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Showing 7105–7120 of 9248 results
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The Day of the Dead
$20.00The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions, Short Stories & An Homage is a series of collisions between genders in the realms of sexuality, relationships, art and grief in three sections: Men & Women, Muses and The Dead. Owen explores secrecies, abject pasts, misunderstood desires, the urgency to create and the horrors of loss. The Day of the Dead takes the reader into discomforting worlds, thorned with fantasy and dark humour but rooted in the harsh and sometimes beautiful realities a woman and artist can face in 21st century society. Like the subtitle connotes, Owen’s “sliver fictions” are short and sharp, unapologetically getting caught within inconvenient areas of the heart and mind. Familiar settings, like the cafeteria of a BC ferry, are made unheimlich, or uncanny, with the choice of conversation by strangers, or the memory of a character’s early sexual experiences. Interactions between boys, girls, ghosts, men, women and all sorts of bystander animals make for brief but elaborate tales twisted into hauntingly confounding shapes and angles.
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The Day-Breakers
$19.95Longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize • Longlisted for the 2023 Raymond Souster Poetry Prize • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
Saturated with locutions lifted from the late 19th century, The Day-Breakers deeply conceives of what African Canadian soldiers experienced before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.
“It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.
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The Days
$14.95It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life. The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)? All these are repeated gestures that run through The Days, a kind of absurdist guidebook made up of ninety unconventional, very short stories collected in three tight sections. This is fiction that thinks, fiction that cuts to the chase, told with Farrant’s trademark humour and acerbic wit. Her miniatures gracefully articulate the contemporary zeitgeist: anxiety about the future coupled with absurd mundanity. Somehow, always, Farrant captures the moments that buoy us up, crystallizing the experiences keeping us from being overwhelmed while calling our attention to overwhelming truths.
Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.
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The Dead and the Countess
$9.50World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2022.
The dead sleep peacefully—until a railway is built near their cemetery. While the old priest works to keep them at rest, the count’s dying wife begs to be buried near the railway. But when her last wish is granted, the priest finds that the sound of the train leaves the countess far from at peace.
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The Dead Celebrities Club
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The Dead Hamlets
$24.00The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.
When Cross stumbles drunkenly into a darkened Berlin theatre that is staging Hamlet, he does not expect to see Morgana le Fay on stage as Queen Gertrude or witness a real murder. But a deadly ghost is haunting the faerie queen’s plays and Morgana expects Cross to solve the mystery or risk his daughter, Amelia, becoming the next victim. With the fate of Amelia in the balance Cross tries to unravel a mystery that takes him to libraries outside of time, into battles alongside an undead Christopher Marlowe and to bargaining with the real Witches of Macbeth. But is the play the thing, or is there something far older haunting Shakespeare’s famous work?
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The Dead Shall Inherit
$17.95Inheriting the Skipper’s House from her late aunt Deirdre MacPhail, a famed Scottish writer, looks like the solution to all Elspeth Laird’s financial problems — but this inheritance comes with a dark legacy.
New to Sulla Island’s wild beauty and fierce weather, Elspeth soon discovers a community divided by her aunt’s memory. Some cherish the tourism Deirdre brought, while others blame her for ruining their traditional way of life. Practical jokes escalate to sinister threats, and a murder confirms Elspeth’s worst fears: a killer is among them. With tensions rising and allies scarce, Elspeth must navigate a web of secrets and old grudges.
As legend says, the Skipper’s House brings doom to its owners. Elspeth must unravel the truth before she becomes the next victim of Sulla Island’s deadly legacy.
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The Deadbeat Club
$14.95This darkly humorous crime novel set in a Canadian ski town is a “fast-paced thrill ride.” (Publishers Weekly)
“The dialogue is some of the sharpest and funniest I’ve seen in any book this year.” — National Post
Grey Stevens took over the family business after his uncle passed away, and now grows the best pot in Whistler, British Columbia. It’s called Eight Miles High and the word on the street is it rivals anything on the planet.
Happy to fly under the radar in this mountain playground, Grey just wants to take life easy, snowboarding in the cold months and biking in the hot ones. But demand for his pot among the locals and tourists keeps growing. Everybody wants to get their hands on it — including two rival gangs who come to town to take over the dope trade.
When Grey steps in and rescues a girl from a beating at the hands of one of the gang members, he finds himself in the middle of a turf war and a new relationship at the same time. After one of his roommates gets attacked and another goes missing, Grey has to decide whether he’s going to take off with the girl and start over someplace new — or stay and fight for what’s his . . .
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The Deaf House
$19.95The Deaf House
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The Death and Life of Strother Purcell
$22.95The man, the myth, the one-eyed legend: a frontier epic for fans of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy.
In 1876, the fabled lawman Strother Purcell disappears into a winter storm in the mountains of British Columbia, while hunting down his outlawed half-brother. Sixteen years later, the wreck of Purcell resurfaces – derelict, homeless and one-eyed – in a San Francisco jail cell. And a failed journalist named Barrington Weaver conceives a grand redemptive plan. He will write Purcell’s true-life story. All it requires is a final act…
What unfolds is an archetypal saga of obsession, lost love, treachery, and revenge, told in Ian Weir’s trademark funny, fast, wickedly intelligent style. A deadpan revisionist Western, refracted through a Southern Gothic revenge tragedy, The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a novel about two cursed brothers, a pair of eldritch orphans, the vexed nature of truth, and the yearnings of that treacherous sonofabitch the human heart.
