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Showing 7553–7568 of 9481 results
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The Guardian’s Dilemma
$25.00Zizi of Cleo knows there is no going back home after their ship is shot down and they are stranded on Earth. Having been placed in the custody of the US Government, they face interrogation and confinement. Their only companion is the man tasked with the topic of their capture: Neveth Amalthea Musleath from the planet Haddal, who has allied himself with Earth in the hopes of brokering their aid in preventing the cold war between Haddal and Cleo from escalating.
The devoted and pragmatic Amalthea struggles with the inherent contradiction between his loyalty to his people and the responsibility he holds for the child abruptly placed within his care. The lonely and lost Zizi seeks both freedom and camaraderie, finding them at odds with one another. In a society that benefits from their captivity and demands their compliance, can Amalthea and Zizi reconcile their needs and wants with those of humanity? Can one truly care for another when both are stuck in a terrible place that benefits from the two keeping each other there?
A soft science fiction ethical drama for young adults.
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The Guilt Trippers
$24.95Moe Tremblay tries hard, but he’s struggling with the trappings of domesticity, having just moved to Montreal with his wife to support her budding law career. He’ll stay at home with the kids, they decide, while she climbs the corporate ladder.
Then Dean shows up. Enticing him with tales of rock and roll glory and grime, Dean convinces Moe to join their band, The Guilt Trippers. Moe follows him through a door to a lost boys’ world of aging musician journeymen and a local music scene that is soiled and sexy, alluring and dangerous.
Moe thought juggling childcare was hard; now he has fit it all in with weekly rehearsals, drug and alcohol addictions, and late nights at the bar. But increasingly, everything Moe does for himself seems to have dire repercussions for his family.
A fictional story inspired by the author’s experience as both a father and a musician, The Guilt Trippers is a darkly funny and moving account of modern parenthood, the Montréal music scene, and the musicians that make their home here.
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The Gull
$17.95Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh. Produced by Vancouver’s Pangaea Arts, and written by award-winning poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, the play is set in 1950: wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians have finally been lifted, allowing them to return to the coast. It is a dramatization of the historical link between the fishing town of Steveston, home to many of these first, second and third generation Japanese Canadians, and Mio, the coastal village in Wakayama from which many of their ancestors originally emigrated.
Inspired by a ghost story a Nisei fisherman had told during Marlatt’s work on the history of Steveston in the 1970s, the ghost in the play is seen by one of the two fishermen as the spirit of his mother who had perished in the internment camps, and as a gull by the other. The iconic centre of the play, the gull is common to Japan and North America. Connected to a fishing superstition that if you see a seagull splashing in the waves it means a storm is coming, it also takes full advantage of the dense intertextuality and multiple meanings of the poetic language of classical Noh theatre. To “be gulled” is to “be taken in,” a key to the play’s storyline of a people deluded that their right to citizenship by birth would protect them, their homes and their families from the State.
An international collaboration, The Gull’s premiere featured: Noh master Akira Matsui, declared an Important Intangible Cultural Asset by Japan in 1998, as the main actor; American Noh expert Richard Emmert who wrote the music; two masks created by Wakayama artist Hakuzan Kubo; and a troupe of professional Noh musicians from Japan.
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The Gull Workshop and Other Stories
$22.95The Gull Workshop is a collection of stories that features a unique combination of thematic seriousness and comic style.
The characters in The Gull Workshop are often in search of something—call it authenticity, a basis for living a meaningful life, or leave it unnamed. However it’s defined, these characters are unlikely to find it. This is a book about the comically fruitless quest for meaning and authenticity; the thirteen stories are set in locations across Canada.
The prose is as witty, brilliant, and engaging as the stories are imaginative. One features a theme park with attractions based on the Book of Revelation. In another, the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud takes up residence on the fringes of an unnamed rural community in Canada in the early twenty-first century. Others are more rooted in realism: there’s the guy who lives in a basement and rants entertainingly about . . . pretty much everything, but especially the woman who lives upstairs, whom he hopes to save from what he calls “a life of blandness.” On every page there’s something to smile at, as the world of The Gull Workshop brims over with weird characters and comic situations, from the man who was once the apprentice of a world-famous taxidermist to the protagonist who’s deeply concerned about a brick on his patio that mysteriously changes position overnight.
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The Gun That Starts the Race
$19.95The Gun That Starts the Race, alternately like a David Lynch film or an episode of The Simpsons, finds the uncanny in the everyday, surprise you, make you laugh and weep (sometimes simultaneously) with recognition at the fleeting spark of our existence. Many of these poems are like archaeological sites between the sturm und drang of people’s fleeting dramas, exploring in language playgrounds recently vacated, graves recently inhabited, basements and dark corners where life and death goes on without us.
