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Showing 7441–7456 of 9248 results
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The Insatiable Maw
$19.95In this story of eco-resistance based on actual events in the heart of Canada’s Nickel Range, Jake McCool, the injured hardrock miner, returns to work for the International Nickel Company (INCO) but now at its nearby Copper Cliff smelter complex. In no time, Jake finds himself embroiled in a vicious fight over health and safety and, more specifically, over the extreme levels of sulphur dioxide that poison the air in the smelter but also in the entire surrounding area. The fight takes on new dimensions as freelance reporter Foley Gilpin sparks interest at Canada’s national daily Globe & Mail and as local parliamentarian Harry Wardell smells the collusion between INCO and the highest levels of Ministry of Natural Resources at Queen’s Park in Toronto. -
The Inspection House
$13.95In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham’s design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.
Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors’ own mobile devices – providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.
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The Interloper
$14.95The astonishing stories in The Interloper capture the moment when ambivalence floods the new immigrant’s consciousness. Regret and nostalgia take turns overwhelming and being overwhelmed by rosy expectations, and only drastic measures stave off paralysis and ruin.
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The Invisibility Exhibit
$16.95These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the “Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori Culbert, Lindsay Kines and Kim Bolan’s 2001 “Missing Women” series in the Vancouver Sun. This media coverage, combined with the efforts of activists in political and cultural sectors, finally resulted in increased official investigative efforts, which have so far led to the arrest of Robert Pickton, on whose property the remains of twenty-seven of the sixty-eight listed women were found. In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in what had become one the highest-profile criminal cases to take place in B.C.’s history; yet this is not the focus of this book.
As the title suggests, the concern of this project is an investigation of the troubled relationship between this specific marginalized neighbourhood, its “invisible” populations both past and present, and the wealthy, healthy city that surrounds it. These poems interrogate the comfortable distance from which the public consumes the sensationalist news story by turning their focus toward the normative audience, the equally invisible public. In the speaker’s examination of this subject, assumptions and delineations of community, identity and ultimately citizenship are called into question. Projects such as Lincoln Clarkes’ controversial Heroines photographic series and subsequent book (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2002), news stories and even the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games circulate intertextually in this manuscript, while Pickton’s trial is intentionally absent.
Irritated by complacency, troubled by determinate narrative and the relationship between struggle and the artistic representation of struggle, Murakami is a poet bewildered by her city’s indifference to the neglect of its inhabitants.
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The Invisible World Is In Decline
$19.95?Rooted in the Modernist tradition of writers like William Carlos Williams and indebted to Canadians like bpNichol, The Invisible World Is In Decline is a philosophical, erotic, and highly personal prose poem. At the same time, it takes on the Postmodern challenges of engaging concerns that extend beyond the autobiographical. Whiteman investigates spiritual crisis, love, and the struggle through language to make sense of what it is to be human in a world where the human seems to be all that is available.
The Invisible World Is In Decline pays homage to earlier writers of both the long poem and the impersonal love lyric: Coleridge, Lautréamont, Spicer, and Zukofsky. Responsive to the everyday, the particular, and to the body, Whiteman explores the grand ways in which poetry has come to shape language and experience in the last century. The prose poem form allows for images and music to sometimes predominate over shape and sense in what poet Robert Creeley once called “a wild exultation.” In the end, it moves towards a human paradise where love, thought, and language are in perfect attunement, and where poetry can say so.
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The Invisible World Is in Decline Book IX
$21.95The stunning conclusion to a 40-year poetic projectIn the tradition of earlier modernist long poems like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and bp Nichol’s The Martyrology, The Invisible World Is in Decline: Book IX is full of startling poetic music and imagery while addressing concerns to which every reader will respond: the life of the heart as well as life during COVID-19, love as well as death, philosophy as well as emotion. The poems are deeply responsive to what an epigraph from Virgil calls “vows and prayers,” i.e., those things that we desire and promise. Like previous books of Whiteman’s long poem, Book IX is largely in the form of the prose poem. But the book also contains a moving series of translations in traditional form of texts taken from songs by composers like Schubert and Beethoven, songs that are by turns tragic, meditative, lyrical, and touching. The concluding section focuses on an obsession that poets have had for 2,500 years: inspiration, in the form of the nine Muses. At the heart of this book is what Whiteman calls “the bright articulate world,” something visionary but accessible to every thoughtful reader.
