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All Books in this Collection
Showing 7313–7328 of 9248 results
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The Girl in the Well Is Me
$12.95Newcomer Kammie Summers has fallen into a well during a (fake) initiation into a club whose members have no intention of letting her join. Now Kammie’s trapped in the dark, growing increasingly claustrophobic, and waiting to be rescued — or possibly not. As hours pass, the reality of Kammie’s predicament mixes with her memories of the highlights and lowlights of her life so far, including the reasons her family moved to this new town in the first place. And as she begins to run out of oxygen, Kammie starts to imagine she has company, including a French-speaking coyote and goats that just might be zombies.
Author Karen Rivers has created a unique narrator with an authentic, sympathetic, sharp, funny voice who tells a story perfect for fans of Flora and Ulysses, Reign Rein, and Counting by 7s. The Girl in the Well is Me will have readers laughing and crying and laugh-crying over the course of its physically and emotionally suspenseful, utterly believable events.
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The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories
$24.95“Bridging tenderness and violence, and brimming with danger and magic, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds will leave you breathless.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis“In these 14 hard-edged and unapologetic stories, debut author Garcia tackles topics ranging from human trafficking and drug abuse to eating disorders and middle-age angst, and in no-frills prose, carves out bizarre and palpable realities, breathing strange life into a horde of depressed, deprived, and abused characters.” — Publishers WeeklyThe boundaries between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative, are shattered in this remarkable debut collection for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, André Alexis, and Angélique LalondeA girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world out of step with reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.
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The Girl Who Loved the Birds
$15.95A story for children by Kwantlen storyteller and award-winning poet Joseph Dandurand.The Girl Who Loved the Birds is the third in a series of Kwantlen legends by award-winning author Joseph Dandurand, following The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets and A Magical Sturgeon.Accompanied by beautiful gouache illustrations by Kwantlen artist Elinor Atkins, this tender children’s story follows a young Kwantlen girl who shares her life with the birds of the island she calls home. Collecting piles of sticks and moss for the builders of nests, sharing meals with the eagles and owls, the girl forms a lifelong bond with her feathered friends, and soon they begin to return her kindness.Written with Dandurand’s familiar simplicity and grace, The Girl Who Loved the Birds is a striking story of kinship and connection.
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The Girl Who Stole Everything
$21.95A stolen house on a Polish square. A pop bottle on Vancouver’s east side. Nadia Baltzan knows a few things about theft. The Girl Who Stole Everything is a fresh and telling portrait of the relationship between prewar Polish shtetl life and Jewish lives today. In Poland, a house stands empty on a village square seventy-five years after its owners were killed. In Vancouver, the aftermath of a murder overturns the life of the victim’s niece. In these old and new worlds a mystery lurks, and Norman Ravvin lovingly recovers the past of both.
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The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly
$18.95A visionary young-adult illustrated novel about Eggs, a homeless girl who knows how to fly.
In a rusted unnamed city full of five-dollar hotels and flea markets, a young homeless girl named Eggs is trying to make her way in the world. She’s shy and bold at the same time, and wary of strangers, but she is convinced beyond all reason that she can fly.
And fly she does, from rooftop to rooftop, from chimneys to phone wires; she scurries up the sides of buildings and sneaks into secret lairs. Eggs is a loner, but she makes two friends: Grack, who sells 100 different kinds of hot dogs from his bicycle cart, and Splendid Wren, a punk rocker whose open window Eggs came crashing through one night. Both Grack and Splendid Wren try their best to protect her, but Eggs meets her match when on a cold night she swoops onto a rooftop and steals a warm jacket belonging to Robin, a neighbourhood baddie with anger management issues. Can Eggs elude his wrathful revenge?
Beguiling and otherworldly, The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly is a fevered dream about a young girlâs flights of fancy in order to survive, and to thrive.
Ages 14 and up.
Full-colour throughout.
