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Showing 7409–7424 of 9248 results
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The House on 14th Avenue
$14.95The House on 14th Avenue is about paired and shared lives, featuring two people whose connection sometimes seemed forced and uneven. That of master and slave. That of trembling and acceptance. Some of the poems detail each individually, a scraping together of momentary identities; others bring them together as they embark on journeys both physical and psychic. Journeys into the past through an underworld of ancestral ghosts and paths so well-trodden there is no possibility of creating new ones. Journeys in the present through detailed lists of the physical objects around them (with the mythic bleeding through on occasion leaving only stains behind). And journeys into a future where the realization of endings looms and where the two are left once more to cope each in his or her own way with that knowledge. In the midst of it all lurks the manipulator of words, phrases, images – the meta-text that tries so desperately to make sense of it all, that tries to bring order into what seems like simply a chaotic movement forward, and that wishes for…prays for…sacrifices for a dream state where a culmination of sorts exists, if only in the mind of the creator. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether the “two peasants” will be allowed to escape the gravitational pull that has weighed them down…to float away from the harsh realities that have defined them into the realm of words and infinite possibility.
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The House on Selkirk Avenue
$20.00It is autumn, 1997 and Kate Thuringer is back in her hometown to help her college-age daughter settle into her new life. A professional photographer, Kate has lived in Western Canada for nearly three decades. Before her marriage, however, she survived a turbulent year in which Québécois terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered an innocent politician. The middle-aged Kate is obsessed with the past, particularly with the memory of a poor francophone student with whom she had been involved during the historic October Crisis. Back in Montreal, she is plunged into a mid-life crisis, struggling to reconcile her romantic past and her melancholy present. The House on Selkirk Avenue is a complex novel about obsessive love, family bonds, aging, and the impact of political events on innocent people’s lives.
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The House that Hijack Built
$19.95The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated—hijacked and transported—to unknown destinations in the act of its transmission. In her fifth collection of poems / collages, Karasick explores the intersection between das Wahre (the true) and die Wahrheit (the truth), as a language at war with itself re-presents a “real world” reworded between narrations of “the real”—inscribed in ruptures, betrayals and unfulfilled promises—and speaks to a ‘real world’ that wreaks havoc with the very truth it seeks to inhabit.
Included in this collection is a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the first chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah. Known as The Book of Creation or The Book of the Letters, it is the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabalistic texts, dating back to 100 BCE. Its focus is on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet—how they were formed, how they inter-relate, how they make meaning—the text itself inscribed through slippage, elision, rupture and undecideability, foregrounding language as a continuum of letters, names, mathematical equations and gates of meaning. By a technique of slight displacement, slipping one word under another, Karasick mimics Nietzsche’s Geschichte Eines Irrtums History of an Error, announcing the narration of a fabrication: how the “true world” finally becomes a fable.
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The House That Hugh Laurie Built
$19.95At the centre of the critically acclaimed Fox drama House, British actor Hugh Laurie has become the focus of fans across North America, Britain, and Australia. Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, honoured by the Queen with an Order of the British Empire, and one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive, Laurie has become an icon.
But who is the man behind the cane and acerbic wit?
A musician? A motorcyclist? A comedian?
Laurie is all these things and more. This biography aims to shed light on his childhood struggles to live up to his mother’s high demands and emulate his father’s accomplishments as a doctor and an Olympic gold medalist; his education at the prestigious academies of Eton and Cambridge; his comedic career with Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and Rowan Atkinson; his own personal struggle with depression; and how he came to be the best-loved curmudgeon on television.
Interviews with creator and executive producer David Shore will reveal the Canadian connection to this truly global show and how a Canuck from London, Ontario, made the move to Hollywood stardom.
The House That Hugh Laurie Built will also serve as a magnifying glass, providing episode analysis, cast biographies, selections of Dr. House’s caustic wit, and production bloopers and medical mistakes that only a sleuth like Dr. House could expose.
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The House That Stands
$19.95An impressionistic long poem in twenty-two parts by Stefan Rose about residence life through a reimagining of the 60-history of the Trueman House residence at Mount Allison University. Typeset in Lanston Garamond and printed offset on Rolland Zephyr Antique Laid paper.