From free-verse lyrics to masterful sonnets, Norman’s poems weld form and content together organically. They neither baffle nor condescend. Blending an effortless style to surprising metaphors, and striking images with a restless, roving intellect, they try to get to the bottom of things, while never satisfied there it is no false bottom. Here, Bolsheviks play tennis with Marxist rules; crows, maggots, and spiders go about their business, oblivious to our sufferings; and the Mole Men of Zug break into song.
In The Gun that Starts the Race, Peter Norman gives us a world that lives and breathes and endures, and of which we are only a temporary part.
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The Gunsmith’s Daughter
$24.95Shortlisted, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
1971. Lilac Welsh lives an isolated life with her parents at Rough Rock on the Winnipeg River. Her father, Kal, stern and controlling, has built his wealth by designing powerful guns and ammunition. He’s on the cusp of producing a .50 calibre assault rifle that can shoot down an airplane with a single bullet, when a young stranger named Gavin appears at their door, wanting to meet him before enlisting for the war in Vietnam. Gavin’s arrival sparks an emotional explosion in Lilac’s home and inspires her to begin her own life as a journalist, reporting on the war that’s making her family rich.
The Gunsmith’s Daughter is both a coming-of-age story and an allegorical novel about Canada-US relations. Psychologically and politically astute, and gorgeously written, Margaret Sweatman’s portrait of a brilliant gunsmith and his eighteen-year-old daughter tells an engrossing story of ruthless ambition, and one young woman’s journey toward independence.
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The Guy in the Green Truck
$22.95Few mature men and women choose to abandon secure employment with handsome health and retirement benefits for a cause and an uncertain future. This biographical memoir is about a man who did just this, abandoning a promising career as a sociologist at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, for the turbulent life of union organizer in Nova Scotia.
In one of his first organizing campaigns, John St. Amand crisscrossed industrial Cape Breton signing up workers to the new Canadian Miner’s Union and became known as “the guy in the green truck.” Archie Kennedy, a miner who worked with John, said, “It is difficult for ‘mainlanders’ to penetrate the culture of Cape Breton and to be accepted by Cape Bretoners as one of their own. John St. Amand did exactly that.” He had a great ability to communicate with people.
St. Amand’s life became a testament to those who choose to advance the cause of the underdog in the hope of building a better society for us all. This book is a tribute to a courageous fighter who worked tirelessly to bring hope and justice to those most oppressed and neglected in our society. His courage, daring, incorrigible sense of mischief and his dedication to working men and women all combined to banish any thought of defeat in the face of lost campaigns.
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The Hammer of Witches
$18.00Spanning centuries, The Hammer of Witches reaches from present-day urban dystopias and the unlikely enchantments that they harbour, to medieval Norway, where the first Christian king waged war on the country’s gender-nonconforming wizards. Macabre imagery, speculative themes, and everyday mysticism blur the distinction between the real and the unreal, challenging modern concepts of beauty, power, and fear.
In her first full-length collection, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back weaves together the magical and the monstrous, the sacred and the profane, to make sense of a world where primeval forests are clear-cut to build parking lots, and where it often seems that the gods have all gone to live behind the veil. The Hammer of Witches was completed with the help of funding from the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers’ Reserve program.
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The Handbound Book in Nova Scotia
$4.95Essay and exhibition catalogue that accompanied the 250th anniversary celebration of printing in Canada at Mary E. Black Gallery in Halifax, NS. Includes photos and descriptions of the items that appeared in the exhibit.
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The Handover
$29.95Until recently, McClelland and Stewart had been known as “The Canadian Publisher,” the country’s longest-lived and best independent press. Its dynamic leader Jack McClelland worked with successive provincial and federal governments to help draft policies in the 1960s and 70s which ensured that Canadian stories would, for the first time in the nation’s history, be told and published by Canadians. M&S introduced Canadians to themselves while championing the nation’s literature, bringing to the world Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Mavis Gallant, Farley Mowat, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, and many others. When 75% of M&S was gifted amidst great fanfare to the University of Toronto on Canada Day 2000—“To achieve the survival of one great Canadian institution,” M&S owner Avie Bennett declared at the time, “I have given it into the care of another great Canadian institution”—one could’ve assumed that it would remain in Canadian hands and under Canadian control in perpetuity.
But one would have been wrong.
