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Showing 7377–7392 of 9248 results
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The Hayflick Limit
$16.95Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.
The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney’s second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.
‘The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The HayflickLimit to the hoop.’ – David McGimpsey
‘Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight … Call it science fiction for the melancholic.’
– Eye Weekly
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The Head
$21.95“Intelligent, spooky, original, and fall-down funny, The Head runs in dark layers from page one.” – Jason Emde, author of Little Bit Die
A surreal and penetrating tale of academia, work life, and surviving trauma.
On the morning of her thirtieth birthday, Dr. Trish Russo, a math professor at Cascadia University, discovers a disembodied but living infant head on her dresser. Attached to nothing, somehow it still manages to wail and produce tears. Unsure what else to do, she takes it with her to work, if only to keep her neighbours from complaining about the head’s terrible cries.
At the university, her colleagues are mortified, not of the head itself, but that Trish has brought it into the office with her. She is soon put on leave and hopes that visiting her parents might provide some solace and advice on what she should do with the head. But no matter where she turns, Trish finds no help and is instead vilified for not knowing what to do with this impossible thing that has happened to her.
The Head is a bizarre journey through trauma, bad relationships, and toxic workplace culture.
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The Headless Man
$18.00The book-length prose poem The Headless Man takes up Georges Bataille’s subversive image of the acéphale and turns him into an outsider “everyman” to explore the paradoxes of identity, the body, and desire. This oddly fractured tale centres the monster, both human and inhuman, recognizable yet strange, in a labyrinth of experience. The Headless Man awakens in a place that, although based on our own world, is unfamiliar to him. Moving through this strange landscape, he must make sense of it through his actions, striving to determine whether there is a place for him in a world not made in his image, or whether he must imagine something different in order to be. Having no head, he cannot speak, see, or hear in the usual ways, so he must learn to do these things using other parts of his body-which leads him to a fuller sense of himself. In this gothic, picaresque narrative, laced with horror and humour, Montreal surrealist Peter Dubé addresses his concern with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries, exploring questions about insider and outsider, what constitutes the “normal,” and what is relegated to the realm of the “monstrous.”
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The Headmasters
$26.99Winner, Arlene Barlin Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2025 Canadian Childrens Book Centre Book Awards>/p>
How do you learn from the past if there isn’t one?
Sixty years ago, something awful happened. Something that killed everyone except the people at Blue Ring. Something that caused the Headmasters to appear. But Maple doesn’t know what it was. Because talking about the past is forbidden.
Everyone at Blue Ring has a Headmaster. They sink their sinewy coils into your skull and control you, using your body for backbreaking toil and your mind to communicate with each other. When someone dies, their Headmaster transfers to someone new. But so do the dead person’s memories, and if one of those memories surfaces in the new host’s mind, their brain breaks. That’s why talking about the past is forbidden.
Maple hates this world where the past can’t exist and the future promises only more suffering. And she hates the Headmasters for making it that way. But she doesn’t know how to fight them – until memories start to surface in her mind from someone who long ago came close to defeating the Headmasters.
But whose memories are they? Why aren’t they harming her? And how can she use them to defeat the Headmasters? Maple has to find the answers herself, unable to tell anyone what she’s experiencing or planning—not even Thorn, the young man she’s falling in love with. Thorn, who has some forbidden secrets of his own . . .
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The Healing Power of Singing
$24.95Vocal health tips, stories from the tour bus, and action items to improve your voice and boost your self-confidence from an award-winning musician and life coach
Performing with David Bowie, surviving the murky depths of the music business, enduring a painful divorce, and making the first music video in outer space, award-winning recording artist Emm Gryner has navigated through life’s highs and lows using a secret compass: singing.
Her voice, and her desire to express herself in music, has been a constant: from the early days of playing in bands while growing up in a small town, to playing arena rock shows and stadiums. Across these years and on many travels, she’s discovered the human voice to be an unlikely guide, with the power to elevate and move people closer to authentic living. This book is about that discovery: part study in the art of singing, part guide to finding one’s voice, and part memoir. This book is a must-have for anyone who knows they should be singing.
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The Healthy Barmaid
$15.00Located at the heart of London’s teaching hospitals, The Red Lion pub is the regular haunt of the area’s most distinguished medical professors. For years, they have been stopping in for a pint, and to talk over the day’s medical issues with Ida, the pub’s remarkably vibrant and energetic proprietor. In The Healthy Barmaid, we join them in their nightly talks, and learn about such vital medical issues as the controversial role of cholesterol in cardiovascular disease, the importance of hormone therapy for both sexes, sporting injuries that should never happen, vitamin therapy, the benefits of moderate drinking, why some people are destined for a medical hell, and many other topics.
