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Showing 7249–7264 of 9492 results
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The Coen Brothers
$19.95Everything you wanted to know about the direction of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink. A terrified woman plunges a knife through the hand of her pursuer. A leftwing playwright turns to the woman in his bed, only to find a river of blood. A baby, abandoned in the middle of the highway, smiles happily. A professional killer stuffs his partner into a woodchipper while a pregnant cop pulls her gun. Welcome to the world of the Coen Brothers. With the smash success of Fargo (winner of two major Academy Awards), the filmmaking team of Joel and Ethan Coen finally received their deserved recognition. But well before that the two brothers were writing and directing terrific films — from the film-noir thriller Blood Simple, to the comedy Raising Arizona, to the gangster epic Miller’s Crossing, to the bizarre Barton Fink. With each film they have surprised fans and critics alike, always refusing to repeat themselves or compromise their independence. While still in their early twenties, Joel and Ethan Coen raised the money for their first film — by knocking on the doors of the wealthy in their native Minnesota. Starring an unknown actress named Frances McDormand (who would later become Joel’s wife), it was an art-house hit and allowed the brothers to make Raising Arizona with Nicolas Cage and another Coen brothers’ discovery, Holly Hunter. But despite their high reputation, the brothers would not make another financially successful picture for years. Were their films just too offbeat and intellectual? And then came Fargo. Here is the story of how two middle-class Minnesota boys have come to write, shoot, and direct some of the most gruesome, exhilarating, and funny films of our time.
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The Coffin of Honey
$24.95Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.
At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician’s speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another’s orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about ‘the interdimensional will to the aesthetic’ – a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.
The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.
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The Cold Panes of Surfaces
$16.95The Cold Panes of Surfaces is the moving second collection of poems from award-winning author Chris Banks.Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings to it a distinctly modern edge, meditating on “the rent we are paying to the planet for our waning lives.” Here, beetles become “child kamikazes… a wallpaper of yellow-winged flames” and the planet is a “Museum of Natural Beauty.”Banks takes imaginative leaps into the worlds of a magician’s assistant, a fifteenth-century Japanese poet, and the Muse. Most of all, these poems eloquently describe childhood, loss in all its forms, the vagaries of relationships, and being “a sullen young man / caught in the world’s fist.”The Cold Panes of Surfaces is a remarkable collection, and a fitting follow-up to Banks’ award-winning first book Bonfires.
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The Collected Books of Artie Gold
$29.95Artie Gold wrote. And although he published only eight books, they were just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Artie was always writing on his manual Underwood, on the back of cigarette packs, on napkins, on the wall, on postcards to himself and to the rest of the world. He also sketched, sketches of the moment, the moment of a moment, like his poems, whose phrases and unsentimental melancholia left a permanent impression on your mind and in your heart. He and his poems made you realize that poetry, contrary to popular opinion, did matter.
Artie Gold was a poet who was sure of what he was. He paid rent in Fort Poetry. He had such breadth in his poems that he could leave you breathless and wondering how did he do that?” There was a Bach-like complexity mixed with a Rube Goldberg playfulness in his poems. His poems were city flowers growing between the cracks of this concrete island at the strangest and most arresting angles.
Endre Farkas
Born in 1947 in Brockville, Ontario, Artie Gold appeared like a supernova within the Ingram CoreSource of Montreal Anglophone poets in the late 1960s. Intensely devoted to poetry, having already discovered the work of Frank O’Hara, John Wieners and Jack Spicer in his teens, six books of his poems were published in each of the years 197479. Daunted by asthma, complicated by rapidly proliferating allergies and emphysema, he increasingly retreated from the world. At the urging of his friends, a Selected Poems was published in 1992, but only one further book appeared in print in 2003. Artie left the world on St. Valentine’s Day, 2007. His eight published books of poetry collected here shine like a beacon of Northern Lights across the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.
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The Collected Poems of William Hawkins
$25.00Born in 1940 in Ottawa, Ontario, legendary poet and musician William Hawkins was one of the most important artists to emerge from Canada’s capital. He published six books from 1964-1974, attended the 1963 UBC Summer Poetry Seminar, organized poetry readings at Ottawa’s infamous Le Hibou Coffeehouse, wrote songs and performed in bands (with the likes of Bruce Cockburn, David Wiffen, Darius Brubeck, and others), and published widely in Canada’s most important little magazines of the 1960s before retreating into silence in the 1970s and working as a cab driver until his retirement in 2012. Hawkins died in 2016. The Collected Poems of William Hawkins gathers Hawkins’s complete output. His books are printed alongside previously unpublished and uncollected poems including early magazine publications, the long-lost book Sweet and Sour Nothings, poems from the time of his extended silence, as well as all work produced since his gradual re-appearance in the 1990s. Edited by Cameron Anstee, this volume presents the generous, defiant, idiosyncratic, and compelling work of William Hawkins in its entirety.