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The Invisibles
$21.95During the tumultuous and often violent election riots of 1861, members of the Royal Newfoundland Companies opened fire on a crowd of rioters, killing three and wounding several others. In the sobering aftermath, a compromise evolved that would shape Newfoundland politics and society into the twentieth century.
In The Invisibles, James E. Candow provides the fascinating backstory of the Royal Newfoundland Companies while enhancing our understanding of the role they played in Newfoundland history and the lives of our communities. This is an important, often overlooked, chapter in the British Military’s involvement in the colony at a time when Newfoundlanders fervently sought to become masters of their own fate—expertly told in Candow’s engaging and vivid prose.
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The Inward Journey
$19.95Sylvia Bolfe sits in her nursing home, criticizes the food and the staff—all but her trusted confidant and registered nurse, Eleanor—and with humour and feistiness recounts her turbulent life. From an upper-class Irish family, Sylvia marries a young medical student beneath her station and leaves Ireland for Newfoundland. When her husband unexpectedly dies, she is left with the children to make her own way. As in Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Evans spins a spirited, funny, no-nonsense narrative in the voice of an unforgettable narrator.
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The Iron Sheik
$28.95In the pantheon of legendary WWE antagonists, perhaps none was as reviled as the Iron Sheik. Loathed for his anti-American tirades, the former AAU champion and bodyguard for the Shah of Iran braved riots, death threats, and legal battles during his tumultuous career. Now, the man whose diatribes have gained him a newfound mainstream notoriety finally delivers his life story. The Sheik shoots straight on the events that shaped his life on both sides of the curtain, with the type of brutal honesty that will make anyone “humble.” Get the former WWE Champion’s take on all the controversy. Learn about the crippling personal demons and unspeakable family tragedy he has endured. Hear him reflect on the notorious and amusing rants he’s directed at Hulk Hogan, the late Randy Savage, and several others.
With interviews and insights from other WWE personalities, readers are taken on a journey from the Iron Sheik’s teen years as a competitor for his native Iran to his time as an assistant coach for the United States Olympic team to the era when the Iranian hostage crisis transformed him into arguably the most vilified figure in sports-entertainment to his current status as a YouTube and Twitter sensation. This book is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended — but those who want an irreverent, uncensored edge to their reading material will love this long-awaited memoir.
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The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard
$16.95The compelling plot of Nancy Bauer’s fifth novel, The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, winds through Cornwall, Quebec City, and the Eastern Townships, New England, and the Fredericton area of New Brunswick. Full of vivid description and eccentric characters, the story brings to life the strange relationships between Arlene, her daughter Alice, and her “found” daughter Andrea, on one side, and their benefactor, James, and the mysterious Mr. Gerard, on the other. The startling dénouement at last fits all the mysterious pieces together.
At another level, The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard integrates the delicate complexity of Tao philosophy with matriarchal mythology, the disorientation of the picaresque, the character-substitution games of classical comedy, and the heightened detail of magic realism. Bauer’s post-modern blend leads the reader through a story full of intrigue into the world of the spirit.
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The Island
$12.95An island off the coast of another island is home to a small community; life is rich with joy and challenges, and the people who live there love their island home. One day they learn that the government will move them off the island, to new homes with modern conveniences like electricity. Life will be simpler, but will it be better?
In gentle and spare prose, and with her unique folk-art illustrations, Lori Doody tells the story of resettlement in Newfoundland?it is a deeply personal tale, but it is also the story of anyone who must leave a loved home to start anew and who carries their old home still in their heart.
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The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief
$25.00Samson Grief, a reclusive painter in PEI struggling with a creative block, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to bethe new Promised Land and also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amidst increasingly bizarre obstacles.
