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Showing 7169–7184 of 9492 results
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The Book of Letters I Didn’t Know Where to Send
$18.95Steve Patterson’s The Book of Letters I Didn’t Know Where to Send is a collection of — wait for it — letters, written by award-winning stand-up comedian — you guessed it — Steve Patterson.
The host of CBC Radio’s The Debaters since 2007, Steve Patterson has become a household name, with more than 700,000 listeners tuning in each week. He has performed at several of the Just for Laughs prestigious televised galas, including one hosted by Steve Martin. Considered to be the highlight of the show by the audience and critics alike, Patterson’s performance prompted the legendary Martin to quip, “If I’d known he was going to be THAT good, I would have cancelled him.”
Patterson’s letters, long a staple of his stand-up comedy routine, address a number of recipients, from real people, to groups, to inanimate objects and concepts. He airs grievances, offers support or creates just plain confusion in unplainly humorous prose.
From the political to the personal, from the philosophical to the mundane, no subject — or target — is off limits. Patterson’s letters may not change the world, but frankly, it’s too early to tell. In these letters, he pleads, begs, cajoles, grovels, and always makes a compelling argument. He would like men to stop wearing Spandex bike shorts. He would like airlines to stop selling seats they don’t have. He would like gluten to explain itself. He would like his nine-year-old self to know everything will be all right…
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The Book of Z
$19.95In The Book of Z, Rahat Kurd turns to classical Persian and Urdu poets whose work responds passionately to mystical possibilities – above all, longing for divine union – found within scriptural language. Zulaykha, the mytho-poetic figure known as “the wife of the Aziz” in the Qur’an or “the wife of Potiphar” in the Bible, was championed by early Sufi poets, most likely those writing in Persian, who felt moved to give her a name. For a thousand years, Zulaykha has been as much celebrated as a lover in Muslim folk tradition and Persian and Mughal miniature painting, as the wife of Potiphar was cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.
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The Borderlands Project
$45.00The Borderlands Project is meant to promote greater recognition and understanding of the status of the United States and Canada as border neighbours. It is a comprehensive study of transborder attributes undertaken by a multidisciplinary team of social science and humanities scholars from both sides of the border. The fourteen essays in this volume examine history, economics, the environment, literature, politics, and trade, with reference to specific regions and the border at large. They provide a new set of lenses for policymakers, educators, and librarians, and sharpen the images of reality formed by competition and cooperation between two industrial democracies in North America.
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The Borrowman Cell
$22.95They make an odd pair: Verena Vitek, a youthful refugee from Serbia, and John Borrowman, a London, Ontario zoologist moonlighting as an animal-rights activist. He’s haunted by a recent trip to China during which he witnessed the barbaric practice of milking moon bears for their bile, an ingredient in a growing variety of commercial products. To stop a Chinese company from harvesting bears for their bile in Algonquin Park, he finds himself having to rely on Verena – emotionally damaged, dysfunctional, but a crack shot with her AR-7 rifle. Others too, become involved; individuals with agendas of their own. The bears may be saved, but death and lives forever changed are part of the human price to be paid.
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The Bourgeois Empire
$18.95Shortlisted for the ReLit Award
“A carnivalesque romp through middle age, addressing the menace of mortality while lampooning comic stereotypes . . . Pulses with life.” — Globe and Mail
A Nabokovian fever dream, an encyclopedic guide to mortal sin, and a thoroughly contemporary reimagining of Billy Wilder’s classic film The Lost Weekend; and yes, of course, it’s a love story too
In this sharp-witted tale of desperation and decadence, a middle-aged man tries to escape the anxieties of failure and grueling reality of everyday existence with a wide range of distractions — from an opulent home renovation to torrents of pornography to alcohol and pills and fast cars. He’s been told again and again that asceticism and a bit of restraint might serve him better, spiritually speaking. But temptation seems to follow him everywhere — and soon the house of cards he’s been building may completely collapse.
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The Box Closet
$19.95The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s early diaries, she no longer saw her parents as Mother and Father but as Margaret and Edward, young and vulnerable: Margaret who flirted, Edward who waited ten years to propose marriage. Meigs saw aspects of them that made them and their parents more fully real to her than they had been in life. She has woven the diaries and letters together with a narrative that integrates her discoveries with her memories as a daughter and granddaughter. The result is a moving portrait of a family that was protected by another kind of box closet—that of privilege and of moral certitude—with opaque walls that shut out most of the world. It was, in her father’s words, “the easy sheltered life,” which is so hard for “good” people to escape from.
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The Boy in the Treehouse / The Girl Who Loved Her Horses
$18.95In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America.