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The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
$17.95Spanning two decades, Smallwood’s story is anchored and propelled by one of Johnston’s most memorable creations: the fictitious Sheilagh Fielding, a caustic newspaper columnist whose own battles with the past and alcohol addiction find full vent and expression in her tireless dogging of Smallwood’s climb to power. At its heart, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is the story of a man whose career is buoyed and sometimes sunk by his unresolved feelings for a woman he never allowed himself to love. It is also the story of Newfoundland’s final years as a country, the end of one cultural and political trajectory, and the beginning of another.
Based on the classic novel by Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a fictionalized portrait of Joseph R. Smallwood, the controversial political figure who ambitiously led Newfoundland into Confederation with Canada, and became its first premier.
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The Colour of Clouds
$18.95The Colour of Clouds features poems that focus on the Greater Toronto area which includes a variety of towns, hamlets, cities and landscapes with a rich history and culture. In a poetic and introspective style, this book explores the loss of our links to the past and how the pace of development threatens the beauty of our heritage, both built and natural. Featured in the poems are writers from Stephen Leacock to Lucy Maude Montgomery to Mazo de la Roche, and artists such as Milne, Gladstone, Varley and Macdonald who were inspired by the landscapes of these regions. The central themes in this collection are: losses and gains over time in the places where we reside; the interplay between our natural world and the built environment; and the often tenuous connection between the present and the past in the spaces that we inhabit; and ecofeminist theories relating to the exploitation of the natural world and the significant connection of women to nature.
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The Comedian’s Book of the Dead
$24.95A profound and imaginative underworld quest, and a fresh, funny page turner, from one of Canada’s most beloved and awarded storytellers.
Death is a comedian and devoted family man, but everything falls apart when the Fates choose him to guide departed souls to the Beneath. Having to perform this new role erodes his humanity and causes him to do some perhaps unforgivable things, and when his only son dies by suicide, Death realizes he’s likely the one to blame.
Attempting the impossible, Death goes into the Beneath to beg the Fates to allow him to bring back his son. Naturally, things are not what they seem, and Death is forced to reevaluate everything he knows— everything except the deep love he has for his child. Blending Barwin’s celebrated wit with deeply moving scenes of empathy and compassion, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead is a heartbreaking and humorous journey into the joy and pain of parenthood, and a thoughtful exploration of choice and agency, sacrifice and love.
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The Comic
$20.00A bored part-time college English instructor who teaches a class called “Humour in Classical Novels” to students who really don’t care decides to try his hand at stand-up comedy, which takes him from his very protected academic world into an arena open to attack and persecution by his family, the public at large, the media and the courts. The novel explores issues such as political correctness/cultural sensitivity, personal and private space and social media, freedom of speech, huckster media, the notion of originality and most especially the nature of humour itself — what makes something funny, what subjects are taboo and why, what causes certain jokes to lose favour, how does context affect what can or cannot be said. To further this approach, he takes the name Bruce Leonard and dresses a là TVs Columbo. On his downward spiral, the man meets some wild characters: a female stand-up comic who tends to mirror his routine and voyage, a prosecuting lawyer who uses court cases to promote her other role as author
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The Commons
$17.95Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed—taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call “privatization”—but it spilt over into Romanticism’s own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in “the literary” since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumulations and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization.
In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, just escaped from an Essex asylum and walking the more than eighty miles to his home in Helpston; we pick wild fruit with anarchist Henry David Thoreau, also newly escaped from jail (for not paying his poll tax); and we comb the English Lake District, undermining William Wordsworth’s proprietary claim upon it, with a host of authors of Romantic Guides and Tours.
Resisting enclosure with each word, tearing down (intellectual) property’s fencing, wandering in search of new commons, new spaces outside property’s exclusive and excluding domain—The Commons veers in and out of history to find spaces of linguistic hope. What we have named, in less inspired moments, “allusion,” “borrowing,” or even (pretentiously) “intertextuality” is just this fact that poetry proves again and again: our languages are common. Shared. Un-enclosable.
The Commons is another installment of what Collis has called (half in jest) “The Barricades Project”—a broadly based, historically ranging test of the old adage that “poetry is the revolutionary act par excellence.” It includes Anarchive (2005) and will eventually continue in The Red Album. The Commons includes an introduction to “The Barricades Project,” written by Collis’ collaborators Alfred Noyes and Ramon Fernandez.
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The Compassionate Imagination
$19.95“The book is worth reading because it does something rather special: it celebrates Canadian arts and offers ideas to promote their continued cultivation. Wyman’s … enthusiasm for the variety and calibre of projects is infectious.” — The Literary Review of Canada
A radical reimagining of the role of art and culture in contemporary democracy, The Compassionate Imagination proposes a new Canadian Cultural Contract that re-humanizes our way of living together by tapping into the instincts for generosity and compassion that find their expression in art.
