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Showing 7089–7104 of 9481 results
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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.
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The Battle Cry of the Siamese Kitten
$22.95From Dr. Schott’s 30 years in veterinary practice come over 60 heartwarming, funny, and adorable stories about angry pelicans, bug-eyed goldfish, and plenty of cats and dogs In the third book in this bestselling series, we meet the oddest creatures, from an escaped newt to a baby snow leopard, but the focus is on the dogs and cats that make up most of a pet vet’s day and on the wacky and wonderful people who bring them in.Dr. Schott also pulls back the curtain on what it’s really like to be a veterinarian. Do some vet students faint at the sight of blood? (Yes.) Is it easier for vets to bring their own pets in for procedures? (No.) Did the pandemic change veterinary practice? (Yes, and how.)You will also learn how to bathe a dog, why some rats love cats, why Dr. Schott is afraid of parrots, and a surprising way for a dog to accidentally get drunk. And, of course, you will meet Supercat, the Siamese kitten with the mightiest lungs.
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The Battle of Batoche
$19.95The Battle of Batoche is the best-known confrontation between Métis and British soldiers in the Northwest Resistance of 1885. It remains one of Canada’s most emotion-laden memories, eloquently revisited in this revised and expanded edition.The strategies of both sides are thoroughly examined, and numerous maps and photographs offer detailed description of the fateful battle. Introduction by Jean Teillet, great-grandniece of Louis Riel.
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The Baudelaire Fractal
$22.95The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she’s written the works of Baudelaire.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.
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The Beach
$18.95Glenn and Jean Cochrane have lived in Toronto’s Beach area for thirty-eight years ? which sounds like a lifetime but really leaves them as relative newcomers. Like many of the area’s residents, the Cochranes are convinced that once someone moves to the Beach, they’ll never leave. From Kingston Road right down to the Boardwalk, the Beach is a Toronto oasis. Here, the Boardwalk stretches along the lake creating a calm, outdoor atmosphere unlike any other part of the city. The streets and shops are busy with pedestrians, dogs, and strollers, and in the summers are packed with people from all over: picnickers, sunbathers, and outdoor sports enthusiasts. ?The Beach is the perfect introduction to the life and history of this unique area of Toronto. This is the Cochranes’ personal take on everything they have learned about the area over the past four decades, and through their words and collected photos, readers will share in their delightful discoveries.
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The Bear Woman
$21.95A writer’s obsession with the story of Marguerite de la Rocque leads her to question how women’s stories have been told, and how she will tell her own.
Blending autofiction and the essay, The Bear Woman takes us on a journey of feminism and literary detective work that spans centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned by her guardian on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother of three becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite sheltered in a dark cave all alone after her companions have died.
The image is an anchor that soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And that maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable.
We meet fellow chroniclers of the Bear Woman, such as Queen Marguerite de Navarre, the most powerful woman in Europe, but whose Heptameron (1558) was unjustly dismissed as the writings of a dabbler. We follow the author on a research trip to Paris where she is accompanied by her teenage daughter and the specter of herself as a younger woman, to dinner tables in Mexico and Sweden, to the map division of the New York Public Library, and to bookstores and celebrity hotels in California during the wildfires. Ramqvist explores what it means to write history, how women’s stories have been told, and wonders, in this time of narrative fatigue and a new wave feminism that the author does not quite relate to, where we have gotten ourselves to.
“Karolina Ramqvist writes with frosty precision the kind of literature that is unforgettable. Her portraits of women hit deep into bone and marrow.” – Dorthe Nors, author of A Line in the World
“Ramqvist’s acute rendering of embodied sensual experience combined with her evocation of her double character’s increasingly desperate circumstances create a story of high tension, startling insights, and lasting resonance.” – Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others
“One of my favorite discoveries from this year.” – Samanta Schweblin, author of Little Eyes
“Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” – Shelf Awareness