything but. Starting with the arrest and unsuccessful deportation proceedings of Winterhalder by the Canadian authorities, more intrigue, assassinations, and double-crosses, Winterhalder found himself in a situation even he found impossible to control.
In The Assimilation, Winterhalder — in collaboration with author Wil De Clercq — recalls his life and times as an outlaw biker; his personal involvement in the creation of the Quebec Bandidos; his friendship with the key players who made it happen; and his eventual disillusionment with, and exit from, the Bandidos Nation.
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The Athabasca Ryga
$19.95The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray the sights, sounds and people of Deep Creek, Athabasca, and Edmonton. They reveal to us Ryga’s ethnic roots, his childhood as a farm boy, his struggle to learn in a one-room school, his desperate search for off-farm employment in meat-packing plants and lumber camps, and his flight to an alien, hostile city where he became both a class-conscious wage-labourer and a visionary poet. Among the manuscripts included in The Athabasca Ryga are two early television dramas (“Storm,’‘ and “Village Crossroad,”), excerpts from the unpublished autobiographical novel, “The Bridge “(1960), and a set of five short stories collectively titled “Poor People.” The Athabasca Ryga also reprints two essays from Ryga’s later years — “Notes from a Silent Boyhood,” and “Essay on A Letter to My Son“ — both reflections on what it was like growing up as an intelligent, creative but lonely youth with a love for literature in an isolated and poverty-stricken Ukrainian farming community.
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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.