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All Books in this Collection
Showing 7505–7520 of 9492 results
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The Garbage Poems
$24.95Featured on CBC Newfoundland Morning with Leigh Anne Power
Poems that repurpose the language of beer cans and fast-food wrappers to explore everything from chronic illness to climate crisis to the joy of wild swimming.
Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing a voice together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.
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The Gathering Tree
$19.95The Gathering Tree is a beautifully illustrated children’s book about HIV/AIDS. Written by award-winning First Nations author Larry Loyie and co-author Constance Brissenden, it is a gentle, positive story of a First Nations family facing HIV. After eleven-year-old Tyler and his younger sister Shay-Lyn learn their favorite cousin Robert has HIV, they discover that knowledge brings understanding and self-awareness. Aspects of physical, spiritual, mental and emotional health are addressed.
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The Genie in the Bottle
$16.95With his signature caustic wit, bestselling author Dr. Joe Schwarcz presents the fun side of science in this dynamic collection
The Genie in the Bottle makes science downright fun. Dr. Joe Schwarcz blends quirky anecdotes about everyday chemistry with engaging tales from the history of science. Get a different twist on licorice and travel to the dark side of the sun. Control stinky feet and bend spoons and minds. Learn about the latest on chocolate research, flax, ginkgo biloba, magnesium, and blueberries. Dr. Joe also solves the mystery of the exploding shrimp and, finally, he lets us in on the secret of the genie in the bottle. As in all his work, Dr. Joe brings humor, showbiz savvy, and magic to this exciting collection.
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The Geography of Arrival: A Memoir
$25.95In The Geography of Arrival, George Sipos revisits the city of London, Ontario, where his family settled after immigrating to Canada from Hungary in 1957. Divided into short chapters, each related to a different local landmark, the book depicts the world through the eyes of a boy getting the hang of North American culture, and of an adolescent finding his way in the larger world.
“A few years ago,” says Sipos, “someone I knew moved to London, Ontario, the place where I had grown up in the late 50s and early 60s. She was totally new to the city and I set out to write her a series of letters describing certain streets and buildings and neighbourhoods as I remembered them, knowing of course that this was bound to be a false guide to anything that might still be there. The wrecker’s ball (or memory, which is much the same thing) had probably assured that whatever I wrote would be more fictitious than not. As it turned out, our correspondence didn’t get very far, but by then the project of writing about certain landmarks was started in my mind. Over the next several years I came back to this unreliable geography and continued to write what ultimately became a nominal guide book. What it’s a guide to is not so clear. The London of the mid twentieth century? Maybe. A particular protagonist’s coming of age? Maybe. An album of snapshots of how a person grows into a mental and aesthetic and even scientific self? Perhaps.”
Moving chronologically, Sipos traces his interior, personal geography across the particular landscape of 1960s London. After his family settles in a downtown apartment, there is the baffling discovery of a plastic hockey-player figurine in the cereal box and the theories he and his father develop to explain it. Sipos shares his fear of opening his eyes underwater at swimming lessons, his first subway ride on a trip to Toronto, and his early love of public speaking, fencing and choral singing. He tries to live-trap a rabbit in the park, recalls the year the fall-out shelter stole the show from the All-Electric Dream Home at the exhibition, and savours the joy of public skating at the outdoor rink on Elliott Street. In one of the book’s most absorbing passages, a teenaged Sipos guides his stage-frightened priest through the first service after the changes to the Mass brought about by the Second Vatican Council.
This is a book that reminds us of the importance of reflection and of the positive impact that the culture and landscape of a place can have on the direction of our lives.
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The Geranium Window
$19.95In the fictional village of Rocky Point, Cape Breton, just after WWII, the Briar family keeps a secret. Locked in his room, Joseph Briar, a child with visible and non-visible disabilities, is hidden from the community. And what Alfie Johns discovers through Joseph’s window will lead him to love and a future framing beauty in photographs. Harkening back to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Beatrice MacNeil reveals the destructive power of shame and the redemptive power of art.
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The Get
$26.95“If you like your crime hard and fast, Kalteis is for you.” — Globe and Mail
A surefire plan that will end his marital and money problems in one swoop … what could go wrong?
Lenny Ovitz has plenty of secrets, and his wife, Paulina, has become a liability. His life would be so much better without her in it.
