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Showing 7185–7200 of 9248 results
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The East Side of It All
$19.95The East Side of It All, written from the perspective of a drug user and single-room occupant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, explores the ongoing process of healing through reconnection with family, the natural world and traditional Indigenous (Kwantlen) storytelling. Dandurand’s voice is lyrical yet intimate, obscured yet sitting with you at the kitchen table having a cigarette. The East Side of It All is the journey of a broken man who finally accepts his storytelling gift and shares with the world his misery, joy and laughter. Dandurand’s previous poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2020 Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for Poetry.
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The Eater of Dreams
$20.00The past haunts the characters in The Eater of Dreams. In fifteen interconnected stories, Kat Cameron’s vivid characters — teachers, singers, writers, and misfits — examine the inner fractures in their lives. A woman muses about her miscarried child while watching a friend’s daughter play; an opera singer in Edmonton is stalked by an abusive ex-lover; a student’s story of bullying reminds a woman of her own childhood traumas; a woman cuts out the heart of a faithless man; the ghost of Lafcadio Hearn haunts the bedroom of a grieving teacher in Japan.
The title for the collection is taken from a Japanese folktale about the baku, a mythological creature that eats nightmares, and her tales pulsate with this energy. In the darkest moments of her characters, they find or discover the energy they need to survive, but not without breaking down the surface to see clearly who they really are. Her portraits bear witness to the longing, yearning, unspoken desire of her characters’ dreams and to the uncertainty and contemplation of their lives in the flux of travel and change. The Eater of Dreams is at once contemporary but also ancient in its probing; it is a collection that blurs the borders between realism and the magic that lies outside it.
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The Economy of Sparrows
$24.95A debut novel about the heartbreak of habitat loss and family trauma by one of Canada’s most beloved writer-naturalists.
This debut novel by Trevor Herriot is the richly observed story of Nell Rowan, who has inherited her family’s prairie farmstead and returned there to live after many decades away. Nell is increasingly obsessed by a 19th-century bird collector while haunted by memories of her mother’s disappearance.
Nell’s fascination with 19th-century bird collector William Spreadborough began during her janitorial night shifts at the National Museum of Nature. Now retired and back home on the same prairie where Spreadborough collected birds, her obsession with his life and death becomes more urgent. Though she finds consolation in the company of her border collie and horses, and the wild birds passing through each season, Nell feels increasingly isolated. Her neighbours seem indifferent to the ongoing devastation contemporary agriculture wreaks on prairie ecosystems and less than supportive of Nell’s attempts to track native bird populations. And now she is unable to escape the central mystery of her life: what happened to her mother in that long-ago snowstorm?
Things begin to shift for Nell when she provides temporary shelter to Carmelita, a fifteen-year-old foster child whose fresh view of the world around her just might rescue Nell from the hopelessness she fears is her inheritance.
Trevor Herriot’s The Economy of Sparrows connects today’s settler culture and natural science to their roots in colonial empire-building. As Nell Rowan finds the people who might help her come to some peaceful resolution of her life’s challenges, readers are faced with questions of how we engage with and value the natural world, how its truths illuminate both history and our present lives, and how we justify ourselves to the wild things of the earth.
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The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
$17.95Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe had a major influence in awakening consciousness to the “Indian problem” both in whites and Natives themselves.
Cast of five women and 15 men. With a preface by Chief Dan George.
The Ecstasy of Rita Joe premiered November 23, 1967 at the Vancouver Playhouse.
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The Edible City
$24.95If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, the role chefs can and should play in society – how a city nourishes itself makes a statement about the kind of city it is.
With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-security policy, of feeding the needy and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree.
Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto – and, by extension, every city – sustains itself, from growing basilon balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork.
‘The common theme here is connecting people through food. In the final essay, Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council suggests that this connection is really about empowerment, and empowering readers is exactly what The Edible City is sure to do.’
– Quill and Quire
‘Part historical recollection, part rallying cry and part love letter to all things gustatory in our fair city, this compilation has an angle for every taste.’
– Taste T.O.