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The Heart Accepts it all
$22.00Decades after his death, John Glassco (1909-1981) remains Canada’s most enigmatic literary figure. The Heart Accepts It All: SelectedLetters of John Glassco draws back the curtain on this self-described ‘great practitioner of deceit.’ We see the delight he took in revealing his many literary hoaxes to friends, and the scorn he had for literary fashion. The letters reflect his convictions about literature, other writers and his own talent, while documenting struggles with publishers, pirates and censors.
Born into one of Montreal’s wealthiest families, Glassco turned his back on privilege for a life in letters. At age eighteen, having been published in Paris, his voice suddenly went silent. His unexpected return to the literary scene in 1957 coincided with the great flowering of Canadian literature. In the years that followed, he produced a unique body of work that encompasses poetry, memoir, translation, and several bestselling books of pornography.
Collected here are the few surviving letters from his youthful adventures in France and three previously unpublished poems. Amongst his correspondents were Maurice Girodias, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ralph Gustafson, Leon Edel and Margaret Atwood.
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The Heart Is Improvisational
$25.00Poets attribute an array of roles and capacities to the involuntary muscle and catalyst of our storied lives. The heart becomes a repository of erotic and familial love and a sanctuary for memory. In this collection, poets explore the flux of the heart’s responses and instigations: the heart’s tender overtures, its joyous pulse, its mating call for the other, its changeable temperament, its final tick in freeze-frame. Among the poets featured: Kenneth Sherman, Lorna Crozier, Marilyn Bowering, Roo Borson, Patrick Lane, Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Eugénio de Andrade, John Barton, Robyn Sarah, and Mary di Michele.
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The Heart Laid Bare
$19.95Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print.
This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay’s sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion.
Jean-Marc has fallen in love. The object of his affection is Mathieu, a young actor working as a salesman at Eaton’s while waiting for his big break. As a dowry to their new relationship, Mathieu brings Sébastien, his son. Jean-Marc, a fusty academic, is not sure about being able to make room in his life for this four-year-old boy.
While daring, for some even shocking when it first appeared in the 1980s, this story has, like Tremblay’s entire ouevre, stood the test of time and revealed itself to be a work of both enduring and prophetic vision
The Heart Laid Bare marks a significant departure for Michel Tremblay, because it is the first of his mature novels which is not set in the semi-autobiographical milieu of his childhood. Yet this thoroughly contemporary love story is told with all the warmth and empathy that is so characteristic of all of his other work.
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The Heart Specialist
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The Heathens and the Dragon
$16.95A middle-grade medieval adventure starring two orphans, a troubadour with dancing feet, and an irascible pet chicken by an award-winning YA writer.
From award-winning author Kate A. Boorman comes her first middle grade historical novel, set in France in the Middle Ages at a time of great religious upheaval. The Heathens and the Dragon: A 13th-Century Adventure stars twelve-year-old Elodie, a resourceful guardian to her little brother Bertran. Together they perform for their very survival.
Elodie works hard to keep a clean house for her master, take care of her little brother, and guard the secret pagan beliefs she was taught by the mother they recently lost. But the world around her is growing suspicious of paganism and violent toward non-Christians. When Crusaders arrive to arrest her kindly master, a Cathar, for heresy, he flees, and the orphans Elodie and Bertran try to follow his trail.
Armed only with meagre supplies and a few good stories, they head into the forest, where they soon become lost. Luckily, they join forces with Joie, who has mysteriously left court life and appears eager to help them. To earn money and food, the trio improvises a spectacle involving storytelling, music, and a chicken-assisted magic trick. The crowd’s applause almost allows Elodie to forget that her dragon tale dishonours an origin story sacred to her mother.
When Joie’s own secrets emerge, Elodie is faced with a new dilemma. With Crusaders hovering and a voracious audience clamouring, Elodie realizes that, to save herself and Bertran, she?ll need to decide who to trust&mdashand who to betray.
