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Showing 7169–7184 of 9248 results
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The Drowned Man’s Daughter
$23.95Award-winning novelist C.J. Lavigne returns with a strange and startling new vision of the future… The last vestiges of humanity live at the Colony, trapped between the myriad dangers of the protean sea and the poisonous moss-lands, which have blanketed the earth in the wake of an ecological calamity. The noxious moss affects the mind and the body; while it drives its users mad, it is also the only way people can have children.
When a baby arrives on the shore, the young caretakers of the Colony name her Naia, convinced that she is the daughter of the sea and a mysterious Drowned Man who heralded her passage months earlier. Naia grows up at the Colony, and learns the myriad dangers of a world turned feral, not the least of which being the moss-parents, who have surrendered their sanity in order to keep the human species alive.
Now, fully grown, Naia appears to hold the sea’s power through her remarkable heritage. When the Colony starts to look to her for leadership, she knows she is unable to provide what they need…
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The Drowning Girls and Comrades
$17.95The Drowning Girls
Bessie, Alice, and Margaret have two things in common: they are married to George Joseph Smith, and they are dead. Surfacing from the bathtubs they were drowned in, the three breathless brides gather evidence against their womanizing, murderous husband by reliving the shocking events leading up to their deaths. Reflecting on the misconceptions of love, married life, and the not-so-happily ever after, The Drowning Girls is both a breathtaking fantasia and a social critique, full of rich images, a myriad of characters, and lyrical language.
Comrades
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco dreamt of the land of the free. Leaving their small Italian villages, they embarked on a long voyage to the United States, only to encounter a world they never could have imagined. Controversially imprisoned for murder, both men must fight for their lives amidst discrimination and public humiliation. Based on actual events, Comrades bring to life Sacco and Vanzetti’s seven-year imprisonment and explores the struggles and agonies of two men, tried not for what they did, but for who they were.
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The Drunken, Lovely Bird
$17.95Winner, American Independent Publishers Poetry Prize
Sue Sinclair writes in a lyrical tradition that subverts the stereotype of “Canadian women’s” poetry while still playing with some, if not all, of the same poetic vocabulary. The Drunken Lovely Bird, her accomplished third book of poetry, confirms her reputation as one of Canada’s most original young poets.
A keen observer of the material world, from the Newfoundland coast to the streets of Toronto, she has a rare gift for epiphany, for exposing the numinous in the commonplace. Her poems speak from that precise place where our perception of the world and our capacity for language meet and embrace, where our sense of experience goes to get sharpened and refreshed. That experience might involve the inner lives of clouds, the flourishing and passing of a tulip, the evocative scent of wolf willow, or the intricate arts of Bach and Virginia Woolf.
Sinclair’s poems are deft, musical, and quick in the moment, alive to the sensuous surface and the meditative depth, their antennae fully extended. They focus brilliantly on lively physical details, yet they resonate with the subtle emotions that whisper at the edges of the everyday world. Meditative and beautifully crafted, Sinclair’s poems are simultaneously surprising and inevitable, inviting readers to gaze more deeply into their surroundings and to rejoice in both the light and the dark.
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The Dry Valley
$20.00The Dry Valley encapsulates one woman’s relationship with herself, her alcoholic spouse, and the world, in three different Saskatchewan landscapes. The poems offer a fascinating interplay between mindful explorations of self and immersions in the challenging complexities of interpersonal relationships, social issues and meaningful engagement with the environment. The quiet, meditative quality of the longer lyrics rub up against the edgier narrative poems, contributing a wonderful tension to the manuscript. With figurative language kept to a minimum, the poems rely on detail, giving a real-time felt presence and the speaker a heightened reliability.
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The Duchess and the Commoner
$19.95(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)
This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, their disappointments, their travails, their agony and their ecstasy. It is in the novels, however, that these characters are seen in their context of time and space: the neighbourhood in which Tremblay and his extended family lived and grew up.
The Duchess and the Commoner focuses on Albertine’s brother, Édouard, brother-in-law to ‘the fat woman’ and uncle to Marcel, and to the ‘fat woman’s’ son. In ths volume, Édouard launches his forays into the 1940’s world of Montréal show-business and creates his own astonishing role within it. As with all the novels in this series, a certain sense of wonder, even magic, emanates from the grandmother, Victoire, which in this episode is seen flowing through Édouard to his nephew, the brilliant and disturbed Marcel.