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The Island of Books
$19.95A rich portrait of the beauty of words – painted by a 15th-century illiterate scribe.
A 15th-century portrait painter, grieving the sudden death of his lover, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until a monk assigns him the task of copying a manuscript – though he is illiterate. His work slowly heals him and continues the tradition that had, centuries earlier, grown the monastery’s library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press.
‘Dominique Fortier has a gift for making insightful connections between seemingly distant ideas, creating patterns that, at the end of the novel, leave you with the impression that everything is connected, both logically and supernaturally.
Set in an improbable fortress in the middle of the sea, her fourth novel explores the to and fro of love and creation. With writing that is both graceful and honed, The Island of Books gives love, maternity and particularly books the mystery that is their due.’—Jean-Marc ValleÌ�*e
‘Throughout these emotional rescues in the high seas, Dominique Fortier’s writing is carried on a rich, beautiful and evocative language. The recurrent use of words from old French adds a patina that is appropriate for this journey filled with touching, illuminating moments … Dominique Fortier plunges into the depths of human paradox and emerges with a love of books that she shares with grace and generosity.’
– La Presse (translated from the French)
‘Dominique Fortier’s writing is at once sensitive and interesting, moving and spare. It reveals a man blinded by pain who tells us his story of love, his distress and the light of the smile of a young woman. A book written in quiet emotionthat makes for good reading as the wind makes the autumn leaves rustle.’
– Au fil des pages (translated from the French)
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The Jane Loop
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The Jill Kelly Poems
$16.95Adult-film diva Jill Kelly, in all her splendid forms (performer, producer, writer, and director), serves as the ultimate 21st century icon in Alessandro Porco’s The Jill Kelly Poems.
This debut collection presents a poetry of surfaces that, at once, cherishes its Bacchus-like existence and comes to terms with its very impossibility through intelligent, irreverent, and formally sophisticated poems: an ode to Christina Aguilera; a love-sonnet for Rambo; and an epitaph in memory of Sharon Tate.
Porco’s climactic sequence dramatizes, in gonzo fashion, the union of language and forms of poetry — a consummation that erupts from the page, leaving readers feeling a little bit dirrty (that’s right, with two r’s) but, undeniably, wanting more. Ample double entendres and sexual punning; lewd bar-room balladeering; comic revisionist histories that expound, for example, on the origins of the thong; libidinal utopias filled with D-cup superheroes and militant villains — it’s all in the name of good ol’ fashioned silicone fun!
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The Jokes
$18.00We sit, hunched over the words that appear on our smartphone screens, altogether unaware of the story of our lives that is going on around us, even as we focus on the minutiae of our social media “friends’” daily activities. These are the stories that draw our undivided attention, and these are the types of deftly observed, wholly engrossing narratives that make up Stephen Thomas’s debut flash-fiction collection, The Jokes.
Presented in the form of a most common present-tense–as a series of moments in a social-media-like ‘feed’–this collection of very short stories riffs on the form of ‘the joke,’ but as this might be understood by the best culture-critical comedians of our time: Andy Kaufman, Stephen Wright, Norm McDonald, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor. And much like those stand-up artists who sanctified the joke-form, these stories deal with sometimes-intense subjects, yet with a kind of SSRI-like placidity that allows readers to cling to each word as the narratives unfold.
In drawing comparisons to Lydia Davis’s creatively detached but inventively curious writing, Thomas’s The Jokes is a book for thinkers; sad and funny, hopeful and determined, nostalgic and cerebral, these vignettes offer a very personal, yet amazingly relatable entry-point into big ideas that trouble our times–religion, sexuality, life and death, and ways of being in the world–all while coloured by touches of weird otherworldliness that living in someone else’s social-media feed can bring.
Fans of metafiction and philosophy, ‘alt lit,’ artist and academics (particularly students of art history and theory), readers interested in experimental and somewhat cerebral fiction in the vein of Ben Marcus, Lily Hoang, or Maggie Nelson, as well as audiences interested in the uses and abuses of Internet and social media, will connect with Thomas’s particular take on worlds within worlds.