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The Edmonton Queen
$19.95A Drag Dynasty is about to be divined from the high life decade of decadence. It is destined, pre-ordained — and perfectly coiffed. Darrin Hagen, under the mentorship of his drag mother, Lulu LaRude, rose to the height of glamour as Gloria Hole, performer extraordinaire at the legendary Flashback nightclub. Beneath the layers of nightlife, stage lights and make-up lay the complex relationships of a chosen family. Both hilarious and moving, The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage once again invites readers to the exclusive party that was, and should not be missed again.
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The Education of Aubrey McKee
$24.95A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title • A 49th Shelf Can’t Miss Title for Spring
A young writer finds his way in and out of love in late twentieth-century Toronto.
The scene is Toronto, the early 1990s, and at a house party Aubrey McKee falls in love with a bewitching stranger who talks him into stealing a piece of cake. This woman—a poet named Gudrun Peel—rapidly becomes the person for whom he would do anything at all. Together, Aubrey and Gudrun make a life of delirious idiosyncrasy. Surrounded by friends, frenemies, lovers, and rivals in the underground arts scene, the possibilities of their destiny remain radically open. But as their relationship deepens, and their creative and professional lives stumble, stall, and then suddenly blow up, Aubrey and Gudrun struggle against their own inexperience . . . as well as each other.
The much-anticipated follow-up to Alex Pugsley’s Aubrey McKee, The Education of Aubrey McKee is a campus novel in which the city of Toronto is the institute of higher education and the setting for a glittering story about the incandescence of first love.
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The Eel
$25.00Writer Jack Fingon realizes too late that his life of “intuition and attraction” has produced little to value, and nothing to remember. To settle a piece of unfinished business, Fingon devises a plan to fulfil the testamentary wish of French vagabond poet Blaise Cendrars — to be buried in the Sargasso Sea where “life first burst from the depths of the ocean floor towards the sun”.
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The Eighth Wonder of the World
$34.95From field producer for HBO’s André the Giant Pat Laprade and renowned wrestling historian Bertrand Hébert comes a definitive and exhaustive biography of André the Giant.
“The gold standard for wrestling biographies.” — Wrestling Observer
Is there a way to find truth in the stuff of legend? You may think you know André the Giant — but who was André Roussimoff? Through exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with family and friends, The Eighth Wonder of the World offers a comprehensive exploration of André’s amazing wrestling career and the indelible mark he left on pop culture, including his role in the cult classic film The Princess Bride.
Born in France, André worked on his family’s farm until he was 18, when he moved to Paris to pursue professional wrestling. A truly extraordinary figure, André went on to become an international icon and world traveler, all while battling acromegaly. While his disorder is what made him a giant and a household name, it’s also what caused his untimely death at 46.
This biography addresses the burning questions, outrageous stories and common misconceptions about his height, his weight, his drawing power as a superstar, and his seemingly unparalleled capacity for food and alcohol. Transporting readers beyond the smoke and mirrors of professional wrestling into the life of a real man, Laprade and Hébert have crafted the most complete portrait of a modern-day mythical being.
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The Eighth Wonder of the World
$24.95From field producer for HBO’s André the Giant Pat Laprade and renowned wrestling historian Bertrand Hébert comes a definitive and exhaustive biography of André the Giant … now in paperback!
“The gold standard for wrestling biographies.” — Wrestling Observer
Is there a way to find truth in the stuff of legend? You may think you know André the Giant — but who was André Roussimoff? Through exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with family and friends, The Eighth Wonder of the World offers a comprehensive exploration of André’s amazing wrestling career and the indelible mark he left on pop culture, including his role in the cult classic film The Princess Bride.
Born in France, André worked on his family’s farm until he was 18, when he moved to Paris to pursue professional wrestling. A truly extraordinary figure, André went on to become an international icon and world traveler, all while battling acromegaly. While his disorder is what made him a giant and a household name, it’s also what caused his untimely death at 46.