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The Death of René Lévesque
$15.95In taking on “The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around “great causes” by “great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death of René Lévesque is, in retrospect, more than an astonishingly profound and prophetic political document.
Showcasing the surprising theatrical range and virtuosity of the author of Canada’s first bilingual—though definitely not bicultural—working-class hit, Balconville, The Death of René Lévesque dramatizes the rise and fall of Canada’s most tragic public figure of the 20th century. Fennario’s deft and subtle characterization of the father of the Parti Québecois, his re-telling of the compromising political realities which formed both the movement and the party as Lévesque created it, and the gradual revelation of the fatal flaw which began to undermine both the man and his dream of a new republic, proceed here with a stately, devastating inevitability which recall the masterful tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare.
The Death of René Lévesque presents its audience with the powerful and cathartic stillbirth of a nation, stripped of both pity and fear, as only an Anglophone Québec separatist could possibly imagine it.
Cast of two women and four men.
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The Death of Small Creatures
$22.95In her lyrical memoir The Death of Small Creatures, Trisha Cull lays bare her struggles with bulimia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. Interspersing snatches of conversations, letters, blog entries and clinical notes with intimate poetic narrative, Cull evokes an accessible experience of mental illness. In The Death of Small Creatures, Cull strives to cope with her hopelessness. She finds comfort in the company of her two pet rabbits until one of them dies as a result of her lethargy. She numbs herself with alcohol. She validates her self-worth by seeking the love of men–any and all men–and three relationships significantly impact her life: her marriage to Leigh, a much older man; her unrequited love for Dr. P, her therapist; and her healthier relationship with Richard, an American she meets through her blog. She tries drugs–Neo Citran, Ativan, Wellbutrin, crack, crystal meth–and after two hospitalizations, she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. Haunting and expressive, this immersive memoir explores love in all its facets–needy, obsessive, healthy, self-directed–and plunges the reader headlong into the intense and immediate experience of mental illness.
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The Death of Tony
$25.95A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika.
The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario-with a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases-Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds.
In animated, entertaining prose, Sileika recounts his time as a young writer in Paris, the dramatic events surrounding Lithuanian independence and the fall of the Soviet Union, and his growing involvement in Lithuania’s political and cultural spheres. Proud of his heritage but unafraid to explore its darker chapters, he touches in this book on the Holocaust and the gulag, as well as the new threats facing Eastern Europe today. Laced with humour and wry observations, The Death of Tony is a tribute to the immigrant experience, a primer for Canadian readers on the history and culture of an underrepresented nation, and above all a sensitive exploration of this author’s bifurcated identity.
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The December Man (L’homme de décembre)
$16.95In the aftermath of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, Benoît and Kathleen do everything they can to help their beloved son cope with his guilt and rage… but Jean’s young life becomes unglued.
Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, Murphy intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working-class family, escaped the massacre… or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism, and despair explores the long private shadow that public violence casts. Winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and the 2008 CAA Carol Bolt Award.
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The Decline of the Hollywood Empire
$17.95The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive in recent years, with astronomical sums invested in productions and promotion. Ironically that massive outlay has gone toward churning out a flat, made-in-Hollywood universalism that can be exported planet-wide, but which is simultaneously losing audiences, primarily to the digital world, at an accelerating pace. The apparently insurmountable barriers of finance and distribution to entry into the world of entertainment have served, so far, to keep smaller players out of the frame and, Fischer contends, have destroyed the industry’s creative potential. It turns out too much money can kill cinema just as certainly as not enough.
In The Decline of the Hollywood Empire, artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer heralds an inevitable move from 35 mm to digital distribution, which will take what has until now existed only on the margins of the “entertainment industry”—independent film, amateur film, documentary and other genres—from bit players to starring roles: how the Trojan horse of digital technology and distribution, in the hands of independent producers, could well toll the bell for Hollywood’s hegemony in the business of film.
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The Deepest Map
$24.95Finalist, Hamilton Literary Award (Non-Fiction)
Longlisted, SWCC Book Award (General Category)
A Globe and Mail Best BookFive oceans cover approximately seventy per cent of the earth, yet we know little of what lies beneath them. Now, the race is on to completely map the oceans’ floor. Scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers are competing in this epic venture to obtain an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.
In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey chronicles this race to the bottom. Following global efforts around the world, she documents Inuit-led crowdsourced mapping in the Arctic as climate change alters the landscape, a Texas millionaire’s efforts to become the first man to dive to the deepest point in each ocean, and the increasingly fraught question of whether and how to mine the deep sea.
A true tale of science, nature, technology, and extreme outdoor adventure, The Deepest Map both illuminates why we love — and fear — the earth’s final frontier and contributes to increasingly urgent conversations about climate change.