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The House Weighs Heavy
$7.50Winner of the 1994 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Award. "This is a book showing tremendous awareness of language and an acute interest in character and situation." Canadian Book Review Annual.
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The House with the Broken Two
$18.00Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a home for unwed mothers, Myrl gave birth in a desolate hospital room and then found herself at the mercy of the closed adoption process that seemed determined to punish her. Myrl was left numb and filled with questions that no one was able to answer. In ‘The House with the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers ‘, Dr. Myrl Coulter reflects on the family politics and social mores that surrounded closed adoption in the 1960s, and examines the changing attitudes that resulted in the current open adoption system and her eventual reunion with her firstborn son. The book is an intimate, honest look at the way personal histories combine with political truths, and Coulter mixes revealing personal details with sharp political observations. ‘The House with the Broken Two’ could be called a personal essay or a feminist apologia, but perhaps most importantly, it is a book about motherhood in its many variations.
“A memoir, an adoption narrative and a grief mosaic, this winner of Simon Fraser University’s 2010 First Book Competition is a beautifully written volume in the genre of creative non-fiction.” -The Winnipeg Free Press
” ‘The House with the Broken Two’ portrays a vivid and unsettling picture of Canadian sexual politics and social policy as it related tothe consequences of extramarital sex. Before World War II the public and private agencies made small attempts to keep single mothers and their babies together, but when the 1950s paradigm of the perfect nuclear family took hold in North America attitudes changed. Girls like me were not young women who needed a helping hand,’ Coulter writes. Instead we were seen as somehow delinquent and definitely unfit as mothers.’” – The Rover
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The House with the Parapet Wall
$24.95Grieving the diminishment and death of his elderly mother, John Terpstra finds solace in a seemingly unusual place: the stories (both historical and fanciful) of the nineteenth-century houses in his Hamilton neighbourhood and of the families which have inhabited them. With a well-honed knack for the circuitous route, Terpstra tackles weighty questions like ‘Why must we die?’ by following his imaginative curiosity into the bricks-and-mortar matters of our daily lives, understanding that the dwellings we construct do more than just shed the weather, but are also physical manifestations of our notions of ‘family’ and ‘home’.
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The Hundefraulein Papers
$14.95Hunde/fräulein: Dog/nanny. For five and a half years (1995-2001) Kathy Mac lived in Sambro Head, NS, looking after anywhere from four to twelve English Setters. The post entailed maintaining the ocean-side doghouse and looking after the many, varied houseguests of the hundemutter – ocean activist Elisabeth Mann Borgese, youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. These poems take their tone from the days and dogs that inspired them – by turns extravagant, intense, celebratory, wistful.
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The Hungry Grass
$18.95This book tells a story that nobody knows because at the time the story happened, nobody cared. The individual lives of the labouring Irish were unrecorded, irrelevant. The Hungry Grass weaves the threads of daily routine, annual cycles, religious faith, fairy belief, communal practice, and political reality to show as clear a picture as possible of the very complex life among Irish tenant families in the nineteenth-century, culminating with An Gorta Mór–The Great Hunger. This volume is one continuous poem that unfolds over the course of fifteen years. It never falters in evoking its theme, or in being focused and concise, with impeccable word choices, and unfailing, echoing rhythm. When employed, the rhyming is subtle and musical. The shape of thought, which is a consistent seven-syllable line, is masterful in its execution of sound and sense. This is poetry that will show anyone who doubts it the continuing and necessary love of this craft, this art.
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The Hunt on the Lagoon
$17.95Sheldon Zitner summed up his career in a seven-word poem: “Here lies, as usual, a Jew d’esprit.” The genial wit of “Trial Epithet” informs the whole of this deeply moving collection by a poet and scholar whom A.F. Moritz describes as “a man of the world in the best sense.”
Whether he is celebrating life’s infinite creativity, recognizing the joy imprisoned in a wheelchair-bound man, or affirming art’s mission to outlast atrocity, Zitner unswervingly follows Rilke’s injunction to join “work of the eyes” with “heart-work.” In the collection’s title poem, Zitner states that “we invent the world we love, /and like the painter’s eyes, our own /persuade the hard discrete details /. . . to surrender to a luminous belonging.”