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The Duende of Tetherball
$18.95The Duende of Tetherball fearlessly ransacks the scrutinizing role of the past on the present; the interactions and accountabilities of ourselves and other species; the challenges and pleasures of getting older and forever striving to balance our most cherished and often incomprehensible relationships both with the world and each other. Bowling strives to account for and address our human need to resolve the tension between personal freedom and a world burdened by increasing homogenization and centralized control by adopting an industry of personal fortitude and thoughtful redress. He seeks to remember and to remember again the lessons polished over a lifetime: “Fifteen, scared but still apt / to toss “damn thee black / thou cream-faced loon” / in PE class at the rippling back / of some hoop or net-bound jock, / I was learning – too soon – / the only lesson that counts: / how to be alone.”
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The Duke of Kent
$32.95A refreshingly honest memoir about politics and private life
Few Canadians have served their nation as well and as widely as the Honourable Darcy McKeough. He was elected Member of Provincial Parliament for Chatham–Kent, Ontario, five times between 1963 and 1977. In 1967 he was mockingly dubbed the Duke of Kent by an opposition MPP, a title he has worn as a badge of honour ever since. As Treasurer of Ontario, Minister of Municipal Affairs, and Minister of Energy during his time in office, McKeough fought to achieve budget surpluses long before it was fashionable, created regional governments that brought more efficient services to citizens, and attempted to tame Ontario Hydro.
In The Duke of Kent, McKeough takes readers behind the scenes and into the Cabinet rooms of government, putting on full display the thrust and parry of legislative sittings where he almost always gave better than he got. He brings to life the political and constitutional issues of the day as led, litigated, and legislated by an array of provincial and federal politicians, including Charles MacNaughton, John Robarts, William Davis, John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Jacques Parizeau, and Peter Lougheed.
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The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept
$16.95The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept is the second of three plays chronicling the saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest, most ruthless and ill fated families.
While Robbie and Joan’s two sons, Alex and Robert, heirs apparent to the family fortune, are groomed to hold the reins of power, Robbie Dunsmuir cuts a deal with Sir John A. Macdonald to build a railway from Victoria to Nanaimo, to distract B.C. voters from the fact that the promise of a trans-continental railway which brought them into confederation has been delayed. The last spike of the E & N is driven and Robbie and Sir John descend to the lowest level of the Dunsmuir pits where they consummate their deal in a two day orgy of bonded whiskey, cold chicken and much quoting of the bard (Robbie Burns, that is).
In a devastating final scene, the family secret emerges from the closet of the Dunsmuirs’ castle, Craigdarroch, on the eve of its inauguration. The scene is set for the furies to deliver the family up to the curse Robbie and Joan brought with them from their native Scotland.
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The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge
$16.95The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families, The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge chronicles the disgrace and exile of Robbie Dunsmuir from Scotland, the settlement of his family as indentured labourers to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Nanaimo coalfields and his application of scab” labour tactics which win him an independent prospector’s licence from the company. His discovery of a vast coal deposit on Vancouver Island, and his scramble to first finance and then gain control over the Wellington Mine on this site, over the literally dead bodies of his friends and supporters, brings this play to a stunning climax. A version of Parts One and Two of this series has been performed annually at the Nanaimo Festival for several years
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The Dusty Bookcase
$22.95Brian Busby’s The Dusty Bookcase explores the fascinating world of Canada’s lesser-known literary history: works that suffered censorship, critical neglect, or brilliant yet fleeting notoriety. These rare and quirky totems of Canadiana, collected over the last three decades, form a travel diary of sorts—through books instead of maps. Covering over one hundred books, and peppered with observations on the Canadian writing and publishing scenes, Busby’s work explores our cultural past from a unique slant, questioning why certain works, rightfully or otherwise, are celebrated and others ignored.
Illustrated throughout with covers and ephemera, The Dusty Bookcase offers up a casual but nonetheless critical and entertaining exploration of Canada’s suppressed, ignored, and forgotten literature, and in the process a curious examination of what we read, when we read it, and why.