It’s the mid-’60s in Toronto, and Lenny works for a ruthless gangster whose travel agency is a front for a collections racket in the Kensington Market area. Lenny’s days are spent with his partner, Gabe, terrorizing the locals into paying protection on their shops and their lives. On the side, Lenny and Gabe co-own a tenement block that they bought with dirty money borrowed from shady individuals. Overextended, Lenny plans to pay them back with more borrowed money from other loans and by re-mortgaging his house, without the knowledge of his wife.
Tired of his lies and scheming, Paulina demands a divorce. Lenny is certain she’s going to take him for everything, leaving him unable to pay the debt on the tenement block. And that’s likely to get him pitched off one of his own rooftops. Lenny would rather get than be gotten, so he comes up with a surefire way to end both his marital and money problems — Paulina’s going to have to get whacked.
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The Ghost of Suzuko
$21.95The Sumida River, the Tsukiji fish market, a stuffed bear head. A Montrealer in mourning returns to Tokyo, where he is haunted by the ghost of his dead lover. But when a turbulent new love enters his life will it be enough to put him on sure footing or will he forever be on shaky ground?
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The Ghosts of Spiritwood
$17.99The first English edition of the popular young adult novel Les fantÙmes de Spiritwood originally published in French by …ditions de la nouvelle plume translated by the author
One summer night Ethan and four friends are heading north of Spiritwood Saskatchewan for a weekend of camping to watch the northern lights but their car swerves off the road and ends up in the ditch. The teenagers head back to Spiritwood on foot but a severe thunderstorm strikes before they reach the town forcing them to break into an abandoned country school to take shelter. After exchanging scary stories for a while they fall asleep. When they wake a few hours later the storm is over and the sky is filled with bright-coloured northern lights.
Ethan recounts the legend of the northern lights. “Those lights are produced by the spirits of the departed. It’s a sign that they want to communicate with the living. To establish contact we just have to whistle at them.” Then Ethan produces a spirit whistle that he had bought at Wanuskewin and he starts to whistle at the sky.
Moments later weird things begin to happen…
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The Gift Child
$24.95How important is truth? What is normal? These are the questions raised in The Gift Child, Elaine McCluskey’s fictional oeuvre — a funny, poignant, sure-shot novel, populated with a community of petty criminals, beloved broadcasters, undercover intelligence agents, and more.
The novel opens with the disappearance of a man in Pollock Passage, Nova Scotia, a man last seen driving away from a government wharf with a giant tuna head in the basket of his Schwinn delivery bicycle. The man’s name is Graham Swim; he’s good at playing the harmonica and making friends.
When Graham’s cousin Harriett decides to investigate his disappearance, she comes up against her own family history. A news photographer now jobless and adrift, Harriett has lived most of her life in the shadow of her larger-than-life father — a once-beloved TV news anchor and borderline narcissist.
When Harriett arrives in Pollock Passage, she meets a stranger who tells her he is researching the Shag Harbour UFO mystery. While this stranger helps Harriett reconnect with pieces of herself she thought long-dead, she also learns that what she knows about her father may not be true.
Vintage McCluskey, The Gift Child showcases McCluskey’s unique ability to capture the malleability of memory and the complex absurdity and nobility of humanity. It’s a novel that’s hard to put down; it’s even harder to forget.
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The Gilded Beaver
$26.00Best known as the author of the satiric utopian novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, James De Mille (1833-80) wrote many other works of fiction and poetry. Patricia Monk’s biographical-critical study investigates De Mille’s personal, educational, religious, social, and professional background in meticulous detail. She provides a comprehensive review of De Mille’s developing career. The Gilded Beaver throws new light on the literary world of nineteenth-century Canada, and is a valuable contribution to the growing list of biographies of Canadian writers.
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The Girl from Ermita
$15.95This collection by the award-winning writer Goh Poh Seng is the first volume of his poetry published in North America. It spans more than thirty-five years of his work and traverses cultures as well as continents.Goh’s settings range from the wharfs at Singapore’s harbour to a backwater bar in Papeete, Tahiti, from a park in Halifax to the streets of Vancouver. His characters are unforgettable: Fely, a young woman from Ermita who sells her body to support her eight-year-old daughter; an old sailor who has solo-circumnavigated the globe; a Vietcong soldier who loses his family and finally his own life to the horror of the Vietnam war.Even more wide-ranging is the perceptual and emotional depth of the poems. Goh brings a lifetime of love, despair, passion and honesty to his work; with the skill of a master craftsman, he uses the most graceful and lyrical language to understand his world and to bring us closer to ourselves and each other.
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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.