In “The Boy in the Treehouse,” Simon, the son of an Ojibway mother and a British father, climbs into his half-finished tree house on the vision-quest his books say is necessary for him to reclaim his mother’s culture. “It’s a Native thing,” he informs his incredulous father (who tells him he’d never heard of such a thing from his wife): “Only boys do it. It’s part of becoming a man.” Of course, what with the threats of the police, the temptation of the barbeque next door, and the distractions of a persistent neighbourhood girl, Simon probably wouldn’t recognize a vision if he fell over it.
“Girl Who Loved Her Horses” is the Native name for the strange and quiet Danielle from the non-status community across the tracks, imbued with the mysterious power to draw the horse “every human being on the planet wanted but could never have.” She is and remains an enigma to the people of the reservation, but the power of her spirit remains strong. Years later, a huge image of her horse reappears, covering an entire side of a building in a blighted urban landscape of beggars and broken dreams. The eyes of her stallion, which once gleamed exhilaration and freedom, now glare with defiance and anger. Danielle has clearly been forced to grow up.
With these two plays, Taylor rediscovers an issue long forgotten in our “post-historical” age: the nature of, and the necessity for, these rites of passage in all cultures.
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The Boy Must Die
$29.95A fourteen-year-old boy has been found hanged and mutilated in the basement of Satan House. It’s the second life the derelict mansion has claimed. The work of a brutal predator? A curse? Or a ritual cult murder? The boy’s death shocks parents in the Alberta city of Lethbridge, and police chief Eddy “Butch” Bochansky knows there will be reprisals. Trying to ward off panic, he persuades his old high school buddy, Billy Yamamoto, to act as a deputy detective and hunt down the killer. Recently returned to the plains, Billy’s just buried his own father and taken over a ranch in the foothills, a five hundred acre spread by Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Convinced he can assist his old friend, Billy takes on his first murder case since retiring from the Vancouver force, where for thirty years he worked in the homicide unit and investigated organized crime. In Redfern’s breathless thriller, the unforgettable Yamamoto and his inherited team of local cops confront child abuse, professional negligence, and racial intolerance while finding connections between the boy and numerous “solid” Lethbridge citizens. Occult activities, drugs, and secret teenage pacts intersect with the world of loan sharks and smugglers as a small-town murder crosses the border and threatens to become an international incident. And then another body is found. Sifting through contradictory evidence, searching for a wholly unpredictable killer, pushed to the hilt, somehow, Yamamoto realizes, the heist of priceless Native artifacts from a U.S. burial site is the key. But can he unlock the mystery before he himself dies?
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The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz
$24.95Robert lost his father before he’d even been born, and was quickly abandoned by his young mother to be raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan. In another sense, though, Robert never lost his father, whose ghostly presence lingers in the young boy’s life over the years by means of spectral “advice letters” on how to be a man.
When Robert finds an old pump organ in a derelict farmhouse, he discovers a deep love of and talent for performing music. He also begins to discover secrets from his past, including his grandfather’s Communist ties, and the familial cover-up of his father’s sudden death. Along the way, Robert embraces his budding bisexuality, discovers his Métis identity and harnesses the power of his wild imagination.
Recalling the work of Jamie Fitzpatrick and Greg Rhyno, The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz is a coming-of-age story and meditation on belonging.
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The Boy’s Marble
$20.00The Boy’s Marble tells the story of experiencing a war through the eyes of a child. Separated as children during the Sarajevo Siege, the narrator meeets someone who reminds her of the boy even twenty years later in Montreal, Canada. They were supposed to run away together, only he never came. She has not seen him since and wonders whether this person she met could really be him. Amongst the many books that can be classified as war-fiction, this novel is different as it looks at this difficult tragedy through the eyes of a child in a, one could say, healthy way. The narrator does not sweep the painful and tragic memories under the rug, but she also does not place them onto her primary radar. The story unfolds in a way that does not burden the reader even more, but wakes in him hope, love and helps understand just how useless, meaningless and absurd war is. The story helps the reader find the strength and meaning to live without hate and recover a lost innocence. In essence, the novel is a brilliant anti-war story, very timely and necessary exactly now.
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The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter
$25.95“I would not have wanted not to know you exactly as you were. I would not like to lose even a moment of your slow decline.”
From acclaimed author John Terpstra comes the story of his wife’s family and the short lives of her three brothers, each of whom lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties. With humour, reverence and great love, Terpstra charts the experience of a family under unusual, but resoundingly human, circumstances. He recreates the daily life, the vitality and wit shared by the three boys, and his relationships with them as they entered the final stages of their illness. Above all, he underlines the privilege of spending time with each of themNeil, Paul and Ericcoming to know their persistence as individuals, their collective brand of humour and the force field of their personalities in unison.