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The Hedge
$22.95The Hedge, set in early New England, is the story of an intelligent young governor’s wife who is repressed by the severe attitudes of the Puritans, to the point where she withdraws from society, and is considered to have lost her mind. Anne Yale Hopkins comes to Hartford, Connecticut in 1638, delighted to have escaped the household of her stepfather Theophilus Eaton, a rigorous Puritan, by marrying Edward, who becomes governor of Hartford. She is a voracious reader, and has written several books. She can hardly wait to make a fresh start in a new land. Her first enthusiastic impressions of the community gradually change as she comes up against the rigidity and judgmentalism of some of the Puritans. Her strong reactions to their behaviour and ideas cause the community to think she is growing “distracted.” A number of events contribute to her decline: the unwarranted punishment of one of her Native friends, her mother’s trial for heresy, the execution of King Charles, and the loss of two her three confidantes: Nellie, her maid,and David, her brother, who returns to England. She corresponds cautiously with her beloved cousin Jane in London, but Jane’s letters arrive infrequently. With the death of one good Hartford friend, and the departure of the other, she withdraws even more. Edward’s friends advise taking away her books and paper, because they say her brain is overloaded, and that is why she is behaving so oddly. She is devastated, hides her journal and keeps writing. Throughout the story, certain incidents bring up flashes of lost memory. Finally, during her pregnancy, a crucial buried memory is uncovered, and the process of facing a new reality begins.
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The Hell of It All
$17.95“A stylish noir.” — The Globe and Mail on The Drop Zone
Retired detective T.J. Peterson is working the table scraps that his former partner, Danny Little, sometimes throws his way. One of them has Peterson hearing from a snitch about a body buried 30 years ago, the same time a drug kingpin went MIA. Peterson is also ducking an ex-con with a grudge, a hitman who likes playing jack-in-the-box with a 12 gauge. Then a former lover re-enters Peterson’s life and begs him to find her daughter, an addict who knows too much about the local drug trade for her own safety. The search for the girl and the truth about the 30-year-old corpse takes Peterson down into the hell of it all, deep into the underworld of crack houses, contract killing, money laundering, and crooked professionals doubling down on their investments of black money.
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The Hellmouths of Bewdley
$14.95In The Hellmouths of Bewdley there are always some murdered men and some gay men. A baby man, a sexy man, and a drunk man. An insane doctor. A wonderful doctor. Twenty guys named Jesus. Men who wonder about women and women who don’t care. A lot of dogs: some of them supernatural. More drunk and dead men. A number of cranes, no herons. A real ninja turtle. A jail, a detox, a fire, and a suicide or two. An agoraphobic with crabs, a bunny messiah, women in ages, some children, and drugs and fried chicken. A very small town. Like sixteen medieval B-movies, The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario’s cottage country. Tony Burgess’s first book is a halfway house for literary delinquents; electro-shock therapy for a storyteller who is grateful for the looters’ paradise of post-modern distraction. Burgess believes there is a shape that fact and fiction both seek, that narratives occur in defiance of the things they harbour. In The Hellmouths of Bewdley nightmares are our babysitters: they tell bedtime stories to normal, happy children while their parents destroy their lives or pass out, dead to the world, in front of the TV.
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The Herb Garden
$20.00Bartholomew the Englishman was a 13th century Franciscan friar and scholar whose only surviving work, De proprietatibus rerum (The Properties of Things), was intended as an encyclopaedia of the world. The Herb Garden is an imaginary representation of what his herbarium might have looked like. The dialect of the collection is a mix of middle and modern English, a verbal florilegium meant to explore the exuberant richness of the English language that much of contemporary poetry has scanted or forgotten. The collection is also conceived as a kind of “sapiential book,” a form of counsel literature or life manual with an emphasis on everyday practice and the poet’s craft.
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The Heretic
$16.95The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”
Not exactly a new idea, it works well as the basis of a stand-up act, but it relies on the assumption that humanity was made not only in God’s physical image, but that we are all also cookie-cutter replicas of God’s psychological profile. That’s where Murphy thought the act needed to say a lot more about his own personal encounters with religion.
The challenge was to keep the laughs going through the widening gulf that inevitably opens up between the persona of God and the acts of creation in this stock-in-trade formula for comic monologues, and that’s where Murphy eventually stumbled on his alter ego: Jesus Murphy. Now a dialogue of voices performed by a single actor, the play opens up a discourse, where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; secularists confront theists; in the context of the most fundamental and naïve of theological questions thrown out to a live audience of any and all faiths—in a contemporary world fractured by an increasing proliferation of fundamentalisms—including people who have never been exposed to religion.
Laughter is a form of recognition, an affirmation, and when a couple of hundred people all laugh together, all say “yes, that’s true” together, it’s a powerful feeling—a force of nature, which is exactly what the author intended. This story of a Roman Catholic man tormented by the religious anxieties of his youth, who resolves to become Jesus Murphy, an evangelical atheist, makes us all believers—in ourselves.
Cast of 1 man.