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The Girls Who Saw Everything
$21.95The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is not content simply to read and discuss books. Their process is a little more involved. They once kidnapped Irving Layton and took him for an excursion up a mountain. They attempted to recreate a scene of a nun swinging from a bridge-builder’s broken arm in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. But when they begin to re-enact the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the early days of the Iraq War, the book begins to enact them instead, sending the Cabalists across the globe and driving the narrators out of their own tale.
Cross-dressing Aline becomes obsessed with the Baghdad Blogger, Anna with dabbling in prostitution, Missy with the ticking of her biological clock, Romy with Emmy, and the striped (yes, striped!) Emmy with the maker of the fitzbot, an ambulatory artificial-intelligence experiment. In the centre of it all are Runner Coghill and her little brother Neil, who are still mourning their sister and who brought to the group the ten priceless cuneiform Gilgamesh stones.
Underlying it all is the tale of telling the tale, the convolutedness and self-consciousness of our delighted narrators, Jennifer and Danielle, as they reconstruct the tangled story – with more than their fair share of asides – to bring us a novel that is cryptographically charming and eruditely engrossing.
The Girls Who Saw Everything presents a bizarre book club like no other, and a story so delightfully allusive to literature that it may very well become a book club favourite itself – though only among the slightly strange.
‘A sort of Tristam Shandy for the twenty-first century, Sean Dixon’s first novel is an intellectual, sexual, logorrheic, bibliophilic, cryptological, political and archeological rant of the first order. It’ll change your idea of what “written in stone” means, and it’ll blow your mind too.’ – Michael Redhill (Consolation, Martin Sloane)
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The Girls with Stone Faces
$20.00A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists–and most importantly their work–to appear in Canada in many years.
Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
“… Like the sculpted female figures she describes as ‘tacking their bodies against the history of storm,’ Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love.” –Anita Lahey
“… A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning.” –Stephanie Bolster
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The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum
$17.95A story of the ill-fated romance between a wandering musician-social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter, whose dreams are reawakened by their passion. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum is a play in which the all-consuming brightness of dreams and memory are overshadowed by absentee greed, callousness and exploitation. It is a tragedy that is hard as nails and completely unsentimental, yet nonetheless full of love and humour.
Cast of two women and three men.
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The Glass Character
$19.95In the heady days of the 1920s Jazz Age, people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks, and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day, with one very significant exception. Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd – the silent era’s most influential comedian.
For sixteen year-old Jane he was a living god, and though Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore, Jane knew no one could adore him more than she did, and no one would be willing to sacrifice more to be part of his life. But as guileless as Jane may seem, her unaffected vision reveals much about the politics of the major studios, the power plays of the directors, producers, and actors. Her story also reveals much about the human heart and our desire to love against impossible odds.
“Margaret Gunning’s fascination with Harold Lloyd and the fabled silent era of Hollywood is compelling and full of surprises . . . Her writing is stunning, surprising, deeply insightful, and well worth the respect of readers and writers.” – David West, author, Franklin and McClintock, Caedmon’s Hymn, The Tragic Voyage of HMCS Valleyfield
“Having known the man and made a couple of films about him, I came to admire Harold Lloyd more and more. If you want to convert someone to silent films, just show them one, of his features. I’m sure he’d have been fascinated by this book.” – Kevin Brownlow, author, The Search for Charlie Chaplin, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era
“Margaret Gunning writes with uncanny grace and unflinching clarity about what it is to be a young girl forgotten by the world . . . Her expressive turns can spur shivers of pleasure.” – Montreal Gazette -
The Glass Lodge
$34.99John Brady McDonald, MBSFA, a Nêhiyawak-Métis multidisciplinary artist and writer from Treaty Six Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, is an award-winning author of multiple books who has presented at literary festivals around the world. Before all this, however, he was a young, urban Indigenous youth, struggling with addictions, the streets, and the pain and turmoil of intergenerational trauma as a residential school survivor and the child of residential school survivors.