This biography addresses the burning questions, outrageous stories and common misconceptions about his height, his weight, his drawing power as a superstar, and his seemingly unparalleled capacity for food and alcohol. Transporting readers beyond the smoke and mirrors of professional wrestling into the life of a real man, Laprade and Hébert have crafted the most complete portrait of a modern-day mythical being.
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The Elements of Mentality
$29.95In the 18th century, David Hume suggested that the “science of man” (psychology) was the foundation for all other sciences (philosophy). Now a latter-day Hume offers a model of mentality that sets psychology and philosophy on common footings, eliminating the breach between the sciences and the humanities. From this backdrop, the author offers solutions to some of the great questions: the nature of reality, value, certainty, validity, free will, morality, and justice.
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The Elephant on Karluv Bridge
$24.95Set in Prague and narrated by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins with an lephant named Sál escaping the Prague Zoo. As the elephant moves through the beautiful Czech city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each character is at a crossroads, and desperately seeking the wisdom they need to wrestle with profound questions—how to live, how to love, who to love, how to heal. And the elephant herself is haunted, as memories of her long-ago capture in Africa resurface.
Sál carries the narrative from one point of view to another: Vasha, a writer and night watchman at the zoo, and his wife Marta, a psychotherapist, confront the question of whether to have a child; Šárka, Marta’s patient
and a dancer at the end of her career, is visited by a charming and often abrasive manifestation of the long-dead ballerina Anna Pavlova; Joseph, a clown and bouffon, performs on the Karlův Bridge itself, and he is about to be struck down (literally and figuratively) by a new love…
Through it all, Sál steals the show, wandering the streets in search of water and food, bearing her own share of sadness and painful memories as she struggles to find her way out of her bewildering predicament. Though she, like the humans she encounters, is free now to make her own choices, she is also displaced and lost.
Thomas Trofimuk’s novel masterfully convinces us to accept all the wonders contained in it: that a bridge can tell a story, that art is integral to our survival, that an elephant can scatter sudden flashes of insight in her wake, that there is no separation between the grief of elephants and
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The Elephant Song
$16.95An eminent psychiatrist has vanished from his office. The last person to have seen him is Michael, a troubled patient.
Dr. Greenberg, the hospital director, is determined to question Michael, ignoring the head nurse’s cryptic warnings. Michael speaks of elephants and opera—with the occasional hint of murder and foul play. Fraught with mind games and verbal tugs-of-war, The Elephant Song is a cat-and-mouse game that will keep you guessing until its haunting conclusion.
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The Elephant Talks to God
$16.95The Elephant Talks to God is an endearing collection of whimsical tales in which a young elephant forages for answers to that age-old existential puzzle: What is the meaning of life? In this new edition of Dale Estey’s best-selling book, this pachyderm philosopher asks questions and God answers — sometimes cryptically, sometimes humorously but always with love and patience.
The answers unfold in a series of conversations between this humble, though occasionally impertinent, beast and the Almighty. The free-ranging exchanges between the two include contributions from popes, missionaries and various monkeys, birds and insects. This sweet, sometimes satirical, and occasionally moving story will appeal to readers of all ages. The book includes most of the original stories from the popular 1989 collection as well as many new ones.
Original, fresh and unsentimental, The Elephant Talks to God belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who, just like the inquisitive elephant, has ever wondered about life, love and the true nature of happiness.
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The Embalmer
$17.95A small-town embalmer’s daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead.
Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career – from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse’s skin for that blushing look – the narrator must look her parents’ deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye.
Quietly poetic, The Embalmer glimpses at something most would rather look away from.
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The Emily Valentine Poems
$16.95The Emily Valentine Poems is an innovative book that challenges the impossible notions of femininity that permeate our culture. The texts within include self-portraits, prose poems, fake fan letters, and confessional lyric snapshots. These are pharmaceutically enhanced tributes to the hangovers of twenty-something love and to the pop icons from an unconventional 1980s childhood. With The Emily Valentine Poems, Zoe Whittall provides us with the perfect soundtrack for the culturally literate rebel in all of us.
“Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler.”—The Globe and Mail
“This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.”—Eileen Myles