Terpstra recounts the habits, the gentle rituals and oddities of living in the boys’ realm: their shared passion for sports, their penchant for nicknames, their records and correspondence, and the steady flow of friends, family and caregivers who participated in their lives. Many times along the way, convictions are checked, challenged and rechecked, faith upended and restored, and perceptions of illness, disability and quality of life vigorously shaken.
The Boys honours the last year in the lives of three brothers whose days could never rightly be called wasted or tragic, but whose time on earth was all too brief. Terpstra celebrates life and challenges the brackets we place around lives characterized by illness. He centres the mechanics of the boys’ physical presence within the geography of their home and community. The Boys is also a gradual examination of storytelling, of the ownership of stories, of where stories effectively begin and whether they ever end.
“I have made a heap of all that I could find. . .” says Terpstra, “the stuff kept in trunks and boxes; loose photos and albums, a diary, keepsakes, the written notes. What remained, materially, of their lives. Can art be made from terminal disease? After all these years the narrative of their lives had distilled into key moments and events, I would like to say, but it was really in the putting-together and spelling out in words of insignificant and mundane moments and events that their various lights began to shine. I was also thinking about St. Augustine, and the brief, numbered chapters of his Confessions. I thought, at first, that each of the chapters should be addressed directly to God, as they are in that book, because then the big why of the family’s story could stay front and centre the whole time. It seemed appropriate. Except that the big why never dominated the story as it originally unfolded, and was not doing so as the story unfolded before me. Scrap St. Augustine. With their lives these brothers who had no future raised life high; in their daily routines, routine itself became holy. Can art be made from terminal disease? I took my cue from them.”
This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Fred Smeijer’s Quadraat and Quadraat Sans, and printed offset on laid paper.
Finalist for the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction and finalist for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
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The Brand of Brotherhood
$24.99Two brothers on opposite sides of the law . . .
Life is hard in 1869 Nebraska for the Warner family and brothers Colt and Brick. After the tragic loss of their mother, their father decides to take his sons west to California-but he dies along the way, leaving Colt and Brick, aged just twelve and ten, to finish the trip and fend for themselves in the Wild West.
With the help of a former gunfighter, Jim Borden, the pair forge their way together-until Brick decides to become an outlaw.
After years on opposite sides of the law, the two find themselves locked in a showdown where they must decide what matters more: following their own paths or their shared bond of brotherhood.
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The Brave Never Write Poetry
$17.95First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just 26, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist’s lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning ‘poetry’ on its head before its author (then known simply as ‘Jones’) swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones’ depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible.
This long-overdue revised edition brings Jones’ unforgettable voice to a new generation of readers and includes the complete text of the original collection (including Jones’ own sardonic assessments of his own poetry), a new preface by poet/critic Kevin Connolly, and postscript commentary from many of Jones’ closest friends and literary colleagues.
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The Breakdown So Far
$17.95The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in her work as a rationalization for our ubiquitous materialism of the soul, Zen as our guiltless doctrine of neglect.
Yet as in all such relentlessly dystopian social parodies, there resides behind each of these brief entertainments a stifled scream for help, a trapped yearning for genuine human contact and sympathy, an arrested existential lust for meaning. Where has our sense of order, propriety, history and community gone, Farrant’s stories beg to wonderstories that span the stylistic range of personal journal, objective reportage, fiction, fantasy and writers’ workshop exercise? In order to answer these questions, Farrant’s new stories meticulously trace the breakdown of our language by ridding it of everything unnecessary and excessive: the breakdown of the post- Kierkegaard, post-Sartre existential position through its extension into the absurd; the breakdown of sense and sensibility through its alienation from perception; and the breakdown of discourse in literary craft, the social occasion and the commoditization of the individual and its attendant merchandizing of desire. Each of these stories is a new instance of the author’s ongoing attempt at understanding language ironicallythrough itselfa willingness to let the deadly serious be as playful as it wants to be, a courageous shedding of what Tom Robbins called the tyranny of the dull mind.”
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The Breaking Words
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The Breaks
$20.95A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.
SEMINARY CO-OP’S BEST BOOKS OF 2021
In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.
“The Breaks is amazing—I read the whole thing through in one sitting. It’s got the heft and staying power of Baldwin’s ‘A Letter to My Nephew.’” —Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism
“If a book can be a hole cut in the side of an existence in order to escape it, or to find a way through what is otherwise impassable, then this is that kind of book … How will we live in the new space that we keep making, through refusal but also adjustment, the necessary accommodations to the ‘nowhere and nothing’ that this space also is? The Breaks leads us through such moments, questions, and scenes, with tenderness. And deep care.” —Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart
“This is a lens-shifting book, an immeasurable gift. With poignant, aching, beautiful, and deeply loving prose, Singh brings Brown girls into the sun, and makes you want to change the ways of the world for our young people and for us all.” —Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
“Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, on No Archive Will Restore You