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Showing 7377–7392 of 9492 results
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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.
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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”.