These raw, lyrical poems are a glimpse of the birth of a poet, recklessly using language and words with abandon and without restraint. It is the poetry of an individual experimenting with the language, mixing the influences of Shakespeare and Jim Morrison with the teenage-Goth writing style of youth-the base metals from which a lifetime of words was forged.
Originally published by Kegedonce Press in 2004, The Glass Lodge was presented across Canada and the United States at esteemed festivals. Chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program, it was also nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year in 2005.
Now, here is that seminal work in a brand-new edition, re-edited and restored, illustrated with images of many of the original, handwritten poems, and with author’s notes providing frank, fascinating insight into what gave rise to each of these verses: the outpouring of language that marked the birth of a remarkable writer.
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The Glassblowers
$17.95George Sipos hears the frog song at two in the morning and wonders if it is passion that drives it or the loneliness of spring. In another poem, the wet leaves of fall are described in language that cuts two ways: “I work the rake, / you the wheelbarrow. when we get tired we will change.”
With quiet humour, he writes of nature, the land, and the tasks of an ordinary day. Alive with sublety, The Glassblowers quietly turns images and metaphors the way we might turn a small stone between our thumb and fingers to see its facets and colours.
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The Glorious Mysteries
$18.95The Glorious Mysteries
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The Goaltenders’ Union
$19.95In hockey, goalies have always been a contradiction — solitary men in a team game, the last line of defence and the stalwarts expected to save the day after any and every miscue and collapse from his teammates. It’s no wonder that anyone who played the position has had his sanity questioned; yet some of the biggest innovations in the game have come from its puckstoppers. In The Goaltenders’ Union, Greg Oliver and Richard Kamchen talk to more than 60 keepers of yesterday and today, finding common threads to their stories, and in dozens of interviews about them with other coaches and players. From Gilles “Gratoony the Loony” Gratton, who refused to play because the moon was out of alignment with Jupiter, to Jonathan Quick, the athletically gifted master keeper of today’s game, the book is an entertaining and enlightening peek behind the mask.
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The Goat in The Tree
$20.00The Goat in The Tree
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The Goddess of Fireflies
$19.95The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries mess – a PCP variant – for the first time, her budding rebellion begins to spiral out of control.
Universally acclaimed as the modern-day coming-of-age story for a generation of Québécois youth growing up in the 1990s, Géneviève Pettersen’s award-winning debut novel both shocked and titillated readers in its original French, who quickly ordained it a contemporary classic and a runaway bestseller.
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, the hotly tipped Québécois director behind Inch-Allah (2012), is currently adapting the story to film. Now Esplanade Books is honored to present The Goddess of Fireflies to English readers for the first time in a powerful translation from award-winning novelist Neil Smith, author of Boo and Bang Crunch.
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The Gods of East Wawanosh
$18.95Winner of the 27th Annual Hamilton Literary Awards for Poetry
Marilyn Gear Pilling has written, “For me, to pay close attention to life, both my own and the lives of those around me – to witness and document it, find the larger meaning in it, communicate it to others – is to honour it, to make the most of this little blink of time in which we are here. ” In her sixth poetry collection, The gods of East Wawanosh, Pilling continues this work of loving witness. The long title sequence documents scenes in the life of a Huron County family still in thrall to the ancestral farm — a father and brother who worked in the city but gave a lifetime of weekends to upkeep the land that “tugged at an unseen part of them.”. Pilling memorializes a way of life that was on its way out: the end-of-summer community picnic, pies baked at six in the morning in wood ovens, mothers and daughters walking in “warm golden water” on the hard-packed river bottom, men and boys arriving after a hot day’s threshing; the continuity of generations, family hopes, conflicts and tragedies lived out in a setting that “both shattered and held together” their world. In the book’s second half, Pilling assumes the role of observer and listener, recording voices of others whose paths have crossed hers – neighbours, new immigrants, people encountered while travelling – as they relate stories of danger and escape, of extremity, of personal circumstance and cultural obligation. Clear-eyed, curious, compassionate, she meditates on our mortality and the light in which it casts both our longing for the ideal and our embrace of the real.