Throughout this wonderful collection, many such revelatory moments are caught and many details rendered with equal luminosity. Writing completely without sentimentality, Zitner nonetheless composed his poems with an underlying tenderness and a sadness always held in check by his characteristic urbanity and his epigrammatic wit.
The Hunt on the Lagoon is Zitner’s final work. These last poems, and all his poems, are things into which he breathed his spirit, and where he can still be met. A poet to the last, The Hunt on the Lagoon is a fitting monument, an inspired book about absence and loss, about the transience of bliss.
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The Hunter and the Wild Girl
$32.95Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction PrizeA feral girl roams the dense forests of nineteenth-century France, stealing food from remote farmyards and avoiding human contact. Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.
On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.
When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself.
In The Hunter and the Wild Girl, award-winning author Pauline Holdstock spins a haunting tale affirming the persistence of life, the power of human connection, and the fundamental urge to be free.
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The Hunter and the Wild Girl
$22.95Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
A National Post Best Book of 2015“The Hunter and the Wild Girl is powerful, almost elemental storytelling, an achievement not only of craft but of raw emotion. It pulses with vitality, building to a stunning, shattering conclusion.” — Robert Weirsema, Vancouver Sun
“A rich, immersive experience. Pauline Holdstock’s is the kind of prose you get lost in.” — National Post
The story begins with the crack of splintered boards and bones as a feral girl crashes out of the hut where she’s been held against her will and into the scrubland of southern France. Townsfolk chase her to the edge of a deep gorge. She leaps and vanishes into legend — and into the territory of Peyre Rouff, a once-renowned hunter who spends his days fending off his own demons in an abandoned château.
Pauline Holdstock sets this absorbing novel in the blurry territory between myth and reality. The girl and the hunter inhabit radically different worlds. The wild girl’s is rooted in the physical, a source of food and danger, Rouff’s in the cerebral, an existence patterned to prevent him from the destruction of despair.
When their two worlds unexpectedly collide, this odd pair of outsiders forms an unlikely bond. The girl’s untamed spirit and volatility shakes the hunter from his solitude. The hunter’s unexpected kindness provides the girl with a sense of connection. But when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence, Rouff is forced to confront both his choices and their consequences.
Wild and unpredictable, lush and sensually evocative, The Hunter and the Wild Girl courses with mythical life blood, resonant, disquieting, and fathoms deep.
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The Hunting Ground
$15.95A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat for birdwatchers, nature tourists and collectors of antiques and local crafts; now primarily dependent on income flows from cottagers and retirees.
Each of these remarkably engaging stories is recounted by different narrators from the village’s diverse genders, social classes and employment and economic circumstances. This is a book of parentheses, which, like the spokes of a wheel or the sweep of the lines on a radar screen, gradually and collectively begin to delineate and define the eerie contemporary landscape of The Hunting Ground. Now devoid of any sense of a cohesive community or shared culture, each of these uncanny fragments of alienated and fragmented civilization and imagination is bracketed on the one hand by the passive and vacuous sentimentality of Reader’s Digest and television, and on the other by the senseless primal fury of killing and destruction. It is a clever and unsettling mockery of the many privately printed “local histories” of small towns, feeding only the yearning nostalgia of the few surviving original inhabitants; the tourist trade vainly promoted by the local town council; and the ethnographic interest of urban professionals researching and catalogueuing endangered species.
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The Hunting of the Snark
$16.95In this illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, master wood engraver George A. Walker provides an uproarious reinterpretation of the classic poem as seen through the convex lens of contemporary American politics.
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The Hush Sisters
$22.95***49TH SHELF UTTERLY FANTASTIC BOOK FOR FALL***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS WINNER, SUSPENSE***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST, PARANORMAL***
Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John’s. With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they’ve inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other’s intentions. As the sisters discover the house’s dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.
In The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins weaves psychological suspense with elements of the fantastic to craft a contemporary urban gothic that will keep readers spellbound until the novel whispers its startling secrets.