In her controversial new book, Elaine Dewar reveals for the first time how M&S was sold salami-style to Random House, a division of German media giant Bertelsmann; how smart businessmen and even smarter lawyers danced through the raindrops of the laws put into place to protect Canadian cultural institutions from foreign ownership while cultural bureaucrats looked the other way; and why we should care. It is the story not just of the demise of the country’s best independent publisher, it is about the threats, internal and otherwise, facing Canadian culture. The Handover is more than just a CanLit How-Done-It: it is essential reading for anyone interested in the telling of Canadian stories.
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The Hands
$20.00A paean to iconic personalities
Moving, intriguing, and exquisite, this collection is a paean to the iconic personalities Marty Gervais has met and written about during his career as both a poet and a journalist and includes poems about such diverse characters as Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa, Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, Karen Kain and Thomas Merton. Each poem narrows the focus to one little detail about them, a slice of a memoir but in poetic form.
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The Handsome Man
$20.00The Handsome Man is a collection of linked stories that follow several years of the life of a young man as he is drawn around the world: from Toronto to Montreal, New York, Ohio, New Mexico, British Columbia, Berlin, Rome, and Northern Ontario, along the way meeting hippies, healers, drinkers, movie stars, old friends, and welcoming strangers. He isn’t travelling, however; he’s running away. But as far and fast as he runs, the world won’t let him disappear, and each new encounter and every lost soul he meets along this journey brings him closer and closer to certain truths he’d locked away: how to trust, how to live in this world, and most of all, how to love again.
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The Happiest Man in the World and Other Stories
$18.95The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be — husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, psychiatrists and sailors, fishermen and fish, and the girl and the wolf all have their conventional roles drop away as their dreams enter their everyday lives. The Happiest Man in the World moves between cynicism, wonder, and a resigned amazement, as he examines his own, and others’, places in post-feminist North American society.
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The Hardcore Truth
$22.95Long before he became “Hardcore Holly,” Robert Howard was a fighter. From humble beginnings — a boy dominated by his disciplinarian stepfather but fueled by an unquenchable passion for pro wrestling — Bob grew up struggling to make ends meet.
As an adult with a family of his own to provide for, Bob fought in bars for money before finally following his dream of wrestling. From regional promotions all the way to the bright lights of the WWF, from false starts as Thurman “Sparky” Plugg and “Bombastic” Bob to fame as an internationally known superstar, The Hardcore Truth tells the story of Bob’s life including his 16 years working for Vince McMahon.
In this rollercoaster tale of success and frustration, replete with missed opportunities, broken promises, and a broken neck — a story of fast bikes and faster cars, lost loves and wrestling bears, bar fights and betrayal — Bob shares his uncompromised views on the present wrestling landscape with fascinating insights into the world leader in sports entertainment.
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The Harmon Chronicles
$17.95Leon is kind of like Tom Green, except that Leon is smart, and funny, and should have his own TV show. — Malice Inc.
This hilarious collection of anecdotal essays explores the absurdities of modern American life. Harmon Leon is a cutting-edge prankster who infiltrates one lifestyle after the next, takes each to the absolute extreme, and reports back with his findings. From attending the regional semifinals of “America’s Most Beautiful Baby Contest”” to getting a job at a fast-food restaurant with the sole goal of getting himself fired in three hours or less, Leon exposes the day-to-day ridiculousness of the American Way. This book drags the highs and lows of contemporary American existence into the light for public scrutiny.
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The Harvesters
$24.95Set in Paris, an offbeat and sweet novel about family, loss and recovery, and the magic of memory.
When Mira takes a trip to Paris with her nephew, Bernard, she expects to ride bicycles through the picturesque streets and admire the parks and courtyards. But the trip takes a different turn when the two travellers try to rescue an injured pigeon from the sidewalk, and their journey becomes one of addressing the losses that define their lives.
Mira is recently divorced and facing a childless (or is it child-free?) future; Bernard has lost his first love and is grappling with his responsibility in the relationship’s demise. Both are living in the shadows of war, immigration, and family disconnection as they prepare to travel on to Croatia, the country Mira left behind during the Yugoslav Wars.
But for now: Paris. Mira and Bernard move through a city that feels both familiar and strange — this is not merely the Paris of postcards, but a Paris of dubious one-star hotels and immigrants and labourers and taxi drivers and Eiffel Tower trinket vendors. And yet it’s still a city that possesses an undeniable magic, where one might glimpse intriguing strangers or stumble upon past lovers.
Thoughtful and witty, The Harvesters is infused with subtle beauty and the magic of memory.