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The Dying Detective
$19.95Retired Detective Kevin Beldon has left Ottawa and gone into retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California following his successful treatment for lung cancer. He’s trying to make sense of his life, but death is very much on his mind. And not just his own; he’s still trying to come to terms with the loss ten years earlier of his wife and son, victims of Dr. Ewan Randome, an evil mastermind whom Beldon had been forced to let escape. Aside from providing the occasional consultation for the California police, Beldon has happily gone into retirement, but when Global Patrol, the international police force, comes looking for his help on the Malachai case, a serial killer investigation that has them stymied, his interest is piqued. Beldon quickly deduces that the killings are related to his last unsolved case before his retirement two years earlier, a triple murder in his nation’s capital, and he suspects the involvement of his old nemesis Dr. Randome in this new round of assassinations. As events unfold, Beldon comes to realize how inevitable it was that Malachai’s killing spree would end in New York, and how inevitable his own final showdown with Randome has always been.
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The Dying Meteorologist
$18.95In Acting My Age, the opening section, the poet Steve Luxton navigates retirement. With unflagging wit, he suspects he is viewed, if at all, as a curiosity or even sidewalk obstacle by hurry- by younger generations . . . . Growing older involves losses but also gains: a flourishing bond with wife and friends, and the acquisition of wisdom. In the second, The Dying Meteorologist, from which the collection’s title derives, Luxton writes of the winter-long bout with cancer of a close friend. In this 22-poem cycle, he movingly records conversations, walks, drives and last days. These pieces celebrate life and friendship, under imponderable and fateful skies.
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The Dying Poem
$18.95On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto’s Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there’s a book lodged in his chest.
Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet. In the process of making his documentary, Jay must try to unravel the threads of Henry’s labyrinthine, suicide-obsessed mindwith only the poems as tools; he must also contend with two of Henry’s sometimes lovers, Luisa, a Mexican violinist, and Dee, a feminist writer now living on a farm in the Annapolis Valley and writing a novel about Catherine the Great.
The Dying Poem will take you through stories within stories in search of the mystery behind Henry’s artful suicide. And, in the end, the crossing of paths and the difficulty of speaking about the dead tell us something aboutthe making of art and what art makes of us.
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The Earth Remembers Everything
$18.95The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and poetic narrative, tracing the author’s journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world; the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Tiananmen Square in China, Hiroshima in Japan, and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland; First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii and Chinlac, and a deserted Carrier village at the confluence of the Stuart and Nechako Rivers, where the Chilcotin massacred the Carrier in 1745.
These places where violent eruptions occurred throughout the history of humanity have created deep cracks in the emotional bonds between the people who were there, as well as forever transforming the spirit and essence of the land where the violence occurred. In this first book by Adrienne Fitzpatrick, she struggles with how to speak the unspeakable, and questions what it is that we find so compelling about the places we are drawn to. The answer, she finds, lies in the memories that are stored in the earth.
The Earth Remembers Everything is an intimate, powerful story in which Place is the main character and we are taken along to bear witness to these sites that still hold the sadness and secrets of the past.
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The East End Plays: Part 1
$24.95By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring the ironic and dramatic possibilities of the stereotypes (albeit, by this time, home-grown ones) that continue to provide the fertile ground of contemporary North American sensibilities.
With his creation of the Governor General’s Award winning Criminals in Love (1984); the Chalmers Award winning Better Living (1986); and Escape from Happiness (1991), Walker embarked on a whole new direction in his evolution as a playwright. Much less of his comic irony now relied on the recognition of character, much more now relied on the creation of character. In a very real way, George Walker had freed himself to come home.” Set in what is transparently a single neighbourhood, the East End of Toronto, these three interrelated plays were quickly collected in a volume called, naturally, The East End Plays, in 1988. From here, George Walker moved in two related directions: to a further exploration of the margins of contemporary urban life in the global village with the three plays now collected in The East End Plays Part 2 (1999); and to the continued exploration of linking plays around a single location with the wildly successful six-part Suburban Motel (1998). The original three East End Plays are here published in a completely new and revised Talonbooks edition now called The East End Plays Part 1.
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The East End Plays: Part 2
$19.95Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those ends to the other. It’s where Walker’s settings have come home.” From his offer of tenuous hope to the denizens of a city salvaged from the powerful and the greedy in Beautiful City (1987); to his championing of women in Love and Anger (1989); to his explorations of sex and gender issues among three young people in Tough! (1993), Walker continues his explorations of characters living in extremity in the arena of a political comedy uniquely his own.