Over the last forty years, the arts have been increasingly deemed unimportant to the creation of an educated workforce. Reflecting a broadly held political view that in a market-based economy the arts were “a frill,” they were deemed “unnecessary” courses compared to sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
But what kind of Canada might we make if we were to place art and culture at the heart of our mutual decision-making, and return the arts to a central position in our education, shifting to steam rather than stem?
What might be possible if we integrate the creative imagination into our responses to the great social challenges we face? What impact would it have on the future shape of our democracy?
It’s time to find where the Compassionate Imagination can take us.
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The Complaints Department
$27.95Gaspereau Press is pleased to present this redesigned edition of Susan Haley’s fifth novel, The Complaints Department, first published in 2000. The novel takes place in the village of Prohibition Creek, a fictional Dene community in the Northwest Territories. We first encounter Robert Woodcutter on the steps of the local Band hall, having just lost to his brother Danny in the election for chief. When Danny begins to outline his plans for improving local affairs, Robert points out a hole in his list of committees. And so the local complaints department is born, with Robert Woodcutter as its sole administrator and attorney.
The novel centres on the Woodcutter family and on the relationship that develops between Robert and Rebecca McCrae, whose allegiances gradually shift, from a defense of her position in Danny’s band office, to Robert’s way of doing things. Like many others in the novel, Robert and Rebecca’s relationship hinges on the town’s transitional status, as the last of the old ways are steadfastly maintained alongside a newer, non-traditional approach.
Issues of governance and authority lurk around every corner in Prohibition Creek. When Robert’s wife tells him to leave, he and his friend Haga (the town fool) reclaim an abandoned fish plant. Before long they are deep in the paper chase required just to build an outhouse. Haley delights in these kinds of absurdities, capturing their inanity, and detailing the labyrinth of shortcuts and forgeries that have long characterized the attempts of national bureaucracy to replace local systems.
The Complaints Department features an unruly crew of family and local curiosities, including Robert’s mother Ama and her boyfriend Elvis, Rebecca’s uncle Herod, Danny’s dissatisfied wife Roseanne, and Robert’s own wife, the sullen but capable Mary Ann. Haley demonstrates a genuine understanding of life in Canada’s northern populations, and an appreciation for the range of archetypes recognizable in all communities of certain size.
Prohibition Creek is a place where magic, dreams, visions and storytelling permeate everyday life, but where these forms of guidance are increasingly being driven under by a kind of power that operates from the top down. Ever evasive of authority, Robert instead relies on stories he once found in a little green book in the school library, a volume of knowledge he takes to calling “The Book of Dene.” Drawing strength from storytelling and from his occasional participation in the ways of life still maintained by his mother’s generation, Robert works to rebuild the relationships upon which his place in Prohibition Creek depend.
This edition is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in a letterpress-printed cover. The text was typeset in Adobe Jenson by Andrew Steeves and printed offset on laid paper.
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The Complete Lockpick Pornography
$14.95Now in one volume, Lockpick Pornography and its thematic sequel, We all Got it Coming
Lockpick Pornography is a genderqueer adventure story, and We All Got It Coming is about a young couple dealing with the aftermath of an act of violence. From kidnapping the son of a “family values” politician in Lockpick Pornography to the violent confrontation of We All Got It Coming, these are characters who fight back.
Comeau explores the effects of prejudice and the ramifications of violence with his signature mix of unhinged humour and unexpected tenderness.
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The Conception of Winter
$12.95Powerful yet serene, The Conception of Winter is about women, their friendships, loyalties, and pain. But most of all it about physical, mental, and spiritual healing.
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The Concise Kochel
$15.95The Concise Köchel cannot be substituted for the “Complete” catalogue. Published in response to the many requests from musicologists and musicians received by the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, this abridged, less costly and easier to handle edition is designed to meet the most frequent needs of those interested in the works of Mozart.
—From the Introduction
It’s All Hallows’ Eve, and the Motherwell sisters, Lili and Cecile, have invited their musicologist patrons, the Brunswick sisters, to attend them on this crucial day. All their lives, Lili and Cecile have practiced on their pianos, to the exclusion of everything else. Their interpretations of Mozart, as the impresario Mendel says, are “too impeccable, too irreproachable,” there is “too much politeness, too much purity, not enough passion.”
They wish to discuss something hidden in their basement—someone has strayed from their score, someone has improvised, the hands of the clock need to be turned back.
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The Confederation Poets
$25.00The Confederation Poets: The Founding of a Canadian Poetry, 1880 to the First World War is a study of poets born between 1850 and 1866, focusing on the work they produced up until the end of World War I. Through this investigation, the climate of opinion that animated Canadian society following Confederation is brought to light. Poets covered range from the famous (Lampman, Roberts, Crawford, Carman) to the less well-known, but still important (Cameron, Herbin, Coleman, Wetherald). 55 Confederation poems, many hard to find today, are quoted in full.